Fuschi’s Canadian Forum

The boat is bobbing around on turbulent waters, while dead ahead and coming fast is a thousand foot fatal drop. Someone in the boat says, “…everyone, grab the oars and let’s row together or we’re doomed.” While most are looking for their oars, Ken Lewenza, of the CAW says, “We’ve done enough rowing before this crisis, so me and my guys are going to sit this one out.”

This scenario reflects the attitude of the CAW and their disconnect from reality. It also illustrates what has been a fundamental lynchpin of their political beliefs. That is, when the going gets tough, the tough protect their turf. The CAW has always been convinced that managed trade, and protective barriers are the key to employment  security, hence they pine still for their little two way trade paradise (the US-Canada Auto Pact).  They remain convinced that they could have forced the rest of the world to stand still while they played in their own sandbox.

This desire to burrow one’s head deeper into the sand, at the sight of any threat, runs throughout the hierarchy of the union movement. It is most clear in Windsor than elsewhere. In the midst of the debate currently raging over the future of the Big Three, both aired and written local media is rife with the defensive posture of local union ground troops. Since their efforts have succeeded in producing many favourable community outcomes, they see it profoundly unfair that this and other Canadian communities are pointing accusing fingers at the CAW for their part in the auto meltdown. Ken Lewenza boldly claims that they have no part in this negative outcome.

A locally sourced website, autoworker.net, is a very active posting board for Big Three discussion streams. The site was a useful forum in its infancy, but has been commandeered and censored by union faithful. A recent post puts out a wide-ranging call for a variety of people with skill sets adequate for the formation of a competing Windsor newspaper. The reason for this effort is alleged to be the Windsor Star’s anti-union, conservative bias.

Well, the Star might be a Canwest entity, and as such, does have some conservative fundamentals on its editorial board, but many of its reporters have drunk the “progressive” kool-aid and speak a left-leaning bias. Evidently, this is not enough for union faithful. Democracy is never sufficiently democratic to them, until its voices are narrowed to the correctly political ones. Presumably, voices like mine, even though I am a CAW member,  would never see the light of day in their vision of democratic discourse.

This is what Windsor and Ontario is up against, as the bailout debate rages in congress. Remember that Obama got a $100 million campaign push from American unions. If they think the way ours do, they will come looking for favours before they will co-operate. Obama may feel that he owes them a few repatriated plants. Since we have some, it might be a great time for diplomacy on the CAW’s part. The last thing we need is Lewenza’s big-mouthed bass look, on all front pages, with his fists of defiance pointed at everyone he considers to be an enemy of his cozy socialist movement.

Windsor has outlived its need for unions, even if the unions have not outlived their stranglehold on the city. Sure they have put in time shaking the trees for United Way donations, and many other well-intentioned causes. But I have not the least doubt that Windsor would be equally generous without the unions. Or, that the attitude of resentful insularity they radiate, has done so much to stifle positive innovation. I also have no doubt that it has been long since the unions have brought more prosperity than they have chased out. It is to be hoped that the waning vestiges of their power, are removed for good as a consequence of this crisis, before they do any more damage. The successful and non-union transplants  of the import competitors, are a clear challenge to a better way.

The worst thing that can happen to the domestic auto industry is forcing change onto it based on the current consensus coming mostly from politicians and from media opinion, which are vying to see how much damage they can wreak. Politicians will want politically motivated solutions, and that’s bad enough. Media pundits, on the other hand will want solutions based on their abysmal understanding of cars in particular, and the industry in general. The spokesmen most qualified to say anything are usually kept in the basements of media outlets, and allowed to come out once a week as a sop to the “motorheads”. They won’t be heard.

What has been heard instead are repeated misconceptions which are not only wrong, but become self-fulfilling prophecies which further harm the automakers. The most often and furiously repeated of these, mouthed ad nauseam by every two-bit by-liner and prospective anchor-woman, is the farcical notion that the Big Three have been producing cars “that the American public does not want”. This falsehood needs no protracted forensic dismantling. The idiots who keep repeating it need do only a cursory research on the sale of Ford F150 pick-ups in the last decade. The resulting numbers can be doubled, at least, once we add the sales of their North-American competitors. We must conclude, then, that a vast conspiracy has existed, to force some twenty million buyers, at the point of a gun, to accept an American pick-up.

