Bombardier Makes Fools of Us All

It boggles the mind how devious, arrogant and underhanded companies like Bombardier can be. This coupled with the rank stupidity of those in government who deal with these slickers, leaves taxpayers holding the bag once again, a Quebec tradition.

Quebec is the provincial champion of government largess vis-a-vis company handouts and actually doles out three times as much money and tax breaks to companies as Ontario does. Considering that Ontario's budget is 1½ times that of Quebec, it means that we dole out money at a rate 4½ times in comparison.
This adds up to about $6 billion that the government shells out to keep companies from fleeing to greener pastures.
The vaunted Montreal video game industry, the poster boy of the government's investment in jobs is strictly a question of pay to play, with tax benefits that cover in some cases of up to a third of the overall company payroll.

At any rate, let us say that when negotiating with these companies, our illustrious leaders are over-matched, like a flyweight boxer getting into the ring with a heavyweight.

If you hadn't heard the latest, Bombardier blackmailed the Quebec government for a $1.3 billion loan, claiming poverty, and then turned around and gave huge raises and bonus' to its bosses.
The company has a long history of living on the government dole.

There is no better description of Bombardier's actions than the Yiddish word "Chutzpah"

How stupid are Bombardier bosses?
Not since "New Coke" has a company blundered so publicly, turning even the biggest government defenders against them.
The federal government is now considering an additional request from the company for a further $1 billion loan, which has become toxic overnight.
Not even Trudeau can sell this loan, the country won't have it.

It's time for governments to forgo loans and subsidies to  private business. Those companies asking for handouts are either commercial failures (Bombardier) or successful companies who scam idiot politicians with threats and promises over jobs.

Now we are hearing that the Calgary Flames are threatening the city and province with moving if taxpayers don't shell out for a new arena.
The Flames are in the successful scammer category, threatening taxpayers in a shameful ruse that would make a mafia protection racketeer proud.

The Flames billionaire owner is just following the successful shakedown that the other Alberta hockey billionaire-owner of the Oilers, Daryl Katz did on Edmonton taxpayers, getting the city to pay for most of the $600 million arena project. All it took was a shopping trip to Seattle to frighten officials into coughing up. Easy-peasy.

But Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi should call the Flames bluff.
There is absolutely no good option in the western part of Canada or the United States to move to, Seattle included. If there was an option, the NHL would have expanded there itself.
On the other hand, on the remotest of chance that the Flames move, another ownership group would jump at the chance to operate in Calgary under the present conditions.

Politicians need to grow a pair.
Subsidies and corporate handouts should be made illegal, because just like drugs they are too tempting for weak-kneed politicians.

As Nancy Reagan said....JUST SAY NO!

Does Social Malaise Grip Quebec?

It was more in sadness than anger that I read about the inevitable forced resignation from McGill university by perceived Quebec-basher Professor Andrew Potter, who wrote a scathing and perhaps disjointed article attacking Quebec society entitled entitled;
“How a snowstorm exposed Quebec’s real problem: social malaise.”

Reading the article I couldn't help but sense the profound disdain and anger that the good professor felt for Quebec society, and although the article was mostly accurate, it had the sense of one written by an author in an altered state or someone unloading on his boss before the inevitable firing.

Of course, once published, the writing was on the wall for the good professor at McGill, an institution on a precipitous decline after itself adopting and installing Quebec values, best represented by the French expression; "Nivler par le bas" or as we say in English "leveling down," the process of making the lowest common denominator the academic standard.
McGill is a university led by Quisling-like administrators petrified of giving offense to its government overlords and French language critics. It is quick to change its academic standards so as to accommodate French students in order to scare off the language hounds.

“Dr. Saleem Razack, assistant dean of admissions for medicine.... .... says McGill would have kept the MCAT requirement if there was a French equivalent. “But we want to make sure there’s no barrier for a major segment of our population.” According to Razack, the regular med school class from undergraduate programs doesn’t have as many francophones as McGill would like....” LINK

McGill University medical school, which lowered admission standards to favour francophones has slid from the best program in Canada, to third, reflecting the sad realty of the effects of affirmative action.
I can only imagine what other 'accommodations' have been made in other faculties.

