Our Public Servants at 'Work'- Volume 1

I'm happy to announce that due to the many hilarious stories in the news concerning lazy, uncaring and wasteful public and para-public employees, I'm adding a new recurring piece describing the follies of those who abuse the public purse.

Blue collar Workers Asleep on the Job.

Office workers in old Montreal were surprised to find two City of Montreal employees fast asleep in their city owned vehicle. As passerby after passerby gawked and photographed the oblivious pair, it's disquieting to know that they are earning $40 an hour during their siesta. When asked to comment about the incident, a union representative claimed that the picture only proved that the employees had their eyes closed and not necessarily that they were sleeping. LINK(Fr)

Don't Call Us- Call the Police

A Montreal women complained to a TV commentator that when her corpulent mother fell down and couldn't get up, she called paramedics to help her lift up the heavy load. After three hours of waiting with no response she phoned back Urgences Santé to complain. The dispatcher explained that she'd have to wait even longer as the call was classified as non-emergency.
Frustrated, she asked what other options she had, to which the operator told her to call the police and tell them that she had 'pushed her mother down'.  The operator assured the caller that the police, the firemen and an ambulance would be there within minutes.

20 Grand for Yoga Classes

The day after the Quebec government's tax-raising budget, 300 civil servants, employees of the Centre jeunesse de la Mauricie et du Centre-du-Québec, took advantage of an organized paid day to enjoy a program of yoga, stretching, relaxation and conferences on food and physical activity. Meeting at the Hotel Dauphin in Drummondville the outing set back the government $20,000.


Workshop in 'Silence' costs $1,400
Fifteen Managers of the L'Agence de la santé et des services sociaux de la Mauricie et du Centre-du-Québec  enjoyed an "experience of silence"at the Auberge Les Jardins in Bromont, consisting of two days and one night of silence. They were told to think about what really matters to them at this time of their lives, said Remi Tremblay, who provided the training.
Cost of this weekend cost $1,404.37 per person.

In another story, five members of the Health Agency of Montreal paid a whopping $9,385 to attend an "e-Health 2009" conference in Quebec city to learn about (...sigh) cost overruns. How the group managed to spend so much money in just three days remains a mystery.


Town of Rawdon Blows Half a Million Suing Bloggers 
After some bloggers wrote some pretty nasty things about the mayor and city council members, enough seems to be enough for the town of Rawdon. The village of 10,000 inhabitants sought an injunction to close down the web site  rawdon-qc.net which was the home of the abuse.
The Quebec Court of Appeal overturned the injunction based on freedom of speech and the whole issue is spiralling upwards.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association commented that the issue ought to be addressed pursuant to new anti-SLAPP legislation in Quebec and not left to fester until a trial date sometime in the future.
At any rate the town has blown a whopping $500,000 or 5%, of its $10 million budget on the affair. LINK

$830 for Eyeglasses charged to Community Organization 
An employee of a community organization that helps people with alcohol addiction in the Montreal suburb of  Longueuil, La maison de l’Amitié Omer  was reimbursed $ 830 for a pair of glasses, contact lenses and an eye exam. The Chairman of the organization billed $ 9,278 in meals and gasoline without any receipts. 

Expense-Padding Director's mandate extended

You might remember Marielle Poirier, the directer of Cégep de l'Outaouais, a junior college near Hull who was outed in the Journal de Montreal for expense account padding. She is renowned for taking globe-trotting trips, to attend various dubious meetings,  all on "school" business. She once expensed a purchase in a museum gift shop as a meal reimbursement, only to be caught in the lie by a reporter who revealed that there was no restaurant in the museum in question. She also claimed as an expense a tourist trip to the Grand Canyon and regularly raids the hotel min-bar and enjoys three bottle of wine dinners, all on the arm of the CEGEP.

Was she punished for any of these excesses? No! The Board of Directors of the school unanimously renewed her mandate for another five years.