Add to those numbers, at least a million a year to satisfy the minivan demand, and another million, at least, for the SUV crowd. There are some forty to sixty million vehicles here, and none of them are of the bare-bones, cut-rate category. Buyers willingly paid above average prices for them. The dim-bulb refrain that North-American buyers did not want these come from such as  Thomas Friedman of the New York Times when he says, “Any car company that gets taxpayer money must…plan for transforming every vehicle in its fleet to a hybrid-electric engine…” Furthermore, Friedman wishes to disqualify auto executives just because they don’t pray, like him, at the altar of global warming religion. He quotes, with alarm, Bob Lutz’s opinion that global warming is “a total crock of…”

And suppose, that when we have accomplished what Friedman wants, and we have created a huge expensive infrastructure of electric supply, driven the price of hydro through the roof, and forced the price of oil down to the point where Exxon is asking for a bailout? Suppose that at that point, gasoline powered vehicles make the best sense?

While this last scenario is guesswork, it should be clear that we are all guessing. We know one thing for sure and that is that prevailing conditions will lead the consumer, as they always have, to the path of least resistance. If oil prices drop, those that love their trucks will return to them. If electric hybrids produce the competition that the oil industry needs to keep it honest, then the price will drop (even further than currently). When that time comes, the consumer will seek choices in his mode of transportation. If he worships at the altar, let him buy electric. If he has not drunk the kool-aid, let him buy his hemi.  If the anti-carbon crowd, like Friedman, and their political sycophants succeed in influencing the future direction of our choices, the Big Three could easily find themselves at the opposite end of the same bind.

The problems of the Big Three are: enormous fixed costs, the 500 pound UAW in the room, and a frightened consumer. Let the politicians deal with these, and leave the shape of tomorrow’s car to the buyer.  

 It is not surprising that such a clear majority of Canadians are on the Obama bandwagon. The same phenomenon swept Canadian politics in the Trudeau era, when eloquence and style won a clear victory over substance. Unfortunately for all of us, Obama does not have the luxury, at this time, to be as insubstantial as Trudeau was. There is too much at stake in today’s world, both economically and in challenging conflicts, to allow for a long learning curve.

What if Dalton McGuinty has no intention of controlling Ontario’s slide into fiscal deficit? What if he has every intention of allowing it to happen, and is willing to aid and abet Ontario’s descent? What if he has all his excuses ready, and intends to use this as a lever to; (1) force more money out of the federal government, and (2) blame them for all his problems, while (3) endearing himself to his core supporters?

The mounting evidence seems to point clearly in this direction. In spite of the fact that minister Duncan admitted to a projected shortfall of half a billion dollars, additional announcements and the unspoken stuff between the lines, indicates that these two have not the least care in the world. We know that the teaching cartel is quickly stampeding toward a double-digit wage offer made by McGuinty’s gang. Wouldn’t you? With the financial world in turmoil and corporate giants teetering on the brink, who in this hell is expecting any kind of increase? Who would not be happy with a manageable decrease, instead? Teachers, that’s who, and McGuinty is not the least bothered by the billions that this heaps on his already enfeebled bottom line. Not only does he butter the bread of his symbiotic co-dependents, in this way, but he sets the federal government up for another dose of fiscal imbalance ranting.

This strategy does not end there. After re-ensuring the loyalty of teachers, McGuinty has also cemented the loyalty of chronically Liberal Toronto by bailing them out to the tune of a projected $500 million. This was done through a bizarrely timed commitment to municipalities to assume some off-loading. The commitment was rich in anti-Conservative-Harris imagery about the evils of downloading, and the needs of the poor communities.

