....we have social in-activists and other special interest groups and the citizenry at large asking for more and improved services and lower taxes and the politicos cave into these demands.
Who’s to blame?
Terry Corcoran says we should be pointing fingers at the union – not just at David Miller, as the Toronto strike drags on with no end in sight: ...On one level, personalizing Toronto’s civic workers’ strike as a Miller problem may work in getting rid of David Miller. He certainly seems to have brought this on [...]
Blue Like You |
I blame them both
Terence Corcoran has a good piece blaming cupe more than miller for more than a month of Toronto refuse not being picked up.
I blame them both. However Corcoran makes good points. The unions have succeeded in rewarding sloth and protecting the incompetent. Its true that this has been going in Toronto during the tenure of many mayors. What is the solution? will it take the bankruptcy of the city , like for GM, to finally get the unions to understand the damage they are doing. It is funny to watch union members complain about how expensive it is to live in Toronto without realizing that their costs are a big part of the problem. This is happening across Canada's cities.
Hopefully miller will soon be gone and a more center right mayor will be elected. Unfortunately i don't see anyone in the wings who will be willing to take on the union stranglehold and think about the citizens of the city first.
Like all union leaders, CUPE chiefs just make stuff up. The sick-leave unfunded liability, estimated at $140-million for the striking workers, is said to be an "accounting fantasy." Unions always say things like that about unfunded liabilities. The auto workers dismissed their unfunded pension liability as a non-problem until their pensions couldn't be paid. Then they blamed management for failing to properly manage the company and the liability, for which they should have prepared. While Miller is being hanged, the union operatives are getting away with murder. There is no winning against union arguments. Anyone who gets into a debate with union brass risks a mean personal battle. As part of the CBC Radio debate over the Toronto strike, Jim Stanford of the Canadian Auto Workers lit in to Catherine Swift of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business with a typical ad hominem: "She makes five or six times as much money as the people on the picket lines, but she's still pointing the finger."
With mean-spirited class warfare on its side, the union is winning the battle. The worse the Mayor and city hall look in public opinion, the more CUPE can count on a city capitulation to union preferences.
Eventually, the strike will end and Toronto CUPE members will return to work and the garbage will be picked up again. In the end, even if Mr. Miller is gone, nothing will have been done to rewrite Toronto's dismal union-dominated financial outlook. But CUPE's Paul Moist -- who should have been the Maclean's cover story this week -- will still be around, doing his shtick.
Posted by Roy Eappen
1 comments:
Simeon (Sam) George Drakich said...
Toronto's CUPE strike is peanuts compared to Windsor's CUPE strike that is heading into it's fourth month.
Windsor Mayor Eddie Francis invited himself to the negotiation table with great arrogance and incompetence. Eddie told CUPE that he and he alone is deserving of pay raise and retirement benefits, poisoning the talks at the onset.
Mayor and council gave themselves a 15% pay raise two years retroactively plus another 3% on top,the mayor's office's operating cost was extended to over a million dollars.
Windsorites have endured an 86% increase in water, that have found their way into the city's treasury not utilities.
The mayor and council have increased the taxes via a backdoor mill rate increase while all the while singing self praise of only a marginal tax increase.
Windsor has no culture but the legacy of corruption and incompetence, Toronto has it made in the shade.
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