Image Maker Fired  in Quebec City

A international image-maker, of dubious reputation scored a $300,000+ contract to re-define Quebec City's image. When Clotaire Rapaille made his preliminary findings, that Quebec city residents were "totally neurotic,  sado-masochistic and that they loved being abused by Anglophones, the shit really hit the fan. Mayor Regis Lebeaume was not amused to say the least and cancelled the contract, not before paying the image consultant $125,000 for his bon mots. LINK

French vs. English Volume 10

Parizeau Chooses Anglo Hospitial

Ex-PQ Premier, Jacques Parizeau is putting paid to the argument that Montreal's officially bilingual hospitals treat only Anglophones. Pulling a 'Danny Williams,' Monsieur Parizeau checked into the Jewish General Hospital for treatment for a rapid drop in blood pressure. In attack after attack, nationalist claim that the government is spending too much money on these hospitals because of the small proportion of the general population that Anglophones represent.
I'm sure that for many nationalists, Mr Parizeau's decision to seek the best medical care in an Anglo institution is somehow treasonous and a stab in the heart to the sovereignty movement. We wish Mr. Parizeau a 'prompt re-établissement' and a hearty 'Mazel Tov' on his vote of confidence.

Baby on Board Sign irks Nationalist

In one of the most moronic pieces I have ever seen published, Martin Lavallée in vigel.net  complained that a hoard of new immigrants have been seen tooling around the city of Montreal in cars with the infamous "BABY ON BOARD" sign attached to the inside of the rear window. He claims that it signals an Anglophone invasion from other parts of Canada and the United States and that the Anglos have moved into sacred Francophone territory outside the traditional Anglo bastion in the western end of Montreal. Without a shred of evidence, he builds a rant against the English based on his nonsensical fairy tale premise. He notes that all the new construction of condos and apartment buildings are being built to house an onslaught of invading Anglos.
Now there are paranoid nut cases in all communities, Anglos included, but one must ask what kind of editor, even of a nationalist web site would allow such demented ravings to be published?

Voodoo Mathematics from Striking Newsman

Perhaps being on strike from The Journal de Montreal for over a year has affected journalist  Jean-Philippe Pineault's math skills. In a piece on the striking journalists' news web site, Rue Frontenac, he draws a hilarious conclusion from a report published by separatist language critic Pierre Curzi.
The report, which most likely is another self-serving separatist creation, contends that 157 thousand immigrants chose to adopt English as their new language, while 143 thousand chose French. I don't for a minute have any faith in those numbers but notwithstanding, by my calculations it represents a 52% / 48% split.
Not so according to the writer of the article, it actually means that English is five times as popular as French!
How does the author arrive at this conclusion? Well, Francophones are five times as numerous as Anglophones, so it's natural that five times as many immigrants choose French. Because only half do and so, English is five times more popular.
I'm not making this up.....

Get that? No? 
Let me give you an analogy --- A marketing company takes a survey commissioned by PEPSI to compare it's product to COKE. The polling firm ascertains that 85% of Quebeckers prefer PEPSI, with the remaining 15% preferring COKE. It then surveys immigrants arriving to Quebec and finds that this group is split 50%-50% between products. The marketing company then goes back to PEPSI and tells the company that immigrants prefer COKE five times as much as PEPSI.
"How can you possibly  draw such a conclusion, the immigrants prefer both products equally?" asks the PEPSI representative.  "Well," answers the polling firm, "Immigrants are five times more likely to choose Coke than traditional Quebeckers and so by logical extension it is five times more popular among them."
"BUT ONLY HALF OF THEM CHOSE COKE, IDIOT! HOW COULD IT BE FIVE TIMES MORE POPULAR!!!! "screams the Pepsi executive.
"You don't understand our methodology..."

"Jewish" Court Responsible for allowing 'Kirpan' in Class

 In another rant, prolific Anglo, immigrant and non-Christan basher, Jacques Noel now refers to Canada's Supreme Court as the "Jewish" court, which he blames for ruling that the dastardly Kirpan be allowed to be worn under the clothes of religious Sikhs in schools. LINK.
It isn't so bad when his idiotic and logic twisting rants are confined to obscure sovereingist web sites,  but every now and then his nonsense spills out into the main stream media.
He is famous for twisting voodoo statistics to Quebec's advantage and has published a beaut in a letter published by LE SOLEIL.
In it he attacks Stephen Harper's plan to increase the number of Parliamentary seats to Alberta, BC and Ontario as statistically unfair.
His justification is based on the fact that while these provinces are under-represented based on population, they are not by virtue of registered voters. The fact that many are new immigrants and can't vote means that they should not be considered in determining proportional representation. Yup......