In this case, communities will in fact be needy. But, this is being done now, specifically to head off any belt-tightening on their part. Why? First, there is Toronto, the biggest benefactor, which is incapable of belt restricting because of the ideology of its administration. This act effectively catches them in a safety net before they crash to the ground. It also spreads largesse to all municipalities with the intention of eventually forcing the federal government to pay for it. No effort or declared plan to finance this expense has been announced, because none exists.

If it seems that McGuinty and company are on the way to debtor’s hell, beware that this is instead a clever ploy to embarrass  Harper and fleece the feds. Eventually McGuinty will declare that he has had to ensure the proper funding of our educational system, and come to the rescue of needy communities who are still suffering from the mismanagement of the Harris downloaders. It will not fiz him one iota that Ontario is projected to fall into have-not category. All the more blame to be heaped on Harper, and all the more money transfer to which the feds will have to commit. The astute observer will notice that, in the end, the same lonely taxpayer will be footing the bill for this revisit to the “Rae Days” - (“We will spend ourselves out of the recession.”)- but McGuinty knows that observers with that much astuteness are few, and practically non-existent in Toronto.

Any bets that that $500 million deficit becomes $5 billion before long?

Doing what Liberals do so well, Paul Martin is busy these days, wagging a preachy finger at the governing party, from the also-ran bleachers. Having dusted himself off from the remnants of the Liberal party that he and his predecessor managed to wreck, he was big enough to answer questions about its current state. “I think that we have got to…revise the way in which the party is financed.”

No kidding? Mr. Martin probably means that the days of the original “green shift” are gone, and all that remains is begging. The adscam aficionado will recall that it entailed a creative transfer of taxpayers’ money into their riding associations by first, making it disappear into the black hole of Liberal spending. That they got nothing in return for the expenditures created no immediate suspicion, since this sort of exchange was so characteristic of Liberal “investment”. Then the money was returned to needy Liberal campaigns by grateful donor/recipients. Just in case you thought that since the Chretien dark ages, Liberal electoral experience had taught them some degree of contrition, the public comments of these two, dispelled us of that illusion. Liberals are eternally absolved of guilt by their wholesome intentions, and are not the least ashamed of lecturing the current government, as though their recent histories were not lessons, but patterns for future success.

Martin further took his fifteen minutes to lecture the Harper government on the error of tax cuts. No surprise there from the administration that managed to tax from the pockets of Canadians every new dollar of income they made since Chretien was first elected. (TD bank study.) That managed to inflict the largest tax increase (pension deductions) in Canadian history. As if to say, “Who does this Harper guy think he is, trying to reverse the natural one-way flow of taxation established by the natural governing party?”

Perhaps Mr. Martin might comment on the current condition of Ontario, then, since their road to success was exactly the opposite of Harper’s, and very reminiscent of Martin’s modus operandi. The province has been sliding for at least half a dozen years and is about to start racking up deficits again. They certainly did not do so because they cut taxes. In fact McGuinty took a page out of Martin’s book and created the biggest tax increase (health levy) in Ontario’s history. But in spite of the new income, they managed to pay off all their electoral creditors (public service dependents) and write enough photo op cheques to fritter it all away. Ontario had been in economic decline for several years before the current crisis gave them a scapegoat.

At this point both federal and Ontario governments are fiscally threatened. But, Ontario got there the Liberal way, which can only be sustained in very good times. Now their high taxes and inaction – the Martin/Chretien way - have produced job carnage. Most of the rest of Canada has yet to feel the coming pinch. You do the math.

I don’t know what an "ordinary family" is, but I know that Jack Layton claims to be its defender. By his implications, I guess that an ordinary family is one that has no conservative principles, no economic background, and noone who works in any capacity, for large corporations that have board rooms. But most important, Mr. Layton has presumed ordinary families to be those who are entirely peopled by idiots.

