Expected Behaviour

I make it a rule with regard to dealings on a personal level:  never get angry at someone for displaying expected behaviour.  Get annoyed, get disappointed, get sad, but never lose your temper.  So it is with today's cancellation of the Air Canada strike.  This Conservative government is the most business-friendly administration in Canadian history.  The owners are firmly in control of the machinery of the state, and they're using it in the way that is, unfortunately, expected of them.  Suppress costs (especially labour costs) in order to maximize profits; it's the neo-liberal paradigm, and Harper is, as I firmly pray to nameless gibbering gods in the dead of night, the peak of neo-liberalism in Canada.

6,800 Air Canada flight attendants rejected two deals made between Air Canada and the union that represents the attendants, CUPE.  The real sticking point was Air Canada's plan to create a low-cost airline to hop between various hot-climate tourist destinations.  The wage structure at the new subsidiary airline would have paid out at the top level a whopping 25% less, and would caused route overlaps that would result in lessened job security.  The starting salary of an Air Canada flight attendant is only $18,000 to begin with, which as anyone with even a modicum of self-honesty knows is far, far below the poverty line.  Even the offered 9.3% increase would make that $19,674 - just enough to live in your parent's basement on.
CUPE's gains were pretty weak, compared to the loss of job security and earning potential; the union did not have the confidence of the members.  The first offer did little for them, and the second one removed a number of concessions that the airline had originally given to fringe items.  So, what is left to them but striking?

Enter the Sun King and Parliament.  Rumour has been abounding for some time that if the flight attendants went on strike the Conservatives would implement back-to-work legislation.  They only have the right to strike until they try to, and then they don't, amirite?  Well, even the (rumoured) threat of a wildcat strike has been smothered.  Today the federal government asked the Canadian Industrial Relations Board to determine whether or not Air Canada flight attendants constituted an "essential service".  Specifically, "whether any services need to be maintained, in the event of a strike or lockout, to prevent an immediate and serious danger to the safety or health of the public".  Until the CIRB comes to a decision on this "question", there will be no strike, on pain of decertification.  It is a transparent ploy by the Harper government to force the matter into arbitration, where the airline will likely gain significant concessions from the union, and flight attendants will likely end up worse off for it.  Air Canada stands to gain, of course, and from a hand-in-glove corporate-state marriage, that's just expected behaviour.

#OccupyToronto on October 15th.

Then This Happened

Saskatoon: Bible Belt North

Meet Maurice Vellacott.  He's the Conservative MP for Saskatoon-Wanuskewin, a riding close by Saskatoon-Humboldt, represented of course by noted Harper-basher and women's-rights-denier Brad Trost.  Vellacott shares his fellow MP's views on Planned Parenthood, the international non-profit dedicated to sexual education, reproduction rights, and generally helping the poor of the earth to make good decisions when it comes to their sexual health.  The International Planned Parenthood Foundation offers a diverse array of programs and educational services, all of which, in the stunted intellectual capabilities that Saskatoon is apparently offering the nation, equal out to mean "abortion".  It's the sort of disingenuous nonsense that the Tea Party members of the American Republican party have been spouting, sent north and given a good ol' prairie boy packaging.

Paul Bell, a spokesperson for IPPF, states unequivocally that funding received from the Canadian government does not and will not be used to fund abortion-related services and education in countries where such practices are illegal.  Vellacott, of course, calls them lying liars with burning pants, claiming at the language used in the press release is "deceitful" and that IPPF is trying to "con" the Conservatives into funding their evil baby-killing practices.  He goes on to say that he imagines them fleeing back to their glittering modern abortion multiplexes and laughing maniacally, tenting their fingers with schemes gleaming in their eyes.  Quoth he:  "It exposes what this abortion giant is surreptitiously trying to achieve worldwide".  In further news, Vellacott thought that that Onion article was an eye-opening experience.

It's a depressingly familiar cycle that really gained strength since the dawn of neo-liberalism.  A progressive individual or organization says something rational using an argument appealing to logic.  A reactionary proceeds to sneer through an attack on said argument, building up the opponent to be an Other with malicious intent and implying high crimes and misdemeanors - an argument based largely on emotion.  Appeals to ersatz populist ideas about morals and religion play well in the American political scene, but until the rise of the Reform Party in the early 1990s it wasn't a major factor in our elections.  I think Harper is politically savvy enough to realize that this is the public opinion of a minority of his party (and of the country as a whole) but the fact that these people are elected officials in 2011 (and part of a majority government) is odious.  The people of Canada made this decision decades ago.  Has something changed so significantly that we need to revisit this decision?