When it comes to proportional representation I bet Monsieur Noel didn't consider this fact, as pointed out by Chantal Hebert in l'Actualité.
It takes more than twice as many voters to elect a member of the NDP to Parliament as it does to elect a member of the Bloc Quebecois. Here's the breakdown of how many votes each party got divided by the members it elected.
-Bloc Québécois :      1 seat for each     28,163 votes.
-Conservatives:         1 seat for each     36,427 votes.
-Liberals :                  1 seat for each     47,184 votes.
- NDP :                      1 seat for each     67,981 votes.
- Green Party:            0 seats for all      937,613 votes.

OOOH.......

Quebec Budget Ignores Reality

Reaction to the Quebec government's latest budget by experts and commentators has been generally positive and has been hailed by most economists as a step in the right direction, especially in the levying of new user fees taxes in relation to health care.

The budget pushes taxes to the highest level ever and extends the lead Quebec maintains as the most over-taxed jurisdiction in North America. How that can be labelled as innovative, progressive or realistic is news to me. Had the finance minister tabled any such monstrosity in the United States, he'd have been lynched.

Quebec's problem is not on the revenue side, the problem is clearly wasteful overspending. You can't remedy wasteful spending by taxing more.

To ask Quebeckers to pay more to cover a budgetary shortfall is like an addict demanding more money from his parents to support a drug habit. Clearly the problem isn't about the price of cocaine...

Without getting into a lot of boring numbers, the Quebec government will raise $56 billion this year (with all these new taxes included) and spend $69 billion. Hmmm....

The federal government kicks in another $8.5 billion in equalization payments, money taken from other provinces, in a program based Robin Hood's example of stealing from the rich, to pay the poor.

Even so, Quebec's budget still remains short about $5 billion and consequently the Province must go to the bank and increase its overdraft, just like you or me.

That overdraft now stands at over $220 billion and will grow with the addition of this year's deficit.
The interest payments on this debt keeps growing as we keep piling on more debt. Its a vicious circle that everyone who has fallen behind on credit card debt understands, the more the interest payments rise, the less chance you have to pay off the debt. 

Now anybody facing a similar situation in their personal life would be advised to seriously cut expenses, so how did the Quebec government react? By spending more!

With a straight face, the Finance Minister told Quebeckers that the government would tighten their belt and would limit this year's budget increase to just under 3%.
An increase!!!!!!!!  INSANE!!!
 

By demanding that taxpayers continue to pony up ever larger and larger amounts of money, the government is making Quebeckers willing or unwilling enablers.

It's time to cut up the credit cards.

The province's  ability to pay for this spending orgy is drawing to a close. Taxes can't be raised much more and the banks soon won't lend us more. Ask Greece.

Unfortunately, like all spending addicts, the Quebec government spends the money unwisely and always gets poor value.

Quebec spends 26% more than Ontario when identical public services are compared. That's because we have too many civil servants and para-public employees who don't work as hard as our neighbours and who are paid larger salaries and benefits. Our government owned corporations like Hydro-Quebec teeter on incompetence and produce half the revenue they should. Money is spent on programs that other richer provinces cannot afford.

"You and your parents are spending a bunch of money to help Quebec, and they’re paying half the tuition you are. Not only do Quebecers pay less tuition, they also pay far less for electricity, drugs and daycare. Quebec offers a more generous parental leave program than elsewhere, and higher corporate subsidies."        -Ted Morton, Alberta’s finance minister who vowed to visit university campuses and deliver a message to students.   Link

In Ontario, public employees were told that their salaries would be frozen for several years. In Quebec the civil servants have already been promised 7% increase over three years. As outrageous as it sounds, those employees are threatening a strike to get more.

Just like a true addict, our Finance Minister pleaded that he could mend his ways. He brought along evidence that he could spend less and was serious about paring down the size government. To prove his point, he produced a list of 28 government agencies that he was abolishing.
The truth is somewhat different, because he wasn't exactly abolishing them, just their independent status, most were rolled into other Ministries.
One of those agencies,"le regroupement du Fonds relatif à la tempête de verglas" is an organization whose job it is to distribute compensation to those affected by the famous Ice Storm in 1998, twelve years ago. I'm not kidding!