By now we have all seen the NDP health care commercial. Characteristic of Mr. Layton’s poor opinion of Canadians is the cartoonish nature of the commercial, right down to the slump-shouldered, grinch-like caricature of Stephen Harper, as the man who stole all the doctors and made them disappear. (The roots of Ontario’s shortage go back to the lunacy of Bob Rae’s policies as NDP premier of Ontario.) In this little farce, Mr. Layton accuses Harper for the shortage of 5,000 doctors, - as the stick people family in the cartoon cringes at the sight of the PM - and proposes to solve the problem by hiring more doctors.

This is the point at which Canadians should know that Mr. Layton has a profoundly low opinion of their intelligence. We should know, first, that doctors don’t get hired. Once they are qualified to practice, they establish a place of practice, and do the hiring themselves. They do not sit on their hands waiting for the genius of the NDP to provide them with employment. But maybe Mr. Layton meant we are going to hire them from elsewhere. Like where? Will American doctors leave their lucrative practices and state of the art hospitals, for Canada’s poorly equipped and rationed system. Or will we attempt to lure doctors from poorer countries? But, do we not already have a legendary supply of taxi driver-doctors from those countries, which have not been able to surpass the bureaucratic hurdles of the CMA. And what will Layton do about that?

When Kim Campbell was fatally candid with Canadians by saying that elections were no time for debating serious issues, she was correct in sentiment, but not in detail. In today’s world of electoral dysfunction, where parties are more interested in sensationalized slurs and the unearthing of every little scandal that is the least worthy of the title, providing a serious platform is risky at best. Kim Campbell should have said that it is no time for serious proposals to real issues. Mr. Layton’s proposal on the shortage of doctors acknowledges that reality, but also assumes utter stupidity in his audience. He has exhibited throughout the campaign the conviction that he can say whatever preposterous things enter his mind, because none of his supporters are smart enough to question him on them.

Of course, he is not alone. All opposition economic proposals seem to have been hatched with Lewis Carrol’s mad hatter at the table, and promise to add hurricane winds to the financial storm that has engulfed us. We will soon know if their low opinion of their constituent’s intelligence is justified. 

Like many Canadians, I am assessing daily what remains of my dreams. After watching my retirement nest-egg battered in the face of the market’s financial storms, and my most recent home assessment showing a fifteen percent drop, I know I am a prisoner with no hope of escape. You can’t sell low, and noone knows when the market will revive, so I am bound to the mast of the ship Windsor, through whatever weather arises.

In the face of such negative developments, the things that are going on around us are reminiscent of some loony Lewis Carrol setting. University professors have just wrung a sixteen percent wage settlement from the leaking U of W budget, because, even in this environment, noone had the intestines to call their bluff.

Area catholic secondary schools are currently into one of their seemingly endless negotiation rounds, in which union demands exhibit no awareness of what is unfolding around them. Their entitlement expectations show the folly of allowing educational employees the right to strike, and an unrestrained public purse.

What’s worse, as I watch the markets take another daily beating, are the declines in the fortunes of the conservative parties on both sides of the border. The attack on PM Harper by Margaret Attwood, is symptomatic of the Canadian disease of economic ignorance. Attwood’s contribution to running the country are, like all her loony leftist friends, limited to harangues aimed at the Conservative party. Her histrionics in defense of anything bearing  an artsy title is similar to the oblivious expectations of the teaching cartel.

Their just reward would be a Layton federal victory. My recent research on the (whisper) G-r-e-a-t D-e-p-r-e-s-s-i-o-n, indicate that gasoline was eventually poured on the market fire, by the misguided tax and tariff increases which Herbert Hoover unleashed to “help” the American public. The ensuing spastic retraction of a world trade war, and crippling taxation, pushed us all over the edge. Neither the average lefty Canadian nor Jack Layton has bothered to review history’s lessons. His platform promises huge tax increases on Canada’s remaining industry, and his union allies constantly militate for “fair” trade through tariff barriers. See the similarity here? Precisely the policies which buried the world in a decade of economic disaster.