And so it isn't strange that the good professor was shown the door despite the university denying that it forced the professor out, even in the face of criticism of the apparent assault on academic freedom of expression.
The French press went berserk as is always the case when the Quebec model is attacked, with irrational and unrestrained charges of 'Quebec bashing.'

I wonder if the Quebec Press Council will again censure Macleans magazine for the anti-Quebec article, just as it did over the blockbuster article the magazine ran last year entitled...  "The Most Corrupt Province In Canada ."
On second thought probably not, considering that the last fiasco left the Press Council with egg dripping on its face when the allegations made in the article turned out to be more than accurate.
At any rate Anglo apologists like the Montreal Gazette took up the banner of crushing the messenger  with a sadly amateur opinion piece by editor in chief Lucinda Chodan that was to be kind, unworthy of a high school journalist. The Gazette
In the piece Chodin claimed that criticizing Quebec is fine for Quebecers, but 'Quebec-bashing' when done by mean-spirited out-of-provincers. She went on to excuse Quebecers lack of charity or volunteerism on the demise of the Catholic Church, some 50 years ago, an argument akin to the 'dog ate my homework.'
Most of the attacks over the article were based on two small factual errors which in and of themselves were minor. The author claimed that Quebec ATMs distribute $50 bills to facilitate the underground economy and that restaurants routinely offer discounts for cash.
The attacks based on these small errors reminds me of the lawyerly practice of picking apart the devastating testimony of a witness in court wherein a small discrepancy is blown up out of proportion to discredit the entire testimony.
And by-the way, the practice of cash payment in restaurants was so pervasive in Quebec, that the government installed a draconian system of electronic surveillance of restaurant payments, via government mandated billing machines that connects restaurants directly to the tax department. A small army of vicious tax inspectors prowl restaurants clandestinely buying food to make sure that the billing system is used and that every customer is issued a government receipt.
What other province does this?
And by the way, most  hair salons and barbershops in Quebec are notorious for practicing the art of 'cash' payments,' so much so that the government is contemplating installing the same type of  controlled billing machines. The only caveat is that the attached government inspectors would be obliged to get a haircut or perm to establish the bone fides of the billing system, a prospect not altogether practicable.

As for $50 bills in ATMs, they have recently become rare, with Canada Trust one of the few institutions that provide the bills routinely.
Perhaps the banks are under pressure by the government to no longer provide them. 

At any rate, the ad hominem  attack on the author and the picky argument over the minor errors were nothing more than an attempt to deflect, a concerted effort  to obscure the argument made in the piece, that Quebec suffers from social malaise, a subject worthy of legitimate debate.

So the question remains; is Quebec in a situation of social malaise?

social malaise 
- a feeling of pervasive dissatisfaction and disgruntlement
-problems and difficulties acting together which are causing a bad situation.
-a vague awareness of moral or social decline.

Now let us not mince words;
Quebecers are more dependent on government because that is what they voted for...the nanny state and all that it entails and all that it breeds.
The results;
Quebecers are less generous than Canadians and volunteer less because Quebecers view these responsibilities as the government's.
Quebecers work many less hours than other Canadians because the money is less important than the free time.
Quebecers ship their parents off to senior homes at a rate twice that of Canada because personal and familial responsibility has been bred out of them.
Quebecers save for their childrens' education at a rate half of that of parents in British Columbia and 65% of Quebec parents don't contribute a dime (other than general taxes) to their children's higher education.

I could go on and on, but the question remains... Is this a sign of social malaise?
I think not..
That's just the way Quebecers order their lives and they generally feel right about it, far from the definition of social malaise.
As for Canadians judging them as socially backward...well as the saying goes ...Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

And let us remember that like an over-indulgent parent, it is Canadians that help fund these excesses through those naughty equalization payments.
I mean really, if your parents gave you an overly-generous allowance as a teen, would you seek a part-time job at McDonalds?

Why Canadian Medicare is better than Obamacare or Trumpcare

What if a child with a potentially fatal disease had only one option for a cure, a treatment that costs 100 million dollars. Would you expect our publicly funded medicare system in Canada or a private insurance company in the USA to pay for it, or opt to let the child die under the theory that the 100 million dollars could be better spent saving many more lives?

It's a decision worthy of Sophie's Choice, where saving one life means condemning others to certain death, a decision that no rational human would feel comfortable making.
But the reality is that these decisions are made every day by government bureaucrats here in Canada or nameless insurance actuaries in the United States and belies the truth that we cannot provide maximum healthcare to all of our citizens, regardless of whether we are American or Canadian because we do not have the financial wherewithal to pay for it.

