"From the Left"The 1995 Guelph Tribune columns"From the Left" opinion columns which appear every second Saturday in The Guelph Tribune, a twice-weekly newspaper published by Fairway Press (a division of Southam Inc.) These columns appeared in 1995. Table of Contents
December 09, 1995In a move hailed by Brenda Elliott as the dawn of a time of hope, the provincial finance minister slashed funding to municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals. When seniors are charged a user fee for prescription drugs, where is their reason for hope? Only that this government is soon defeated. That is all students can hope for as well, with the prospect of a 20 per cent tuition fee increase waiting for them next year. And we all live at the dawn of a time of hoping we can stay healthy and out of underfunded hospitals until this wretched government goes away. Last week, Elliott and her comrades in revolution gave us what she described as "a beginning." On Monday, the Ontario labour movement will return the favour. We will give the government what we describe as "a beginning." Most workplaces in London will not operate on Monday. Any doubt that this work stoppage would be effective were set aside when Ernie Eves stood in the legislature on November 29. When he slashed funding to universities, exams scheduled for December 11 at the University of Western Ontario were postponed. When he slashed funding to hospitals, workers in London began to pay attention to recent events in Calgary laundry rooms. When he chopped funding for public transit, support for the protest among London's bus drivers rose from tenuous to 95 per cent. And so it went throughout the city. In three short weeks, people in London woke up. Those who voted for Harris last June re-examined their reasons for doing so. They compared the hope he promised to the despair he inflicted. They concluded that they did not give the government a mandate to deliver misery. They concluded that the core of common sense is a common sensitivity. The vast majority of people in London say they did not vote for this brutality at all. Nor did the majority of people in Guelph, or in most other parts of the province. On Monday, in London, we will see a protest and a celebration. There will be music and singing, a winter clothing exchange and a food bank collection. Those who have will give. Those who have not will receive. And all will grow. We will see a community at its best. Families will stand together, people will hold onto each other and say that pain inflicted on my neighbour is inflicted on me. Harris and Eves and Elliott should understand that Monday is the beginning of a labour protest that will not go away. It is the dawn of a time of hope. go back to the table of contents November 25, 1995If you were over-charged for something, it wouldn't take long to figure out what to do. You'd take it, and the sales slip, back to the store, prove your case and get your money back. Simple. An injustice was done, discovered, and corrected. The shop keeper may not have intended to make the mistake, but intentions don't matter. The adjustment still needs to be made. Not all injustices are this simple. Sometimes they are so deeply ingrained that they go largely unnoticed. Except by the victims. One instance which has developed over the years in Ontario has been access to jobs. Women, people of colour, aboriginals, and people with disabilities have been generally shut out of better paying and more interesting work. Skilled trades work, management positions, professions, are all predominantly filled by men. Usually white men. All qualified, no doubt. The trouble is that many people from readily identifiable groups are also qualified. Others could become qualified if given a chance. Left to their own devices, most people who make hiring decisions lean to their own kind. People they are comfortable with. People who are generally both male and white. This is a far more serious injustice than being over-charged at a department store. We should be anxious to correct it, recognizing that it requires a more complex and imaginative solution. The NDP found the start of a solution with employment equity. This law did not force employers to hire unqualified people. It didn't impose hiring quotas. It didn't affect any businesses with less than 100 employees. It was a lot milder than it could have been. It required large businesses to look at the workforce, see how closely it reflected the population they hire from, and draw up a plan to ensure that equity would be introduced where it was found to be lacking. Businesses with between 100 and 500 employees had until next September to come up with this plan. Any inconvenience employment equity caused business owners pales in comparison to the hurt caused by employment inequity. But, as is becoming the norm when corporate cry babies can't get their own way on everything, the howls were deafening. Mike Harris heard, and added them to the litany of lies he peddles as "common sense." He said employment equity is discriminatory. It isn't. It lessens the effect of discrimination and curtails some privileges. He said employers should be left to correct things on their own. But that's how we got into the mess in the first place. He said he would repeal the law. Last week, he began to. And his government has taken another step on its steady march to institutional inequity. go back to the table of contents November 11, 1995"I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all possible means - except by getting off his back." Leo Tolstoy could easily have been talking about Ontario's business community when he wrote these words. This community became fat and bloated at the expense of the people it claims to care about. It whines when regulations force it to pay attention to the public interest. It rebels against the idea that it should pay a fair share of taxes. It spends millions convincing us to become consumers of products we don't need. Their flagrant recklessness, their parsimonious greed, their craven refusal to embrace social responsibility has led our province to the brink of economic ruin. They, and they alone, are the cause of budget deficits and the provincial debt. Now they tell us they want to lighten