"This restructuring will have a direct impact on existing staff. I want to reassure employees potentially affected. They will be treated with respect, in accordance with collective agreements in force," said the Minister.

Sounds like people are going to be fired, right?
Not a chance!
It isn't contractually possible to fire a civil servant whose job has been eliminated, they have job security for life!  FOR LIFE!
Now go back and read the Minister's statement in light of that fact...... Just a tad misleading, don't you think?

Anyone who believes that this new 'realistic' budget will deliver the province financial stability is delusional.
Nothing has changed at all.
It's funny, the Greek government has the same attitude.

Yet Another French Language Campaign (....Sigh)

It's good to know that despite the Quebec finance minister's promise to pare down government, there's still plenty of money available for useless publicity campaigns, this one exhorting merchants to serve clients in French, once again.

The campaign is a follow-up to a similarly unsuccessful project to get merchants to post signs in their stores, which told customers that the premises served customers in French. The $400,000 campaign was a bust because there weren't many business' willing to offend Anglo and minority clients for the sake of the l'Office Québécois de la Langue Française. 
As the old saying goes, "Blood is Thicker than Water, but Money is Thicker than Language" (I made up the last part.)

That campaign fizzled badly and just about the only place these signs were found, were in French language bookstores. I couldn't find one of the signs posted anywhere west of St.Lawrence St. Laurent boulevard in Montreal.

At any rate the new multi-level campaign is much, much larger, costing several million dollars, although I couldn't run down the exact cost because nobody would reply to my request for information.
The details of the campaign are described in a press release, but the cost is conveniently left out.

This campaign uses radio, billboards, mobile billboards and a give-away promotion of hundreds of thousands of shopping bags anointed with the slogan - "MERCI DE ME SERVIR EN FRANCAIS"(Thank-you for serving me in French). The opposite side of the bag was enshrined with more inspiring bon mots,  "Un détaillant qui commerce en français, j'aime ça!" ("I like a retailer that does business in French")

Now I may be missing the point, but if the campaign is to get stores to use more French, shouldn't it target Anglos and Ethnics?

Don't you think that Francophones already offer service in French and don't need to be reminded?

At any rate, I'm glad the government hasn't lost perspective as to what is important in Quebec. It's obvious that the finance minister has his priorities in order and kept alive this vital and strategic campaign to promote the French language.

I guess militants in favour of the campaign might argue the whole thing  costs less than one new MRI diagnostic machine and anyway, purchasing another machine wouldn't put much of a dent in the four-month waiting period that Quebeckers are now subjected to.

Quebec Bakers Want Too Much Dough

It was with some disappointment that I heard that the Weston Bread factory in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil is to close down due to excessive union demands.

Decades ago, many more than I'd like to remember, my whole Grade One class made an end-of-term field trip to that very same factory. The visit was nothing less than enchanting, as the huge vats of dough and the semi-automated machines were dazzling, especially to a gang of six-year olds. When we concluded our visit, we were each rewarded with a giant shopping bag of a selection of the factory's products and I never forgot how proud I was to bring home the 'goodies' to my mom. Back then every little bit helped.

The plant will close, according to the company, because the union refused to guarantee flexibility in scheduling, a condition deemed necessary in a changing marketplace. In spite of a stern warning from the company that it wasn't just posturing, the workers held firm.

And so, the union has negotiated its workers right out of their jobs. As expected, the leaders blame the company and use slogans and catchwords like - 'mépris' (contempt) to deflect responsibility.
I've noticed that more and more, 'MÉPRIS' has become the go-to word, whenever unions, special interest groups and nationalists suffer a particularly humiliating defeat.

I feel sorry for the workers, who are now separated from their well-paid jobs, due to a union miscalculation.

Quebec has always been Canada's most unionized province and also has the distinction of having the most radical and corrupt labour movement, but still, it's hard to understand it's lack of sophistication and propensity to badly overplay its hand.
Union negotiation is all about pushing the company to the brink, but not over.  It seems that in Quebec, more often than not, the union jumps off the cliff all by itself.