And so painful decisions have to be made, decisions that in effect ration healthcare on the basis of cost.
It is a healthcare pie that is to be divided, wherein Canada, each of us gets an equally small sliver or in the United States when the slices are decidedly uneven.
And there is the rub.
And so debate rages here and in the United States over which system can deliver the most for the least, despite the fact that no system can or will deliver all that is ideal and that, to all members of society.

The Canadian system is called single-payer, where the government provides all services related to healthcare and funds the system through special health levys and general taxes.
Both Obamacare and Trumpcare are hybrid systems where the government pay for about half the healthcare service, while the other half is funded by employers and administered by private insurance or health care providers using private doctors and healthcare facilities.

On the face of it, the Canadian system makes a lot more sense. It is plain and simple, eliminates the profit aspect and should in theory spread out health resources (hospitals and doctors) evenly, based on need instead of profit.
But like communist or social systems, it sounds a lot better on paper than in real life and the benefits as opposed to the free market system don't necessarily pan out.
Bureaucracy and low productivity are the Achilles heel of the single-payer system, whereby layers and layers of administrators rob the system of valuable resources and where inefficiency due to poor management and oversight, coupled with low productivity are the bane of the system.

This can be best illustrated by the administration of health services in Quebec versus the rest of Canada, whereby Quebec's infamous bureaucracy and abysmally low productivity rate demonstrate how two single-payer systems operating under the exact same rules can register different results.
Let us remember that 25% of Quebecers cannot find a family doctor despite the province paying for more doctors per capita than Ontario. It is illustrative of how bureaucracy, bad management and laziness makes Quebec's healthcare system so bad as compared to other Canadian provinces, despite having equal financial resources.

At any rate, healthcare in Canada is rationed through long waiting lists for surgery and treatments, and where appointments with doctors, especially specialists, takes much too long. Certain 'exotic' treatments and expensive drugs are just not available due to the perceived poor cost/benefit ratio and so many Canadians afflicted are deprived of  essential treatments, condemned to suffer the consequences of non-treatment or forced to travel to the USA to get what they need or want, at their own expense. How many of us give up waiting in the emergency room because of the interminable hours upon hours of waiting? The societal cost of these delays is incalculable, but impactful just the same.

There is no doubt that long delays for appointments with doctors or waiting lists for surgery or treatment is not a problem in the United States, where health services are plentiful, superb and available almost on demand.
The problem here is getting in the door, where millions upon millions of Americans cannot avail themselves of these excellent services because they don't have the means to pay or the insurance to cover it.
This is the American version of rationing.

When people vaunt the benefits of the American system over the Canadian system they always point to the availability and quality of services as compared to Canada, but always fail to include the crucial aspect of access, whereby too many Americans are locked out of the medical system.

In the end no system is perfect, but let us consider that Canada spends half of what the USA does on healthcare and I can only imagine how much better our system would be versus Trumpcare or Obamacare if we had access to double our healthcare budget.

In the chart above you can see that the USA spends US$8,233 per person, per year on healthcare, while Canada spends almost half that at US$4,445, perhaps the key element in the USA/Canada debate on healthcare.

While most Americans have been frightened away from the concept of Canadian style single-payer system by the entrenched healthcare and insurance industry who constantly 'trump' up the negative aspects of our system, the reality is that only a fraction of Canadians would opt for Trumpcare or Obamacare care, despite the shortcomings of our system.

But before we get too full of ourselves, we shouldn't be too proud of our medicare system and ask ourselves the important question, how it is that countries like France, Great Britain, Germany and others, all have better healthcare systems than ours, while spending considerably less.

New Bloc Leader Already Working on Her Pension

My least favorite politician is Martine Ouellet, the newly minted leader of the Bloc Quebecois who is, although a double university graduate, one of the dumbest people to ever grace the halls of the National Assembly.

She is the absolute definition of of an idiot, spouting off utter separatist nonsense that only fanatical supporters can buy.
According to her, Quebec contributes more in taxes to Ottawa than it receives in benefits and that every province is favoured over Quebec.
She is opposed of course to the Energy East pipeline on the grounds that it is “the biggest threat to potable water in Quebec.”
"She called on sovereignists to rally behind her to protect the “green jewel” that is Quebec and put an end to tax havens and the loss of corporate headquarters from the province."