our load by all possible means - except by mending their ways. In fact, when told that if they don't accept responsibility for their actions, if they don't stop shifting the blame onto the backs of innocent and impoverished men, women and children, their response is irrational and hysterical. Take, for example, the local business response to the consumer boycott proposed by Guelph's Coalition Against the Cuts. In a responsible and imaginative move, coalition members are asking city consumers not to shop in stores owned by supporters of Mike Harris' ill-conceived cuts. Consumer boycotts allow people to make a quiet statement of conscience. We all make choices about where, and on what, we spend our money. A boycott adds one more factor to the decision. Judging by the response of local businesses to the idea of a boycott, you would think bolshevik heathens are at the gates to the city. The local daily - which takes seven days to print as much local news as this one gets out in two - discontinued a weekly column by Guelph's more famous Pickersgill. His final column defended the consumer boycott. The daily was recently bought by Conrad Black, one of the richest and most powerful captains of Canadian industry. This confirms, in my mind, that the coalition is on the right track with its proposed boycott. The boycott will proceed as planned. If local shops want to escape its consequences, they should take the time and trouble to speak with their customers. They should understand that there will be fewer products consumed this year because Harris took disposable income away from people who had little enough to start with. If they want their businesses to prosper, they must stop the impoverishment of the poor. go back to the table of contents October 28, 1995Lizzie Witmer took an axe and gave the unions 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave another 41. Elizabeth Witmer is the Labour Minister in Mike Harris's Reform Party government. This is the government which, like O.J. Simpson recently and Lizzie Borden years ago, is trying to get away with some very deep cuts. Her first whacks came with the repeal of Bill 40, an act which modernized labour relations in Ontario. When this didn't satisfy her premier's thirst for blood, she repealed other parts of the law that have been in place for well over 41 years. Witmer had an opportunity to debate this face to face with Gord Wilson, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) last week at the College Motor Inn. But when the time came, she didn't. Instead, she sent her parliamentary assistant, a rookie MPP from Nepean. John Baird did his best to carry the flag, but he was a poor match for Wilson. Baird's best argument, and one he seemed particularly proud of, was that secret ballot certification votes for unions are no different from secret ballot votes for candidates at a nomination meeting. He forgot, of course that at the end of the nomination process you are guaranteed a candidate. At the end of Witmer's union certification process, you are guaranteed nothing more than endless delays as challenges and appeals clog up the Labour Relations Board. At least Baird tried. Witmer said she couldn't attend because of "personal reasons." Earlier this month she declined to appear on Steve Paikin's Studio 2 show on TVO when she heard Wilson would be there. The two hundred people who showed up for the breakfast debate were left with the inevitable conclusion that, like Baird, she was no match for Wilson. So she threw the new kid into the fire. This conclusion was confirmed when a member of the audience drove to Witmer's constituency office in Waterloo at the end of the meeting. She was there. A secretary confirmed that she had been there all morning. Witmer's law is not the simple repeal of Bill 40 on which Harris campaigned. It takes away rights from workers in large mushroom factories. It takes away successor rights from people who clean office buildings. It takes away successor rights from government workers when their jobs are privatized. It removes automatic certification rights that were introduced decades ago by the Frost government. This law is so radically different from that proposed in the Rolex revolution document that the government should take it to public hearings. Then they could hear from both workers and employers that Bill 40 served the economy well. It brought Ontario a period of unprecedented labour relations peace. This is what Harris is really reversing. go back to the table of contents October 14, 1995First, a confession. I enjoy golf. I also enjoy Scrabble. Often, I get mixed up and have low scores in Scrabble and high scores in golf. But I find Scrabble is good exercise for the mind, and golf is not bad exercise for the body. If you combine golf with something more aerobic, like darts, you could almost get fit from it. Many people who ignore the good in golf view it as a form of environmental terrorism. Land that could be farmed is fed chemical weed killers and turned into a dog leg par five. Guelph, in its collective wisdom, sent the proprietor of For Earth's Sake - purveyors of the most environmentally friendly products plastic credit cards can buy - to sit on a team led by a small town golf pro who took the worst stereotypes associated with golf, and translated them into social policy. His scorched earth approach to government has led to the cancellation of programs for women, children and the disabled. His rampage against those who still have jobs included the dismantling of an important workplace health and safety agency. The list goes on and on. Of all the bone-headed decisions this government has made, the move to close the Workplace Health and Safety Agency is tied for first place with all the others. This Agency struggled to make a bipartite decision making process work. Representatives from labour and management could sit down and work difficult problems through to a consensus solution. But in its determination to slash and burn, the government chose to return workplace health and safety to confrontation. Why settle things peacefully when you can take off the gloves and have a fight? When this was announced last August, I wrote a letter to our sensitively green legislator. I told her the Agency worked to raise awareness about workplace hazards, just as she worked to raise awareness about environmental hazards. Surely she would rally to the side of common sense, and speak up for health and safety. She didn't even acknowledge receipt of the letter. I suppose she was too busy cancelling the Waste Management Corporation and the Interim Waste Authority and freezing hydro rates for businesses. Not much time in there to think about people who get injured at work. Like her golf pro leader, our environment minister seems not to care about the views of people who didn't vote for her, even if that is about 60 per cent of the riding. Maybe instead of telling her I was writing as one of her constituents, I should have said I was writing as a former customer. But then she might sieze on the word "former" and ignore me anyway. go back to the table of contents September 30. 