Tag Archives: Labour

Roundup: A Monday deadline

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CP Rail is now on strike amidst thousands of layoffs, though they are mostly keeping commuter service unaffected. Lisa Raitt, however, is citing the harm to the economy, and is giving them until Monday to come to a deal, lest she bring down the hammer of back-to-work legislation. (This feels like a good time to remind you of my conversation with Senator Elaine McCoy, a former provincial conservative labour minister, about how this government handles its labour disputes).

Leona Aglukkaq admits that yes, there are food issues in the North – but that doesn’t mean she’ll back down from her comments about the UN Special Rapporteur for Food. Nor will she stop using it as an excuse to bash other countries about their criticism of the seal hunt – even if the Rapporteur never made any mention of the seal hunt in his report.

Elections Canada tried to get Michael Sona to talk about who might be behind the misleading robo-calls. Sona wouldn’t bite.

Defenders of the Canadian Wheat Board are back in court trying to overturn the law that dismantled it.

$100,000 spent in flights and hotels while looking for cost savings. Fiscal austerity, everyone!

Here is a reminder about fifteen things stuffed into the omnibus budget bill that have nothing really to do with the budget.

And Prince Charles and Camilla finished the Diamond Jubilee Royal Tour in Regina last night. Part of his visit there included a tour of First Nations University, and a block of oak from Charles’ estate in Cornwall was given to the province for the creation of their own Black Rod.

Up today: Diane Finley is set to unveil the regulations around the proposed EI changes today. I suppose it’s a good thing that we’re actually getting them now and not after the omnibus budget bill passes. Incidentally, HRSDC is no longer sending Statistics Canada certain EI statistical data, apparently over unresolved “inconsistencies,” which seems terribly convenient.

Roundup: Hints about the EI changes

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Fisheries minister Keith Ashfield has lifted the lid off the proposed EI reform regulations, and they almost seem *gasp!* reasonable. People won’t be forced to take jobs more than an hour’s drive from their homes, which shouldn’t result in the massive depopulation of the Atlantic provinces. Of course, this may all be wrong, and there remains no official word, but it’s a start, right?

The seven Conservative MPs whose seats are facing court challenges have all now formally requested the cases be dismissed as “frivolous and vexatious.” Meanwhile, Stephen Maher worries about what the revelations that overturned the results in Etobicoke Centre say about the job that Elections Canada is doing in ensuring the integrity of our elections.

Attorney General Rob Nicholson is stepping in to try to halt a Human Rights Tribunal hearing about an aboriginal RCMP officer alleging systemic racism in the Force. Meanwhile, here are the unpleasant allegations of sexual misconduct around one senior officer in Alberta’s RCMP headquarters.

Ministerial clampdowns appear to be the theme of the day as Peter MacKay has also ordered one on the inquiry of a soldier’s suicide.

The government is launching consultations on how to improve official languages in this country, while sparing said programmes from budget cuts.

What’s that? Vic Toews is misquoting an NDP MP? You don’t say!

CP Rail assures us that a strike won’t affect commuter service. But the economy is still fragile! No word yet if Lisa Raitt is going to drop the hammer yet again and table some back-to-work legislation.

The Prime Minister’s official bio in Diamond Jubilee Royal Tour media materials contains the election phrase “strong, stable, national majority” (though we have been assured that this was a copy-paste and not written by public servants). Because there is no distinction between the partisan and the office it seems.

And a number of First Nations chiefs met with Prince Charles yesterday, and requested a meeting with the Queen to discuss treaty issues. Remember that the treaties are with Crown directly, and that relationship is personal. Meanwhile, Charles and Camilla are off to Regina, the last stop on their Diamond Jubilee Royal Tour. As for their time in Toronto, here’s a bit of video, including of Camilla visiting with the Queen’s Own Rifles, the regiment for whom she is the Colonel-in-Chief.

Roundup: Victoria Day Diamond Jubilee Royal Tour Edition

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Happy Victoria Day, everyone! Be sure to raise a glass in honour of Victoria, the first Queen of Canada, as well as in honour of the official birthday of Her Majesty Elizabeth II, the present Queen of Canada. In case you didn’t realise, Victoria Day is actually a distinctly Canadian holiday not celebrated by anyone else.

Speaking of the Canadian royal family, Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, have arrived and begin their brief royal tour in New Brunswick today, before heading to Toronto later on for the Victoria Day fireworks there.

Thomas Mulcair, digging his heels in on the “Dutch disease” issue, declares that this will be the defining issue for the next election. You know, not a scandal-plagued and incompetent government with heavy-headed and dictatorial tendencies, but something that the Conservatives can rouse their Western base about, along with any other region that is involved in resource extraction. That’s tactical genius at work.

Voter-identification robo-calls have already started in Etobicoke Centre, and the by-election hasn’t even been called yet. Because apparently it’s never too early to get started on this kind of work. Meanwhile, Pundit’s Guide breaks down the riding’s recent electoral history and the dynamics at play.

Peter MacKay indicates that we won’t be extending our current training mission in Afghanistan.

Instead of providing a reasonable explanation why Environment Canada was dumping a bunch of office furniture rather than recycling it, Peter Kent’s office decided to go the route of blaming the media and calling the story “false.” Transparency and accountability, everyone!

Here’s a strange little tale about mysterious Canadian bank accounts in Liechtenstein.

And Lisa Raitt is cautioning CP Rail to think twice about striking. Because she’s apparently not afraid to drop the hammer – again.