Quebec as a "green jewel" Really???

She pledges to shut down the world's tax havens and to force companies to keep their head offices in Quebec. I'm not kidding. She says all this with a straight face.

The Parti Quebecois was thrilled to dump her and her claim that the PQ was conspiring against her is the one thing which she repeats that is 100% believable. 

For those new to the blog, I want to cite this interview that I translated a while back where a Radio-Canada interviewer tries to keep a straight face, but clearly astounded at her stupidity.

Yup, the new leader of the Bloc Quebecois thinks that by Ottawa guaranteeing Newfoundland's $900 million loan, it costs taxpayers $900 million.
Someone should have explained it to her in terms she might understand, so here goes.

Your brother goes to the bank to get a car loan, but since he has bad credit, the bank wants to charge a much higher interest rate. But the banker says that if you (the sister with  the good credit) guarantees the loan, the bank will offer the lower interest rate instead.
Now Martine, listen to this..... If you brother repays the loan without defaulting the guarantee COSTS NOTHING!!!!

This is the same woman that is promising to nationalize the internet.

At any rate, let's talk about the fact that she is not giving up her Quebec National Assembly seat where she now sits as an independent, a situation that hasn't gone over big with any of the political parties who view the idea of holding down two full time jobs rather deceitful. Taking advantage of a loophole that allows members of the National Assembly to have a second job, the situation is somewhat of an embarrassment to the institution.

Now the two years salary she'll collect from the National assembly while she is leader of the Bloc Quebecois has a much larger effect on her income than you can imagine.

Ouellet  will be 48 next month and that number is important because in two years she is eligible for a National Assembly pension. There is a provision that an ex-MNA can receive her pension at fifty years instead of sixty, with a 25% penalty.

Now MNAs earn a 4% indexed credit on their salary for each year they serve.
Simply put, if a MNA has served ten years in the Assembly and made $100,000 in each of those years, she'd be entitled to a $40,000 pension at 60 years old or a $30,000 a year pension if retiring early at fifty years old.
The two years that Ouellet will sit in the National Assembly while leader of the BQ, will earn her another six or eight thousand dollars in pension for life.

Ouellet will be pension eligible just about the time she'll be out of a job in Quebec and ready to run federally as a BQ candidate.
If she wins a seat in Ottawa, she can start working on a federal pension and delay until sixty years old, her indexed $40,000 Quebec pension.

For her ten years of tenure in Quebec's National Assembly, she can collect a lifetime indexed pension which could run thirty or forty years and which would cost Quebec taxpayers over a million present dollars.
But readers, that's not the end of it. No sireee!
Let us consider Ouellet winning a seat in Ottawa where she can start working on an even more lucrative Parliamentary pension, one which she'd be eligible for in six years.
But should she be defeated, after say, five years all is not lost.

She could invoke the buy-back clause in her Quebec National Assembly pension plan whereby ex-MNA members who leave and take another designated eligible job, can continue contributing to their Quebec MNA pension, or can make a lump sum payment to come up to speed. And by the way, sitting as an MP in Ottawa is considered an eligible job.
So by contributing a lump sum  amount, equal to what she would have paid into the Quebec plan had she remained a member of the National Assembly instead of sitting in Ottawa, she could add those five years to her Quebec pension.
A fantastic deal when one considers that the lump sum payment is a fraction of what the pension is worth.
It's calculated that in Ottawa, taxpayers pay $25 for every $1 contributed by the beneficiary of a Parliamentary pension.

Quebec is not as bad as that, but pretty bad just the same.
In the ten years that Martine Ouellet sat as a member of the National Assembly, she contributed about $100,000 herself total towards her pension, a pension which is worth roughly about a million dollars over her projected retirement life. It means that taxpayers are paying about $10 for each dollar she contributed. Yikes!!!

Good luck Martine!!!!

Snowstorm Traffic Fail Underlines Quebec Bureaucracy Nightmare

It's not like snowstorms are something new to Quebec and even the size of the one that hit us this week is not something we shouldn't have been able to handle.