A local letter writer recently endorsed the two NDP political darlings of our local union fanatics, praising their resistance to being “silenced” and wishing “more of the same” on Windsor voters. Indeed! After a half dozen years of watching the business community of this city shuttering its doors; after watching Windsor vie for the unemployment title of Canada; after watching most of the city’s needs go unanswered by any level of government, “more of the same” is just what we need. Right after a political lobotomy. What exactly were these two NDP MPs saying that was of any value, whom exactly was listening to them, and who gave a damn,… was never made clear. And what remains here, to show for it, never discussed. Yes indeed! What we need is a Jack Layton victory (a la Bob Rae), and a safe planet to watch it from.

 We stare, transfixed, into the approaching maw of a financial cataclysm wondering if all the tools we have arrayed to keep it from threatening us will function as promised. As the bricks from this teetering edifice land around us, PM Harper’s reassurances are unconvincing. They are necessarily Hippocratic in doing no further harm to the patient, and little else. But this is happening in the middle of an election, and the promises of the other parties are a lesson to the unwary on their effectiveness in a crisis.

The Windsor Star headline pointed an accusing finger at the CAW, for orchestrating a campaign of lies against the governing federal Conservative party. Is the accusation true? Actually, they did not begin this campaign recently. It did considerable damage to all local Conservative candidates in the 2006 election. As the climax of that election approached, our own, extensive polling showed us in contention with the NDP incumbent. Then, an expensive glossy booklet appeared in mailboxes, throughout the Windsor area. It was entitled “Ten Reasons Not to Vote Conservative”. Below are the gist of its contents, along with my comments. You be the judge of the CAW’s electoral honesty.

Auto Industry: “Conservatives have said for years that they do not support targeted measures…” – For good reason. Look at how well the handouts to GM worked out. In the end, however, this was proven wrong. For their co-operation on the Ford engine plant, the government got the finger from Buzz Hargrove.

Pension: “Most Conservative leaders wanted to abolish the Canada Pension Plan…” A blatant lie meant to trap the gullible.

Tax Cuts: “Ottawa will enjoy $50 billion in surpluses in the next five years. Tories would spend all of that on tax cuts.” – True, as it should be. Unions never saw a tax cut they liked, and will never understand that the tax payer’s money is not theirs to play with. A tax cut is not an expenditure, it is a return of over-taxation to its rightful owner.

Environment: “The Conservatives opposed Kyoto…they are so loyal to business…” – True that they opposed Kyoto. So did the Liberals. They signed it purely for show, and then completely ignored it. The CAW accuses Conservative of being loyal to business, and out of the other side of their face, they blame the Conservatives for not being “pro-active” with handouts to business. CAW’s left hand, meet the right?

Free Trade: “It was the Tories that brought us free trade in 1988…” – True, and the country has prospered since. But in Windsor, where loyalty to business is a sin, empty factories mock the CAW’s self-defeating gestures.

Child Care: “To keep their hard-core moral supporters happy, the Conservatives campaigned against child care”… - Pure cynical hogwash. The unions want public child care so they can swell their ranks. Do you want your child watched by the same people that brought you Canada Post, and the CAW?

Iraq: “The Tories would have sent Canadian troops to Iraq…” – The Liberals sent them to Afghanistan instead. Why was nothing said about that?

Health Care: “The Conservative record is clear. They will support the expansion of private health care…” – Hogwash. The Conservatives are supporting minimum wait guarantees – a badly needed change. The CAW supports an expensive, decaying system, because their union friends are comfortable working in it.

Same-sex Marriage: “The Conservatives want to open it up again…” – By now this should be seen for the BS that it is.

Ballistic Missile Defense: “the Tories devotion to the US government would have got us involved in a technically risky venture…” – The anti-American card. Unions want the safety of the US military umbrella, but never contribute to it.

Are there lies here? Yes, some of them outright. Some merely twist the truth to make it appear uncomfortable. Some dwell on the phobias and fears of the unsophisticated listener. Some simply reflect the neuroses of union leaders. Some of history’s infamous propaganda masters could not have done better. Can’t wait for the 2008 version.