Quebec has a sad history of union incompetence.
Back in 1969, a Post Office contract with a Quebec company to deliver mail locally wasn't renewed. (It was actually the company, newly unionized, who failed to bid on the renewal).
The 450 drivers of 'LAPALME' who in Quebec union folklore became known as the 'Gars de Lapalme"(Lapalme boys) were offered integration into the Post Office, but refused, out of loyalty to the CNTU (Confédération des syndicats nationaux ), a powerful Quebec union. The workers demanded that their union affiliation be maintained, a demand flatly rejected by the Post Office.

The drivers went on 'strike' to push the issue, but effectively had no leverage, since they weren't direct employees of the Post Office, who then hired new workers affiliated to their own Public Service union system. The jilted drivers held a three year long death rattle, often violent, to underscore their plight. It was one of the roughest labour disputes in Quebec history, one in which emotions ran high. Asked to comment on the driver's situation, then Prime Minister Pierre-Elliot Trudeau was quoted as saying, "Qu'ils mangent donc de la marde" (Let them eat shit.)

Sadly, in the end, the CNTU, realizing the futility of the situation, abandoned the workers, who were cast adrift in the saddest example of union bungling in the history of Quebec.

You'd think that after failures like these, attitudes would change and that unionized workers and their leadership would wise up. Alas it is not to be, not even forty years later.

The Journal de Montreal is a successful Montreal tabloid owned by zillionaire Pierre-Karl Péladeau, son of the late great media baron, Pierre Péladeau. Nobody would ever accuse Péladeau Sr. of treating workers with kid gloves and his son is a chip off the old block. Workers should have known what they were up against when they pushed demands in contract negotiations.

Last January (2009), Péladeau locked out employees in a dispute over a variety of issues. The sticking point appears to be the issue of media convergence, where the work of those who write in the newspaper can be transferred to the Internet without additional compensation.
According to Hubdub.com

"Photographers and journalists at the paper make an average salary of $88,000 for a 30-hour week. Editors make an annual average salary of $125,000. Employees are entitled to four to six weeks of annual vacation paid at time-and-a-half.

Amazingly, the newspaper continues to publish during the strike, seemingly without missing a beat, using 'contract' reporters and editors, a practice usually outlawed in Quebec.
The newspaper appears to be as popular as ever with advertisers and readers holding fast, making the newspaper even more successful than it was before the strike.

With the continued success of the newspaper, there's no impetus for the employer to negotiate. It's likely that Péladeau would love nothing better than to have the present situation become permanent.

It's ironic that some of the most literate and educated people in Quebec cannot understand that after fifteen months, it's time to either give up or go home. Many of the old-timers writing for the newspaper should remind their co-workers what happened when The Montreal Star pressmen went on a protracted strike back in 1979. The newspaper folded.

With salaries and conditions, like those described above, it's mind-boggling that the employees haven't realized that they are risking much more than they can possibly gain.  Even if the employees 'win' their strike and the employer caves in (an unlikely occurrence), they'll never recoup the money they lost by not working. Pride? Stupidity? Hardheadedness?

Raynald Leblanc, president of the union of employees is playing a risky game that is banking on the Rue Frontenac news website that locked out employees have set up, to put pressure on management. It's a risky game and Pierre-Karl is not one likely to blink, especially while staring down the mild-mannered photographer/union leader.

The locked-out employees have a healthy strike fund that can last another couple of months, but even the mighty NHL player's union realized that it was time to cave, after being locked out for a full season by determined owners. Once again, another Quebec union is playing Russian roulette.

There aren't many strikes lasting over a year which are ever resolved in the worker's favour, a reality that Quebec unions still fail to understand. If a company can hold out for a year without folding, they can usually hold out indefinitely.

Sometimes you've got to swallow hard.
Weston Bakery employees and their union leaders should have realized that three quarters of a loaf of bread is better than none.
Just ask the Ontario auto workers, who took massive hits in order to keep their jobs. While its hard to accept less, sometimes it's a better choice than to shoot for all or nothing.

That could of course never happen in Quebec, after all, we have our union pride and ....BS (welfare.)