Of course there would be the anticipated traffic delays but considering that we had a few days warning of what was to come, the disaster on Highway 13 in Montreal, where 300 odd vehicles and their occupants were immobilized overnight in freezing weather was a dangerous and unacceptable failure by civil defence authorities, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Transport, all of whom were unable to cope with the difficult but not particularly extraordinary situation.

“With opposition calls for heads to roll, Premier Philippe Couillard has launched an external inquiry into how 300 motorists ended up stranded overnight Tuesday on Highway 13 during a blizzard”......
....“Moving to get the political storm over Transport Quebec’s bungling of the storm under control, Couillard announced it has named former deputy minister of transport Florent Gagné as head of a formal external inquiry into the events”. Montreal Gazette

And so things are running true to form, the politicians hand-wringing and apologizing profususly, but of course refusing to point fingers or assign blame.
So as usual, the government is going to its tried and true formula of calling an inquiry in order to delay accountability until the public's rage has subsided with time.
The result of that inquiry?
Nobody in particular will be held responsible for the dangerous mess, nobody will be fired or sanctioned and a collective responsibility will be invoked insuring no politician or bureaucrat will suffer any consequences.
It is the Quebec way.

I am reminded of this mindset at Quebec's illustrious UQAM university where future leaders are being formed and where collective irresponsibility is taught early and often.
Many courses are graded on the ridiculous notion of 'collective class work,' where every student is given the exact same passing mark, where good students are punished and bad students rewarded.
Everybody passes and everybody is rewarded equally, regardless of talent or devotion making for ideal future politicians and government employees.

By the way, the Journal de Montreal published an organizational flow chart that detailed the 94 steps to be taken by the Ministry of Transport in relation to intervening in a disaster or serious situation.
It is perhaps the best example of why Quebec failed to deal with the situation adequately.
Layer upon layer of bureaucracy that was and is a recipe for failure, followed by collective irresponsibility.

Even if you don't understand French, you certainly get the gist of what idiotic bureaucracy is going on here.

As a society, Quebec has been gripped with the sovereignty debate for over forty years and so little room remains in the public form for debate over the nightmare of bureaucracy and collective irresponsibility.

In Quebec we have more doctors per capita than Ontario, yet 25% of citizens cannot find a family doctor.
The bloated amount of bureaucrats involved in running our health care and school systems is staggering and is directly the cause of inferior performance.
Yet the bureaucrats are firmly in charge and fiercely protective of their entrenched positions.
Recently a government inspector swooped down on a run-down school where volunteer parents were painting the school at their own entire cost and labour, charging the volunteers with illegally working without a permit or qualification and threatening two hundred dollar fines each.

The Quebec government is incredibly bloated and lazy with the guarantee of lifetime job security poisoning  the workplace with a 'can't be fired' mentality that leads to abysmal productivity.
This last week I read a story in La Presse about a Quebec civil  servant who is paid but does not work.

“We'll call him Gilles, because if we give his real name, surely Gilles will find himself in a real mess with his boss, the Quebec government. Gilles is a bureaucrat in Quebec City. But Gilles does not work.
No joke. He doesn't work.
Gilles is paid. He has an office. He has a title.
But he doesn't work and is paid a salary of $130,000”  La Presse {Fr}

Apparently his bosses don't like him or want to work with him and so he is left to do nothing and collect his guaranteed salary. This is Quebec.

Every aspect of Quebec public life is affected with the poison of bloated bureaucracy that is more reminiscent of an old-time communist regime, than a modern western society.
And so Quebecers, even outside government work less days and hundreds less hours per year than Canadians in other provinces.
Laziness, bureaucracy and inefficiency is hallmark of Quebec society, leading us to become the province with the least amount of disposable income in Canada.
What do our leaders say about that?

"It's our choice how we live and organize society."

...Yes it is.

****************** U P D A T E ******************  

 As predicted, apologies flowed profusely by the Liberal ministers without anyone accepting responsibility.

Let me remind them of the code of Ministerial Responsibility as detailed on the National Assembly website (which I've translated from the French)

"Ministers are individually responsible for the management of their departments. They must present the policies and defend the actions taken by their ministry. Before the Assembly, a minister must answer not only his own actions, but also those of his officials. He may even be forced to resign due to an important case of mismanagement....

Quebecers shouldn't  hold their breath waiting for a ministerial resignation despite the code. 

It isn't the Quebec way.