Roundup: A pre-emptive strike on Lawful Access

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The Supreme Court has struck down the ability for police to do wiretaps without a warrant, even in the case of an emergency, because of failures of accountability. Why this is important now is the fact that the Lawful Access bill is under consideration, which also deals with warrantless access to information and communications. This could be a pre-emptive signal by the Court to tell MPs to drop the warrantless provisions, lest they be struck down the way in which these wiretapping laws were.

A number of Air Canada pilots staged a “sick out” yesterday – calling in sick as a job action to protest the way they’ve been treated by management and the government. I spoke to a former conservative Labour Minister about this issue a couple of weeks ago, and small surprise, she’s no fan of this government’s tactics.

CBC’s Terry Milewski goes through the way in which the government took the $10 billion out of its own figures when it publicly said the F-35s were only going to cost $15 billion, even though their own internal numbers, procurement guidelines, and agreements to include operating costs after previous Auditor General spankings – gave the $25 billion figure.

Here’s a look at the current size of the PMO, and the number of staffers in there making over $100,000 per year. Fiscal austerity everyone!

The government’s “back office” cuts at the military includes gutting Defence Research and Development, whose work saves lives in the battlefield. But they’re supporting our troops, everyone!

Here’s a great speech from Senator Cowan about Senator Eaton’s “foreign money” inquiry, in which he notices a few similarities to laws that Vladimir Putin passed in Russia to keep foreign influence out. This targeting of charities is part of the budget, so we can expect more of this kind of targeting to come.

Susan Delacourt looks at the double standard by which political parties are exempt from the same advertising and marketing rules that the private sector is bound by, which includes Do Not Call lists.

If you’re in the mood for a wonkish look at the Elections Act, Kady O’Malley looks at the clause about foreigners campaigning in Canada, and the debate in 1999 where MPs revising the law didn’t do their due diligence.

Also wonkish but very important is this essay from Liberal MP John McCallum on improving the estimates process. It’s refreshing to see an MP who actually understands that his job is to scrutinise spending and exercise control over the public purse.

Here’s an excellent takedown of “conscience rights” as being debated in the Alberta election.

And here’s a look at how it’s Tom Mulcair in English, and Thomas Mulcair in French.

Former conservative labour minister weighs in on back-to-work legislation

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Since the last election, the Conservative government has made use of back-to-work legislation for Canada Post and Air Canada workers – even though Air Canada pilots, mechanics and baggage handlers weren’t even off the job yet. But while the NDP – traditionally the party of labour – has often decried its use and famously filibustered the first instance of such a bill, there are those on the small-c conservative side who also see the use of such legislation as detrimental.

Progressive Conservative Senator Elaine McCoy was provincial labour minister in the Don Getty government in Alberta back in 1989, and saw some major strikes during her time in office, including a teacher’s strike and an illegal strike by social workers. Her perspective comes from those experiences.

Labour relations are about the balance of power between labour and management, and the financial pressure that a strike or lockout can place on the other party, McCoy says, and back-to-work legislation destroys the balance of power.

“You tilt the balance of power by putting the full weight of the state on the one side, and it is really on one side, because it means that the revenues to the management continue,” McCoy says. “There’s no benefit to the workers. Suddenly you’ve removed all penalty from management.”

Back-to-work legislation also erodes the close working relationship between workers and management, which should be based on respect.

“What you get is resentment on labour’s side,” McCoy says. “It builds, and therefore much less desire to come to agreement of any sort, and a desire to get revenge. When you encourage one side to gloat and bully, and the other side to want revenge and bully, you what you have is long-term unrest. You resolve the immediate, but you plant the seeds for more trouble in the long term.”

As for the strikes that happened under her watch, McCoy kept those principles in mind.

“When the teachers went out on strike, we had to bring additional people into my office to answer the phones, because everybody’s grandmother and everybody’s parent was phoning to say ‘get those teachers back to work. I can’t handle the day care,’” McCoy recalls. “And indeed, there were quite a few members of caucus who wanted to use the sledgehammer and use back-to-work legislation, but I had to talk them down because as I say, it might give you an immediate Band-Aid, but it doesn’t resolve the underlying situation.”

This was also the case with the illegal strike by social workers.

“Some labour ministers feel they should get involved themselves,” McCoy says. “I never felt that personally I should go to the bargaining table. I didn’t have that kind of training or skill, but what I did do was use the services of some people who were well respected in the labour relations field to work behind the scenes to help the two sides get together quietly and to iron out their differences. Yeah it took a week or ten days, but they did ultimately, and everyone walked away satisfied.”

Judging the current labour situation and the instances of legislation but forward to date, McCoy says that if she were a federal labour minister, she would be reluctant to do any kind of back-to-work legislation simply because it’s bad public policy.

“I think the current government is sowing the seeds of discontent and labour unrest, which is going to be more disruptive in the long run than a strike or lockout situation would have been,” McCoy says.

Neither does she buy the argument that the economy is too fragile.

“There would have been a great deal of pressure on the labour and management teams to get back to work, but that’s part of the bargaining power,” McCoy says. “There is always in these public service kinds of situations, an attempt by both labour and management to win the hearts of the public, and sometimes management succeeds and sometimes labour succeeds in doing that. But public opinion is important. Air Canada has to respond to its customers and the union has to be careful that it doesn’t alienate public opinion because that doesn’t do it any good in the long run either.”