1995If 20 per cent of the police officers in Ontario were laid off, and the network providing services to those who remain were chopped in half, the public outrage would be enormous. It would be loud enough to distract the Premier from his golf game. This is about to happen to the government workers and services that police Ontario's workplaces. The outrage should be just as loud. A leaked confidential document outlines plans to slash the Ministry of Labour in half. It calls for a 20 per cent reduction in Ministry inspectors, elimination of the wage protection program and the program for older worker adjustment, closure of three laboratories and the Ministry library, and dumping about a third of the staff who enforce the Employment Standards Act. When Labour Minister Elizabeth Witmer was caught with her fingers in the cookie jar, she tried to tough it out. It is just a list of cost-cutting options, she said bravely. No decisions have been made yet, she told reporters. Mrs. Witmer is a senior cabinet member in a government that promised to return integrity to politics. At every cabinet meeting, she looks into the eyes of people like Al Palladini and John Snobelen. Integrity, at that table, is like a diamond in the rough. Rare and hard to find. "In developing our strategy," it says on page one of the document, "we relied upon the Common Sense Revolution, direction from Minister Witmer and Central Agency direction." What Mrs. Witmer describes as a list of "options" was drawn up under her direction. The strategy begins with a proposal to reduce the cap on the wage protection "to $2000 and eliminate severance and termination from the mix on September 1, 1995." They made the change on September 7. They may be more prompt with the second half of the proposal, to "eliminate the (plan) altogether on September 1, 1996." They might move more quickly. The document says "unnecessary controversy created by two announcements could be partially avoided by outright elimination of the program in the fall of 1995." When Mrs. Witmer says no decisions have been taken, she forgets that the first one up went down as planned. In a backhanded nod toward integrity, the document recommends making "retroactive amendments" to the Employment Standards Act "sometime in 1995 or 1996 to reflect the changes." This is the style of government we can expect from Harris. In his rush to fulfill promises made to his friends in business, he may run roughshod over a couple of laws and a lot of institutions. He can always change the laws later on, when he stops to catch his breath. The institutions, though, will be gone for good. Unless you need them. Then they'll be gone for bad. go back to the table of contents September 16, 1995Prozac's place as "the nineties drug" could soon be over. Reports indicate an upstart is ready to launch a challenge. Clomipramine, according to the latest edition of New Scientist magazine, has unusual, but not unwelcome, side-effects on approximately five per cent of the patients who take it. These drugs alter the mood of people suffering from depression. In post-revolutionary Ontario, that's a growing portion of the population. We have a lot to be depressed about as Mike Harris sets about his task of transforming Ontario from a community into a corporation. His first targets were welfare mothers, the cause of every inconvenience suffered by operators of small businesses. Their monthly allowances, which let them live in a style grand enough to balloon the provincial deficit, were chopped by over 20 per cent. This accomplished two goals in one swoop. It taught people not to be out of work, and it freed up some money to give businesses a tax break. Next on the list are injured workers. Elizabeth Witmer, the Minister of Labour, wants to help Harris deliver his promises. Near the top of her list is the commitment to reduce Worker's Compensation premiums by five per cent. Being a conservative, Witmer realizes money doesn't grow on trees. In order to give this money back to the corporations, she has no choice but to beat it out of people who get hurt at work. Witmer recently announced that her government will reduce benefits paid to injured workers from 90 per cent of average net pay to 85 per cent. And she plans to bring in a three-day waiting period. This doesn't mean you only have to wait three days to get your claim paid. It means the first three days of a lost-time injury will be unpaid. Witmer will also implement a regulation preventing unions and employers from negotiating an agreement to maintain income for these days. If people don't feel pain, they won't learn from it. That's what Harris's revolution is all about -- making people suffer so that corporations can grow stronger. That's the sort of thing I want to look at every couple of weeks in this column. I hope that in doing so, I can recruit people to the common sense counter-revolution, and to the view that communities are not corporations. Communities are people living and working together. And the side-effect of the anti-depressant, Clomipramine? According to Reuters news agency, it causes some people to have an orgasm every time they yawn. We can't have this in a province run by a revolutionary government, so I'll try to keep this entertaining. I wouldn't want you to get bored, and embarrass yourself in public. go back to the table of contents |