Best Way To Ruin A Country

In previous commentaries I mentioned I had left Canada because of my frustrations in regards to our constantly bickering and indecisive governments of the fifties and sixties. Nothing has changed there. But there was another reason why I gave up and decided to seek a ray of sunshine away from what appeared to be a characteristic of the Canadian way of thinking. I left its shores for greener pastures and to learn about how others deal with their own frustrations. For years I, along with the rest of the victims of circumstances, had to contend with the regular, if not constant, blackmail by the labour unions in Canada. Hardly a season, if not a month, would go by without some labour stoppage or strike in a major sector of the economy, usually the transportation industry: trucking, trains, shipping, airlines, etc. There were also the steel and automobile industries in Canada and in the US; the construction industry; and just about every other vital sector of the economy, holding the people at ransom. Not much has changed there either. There was a time when labour unions were a necessity to counter the abuse and greed of unscrupulous business and industrial barons. And there may always be a need for that counterbalance to prevent the injustices of the past in societies that are still not mature enough to be trusted to do the right thing for their workers. However, that social immaturity is also reflected in the effects of the pendulum syndrome the labour unions have ensnared themselves into, immature human nature being what it is and all. There is an old cliché, which says: “If you want to find the source of the problems troubling society, especially in criminal matters, including the misdeeds of government, follow the money.” The other familiar saying that works hand in hand with this one is: “Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Money is power. Control the money and you control the power, which explains why the gangster elements infiltrated the major labour unions back in the middle of the last century and to some extent are still there, in one form or another, including in our government or at the very least in some political parties, or maybe just one. Need I say which? When I was an unwitting member of a union we paid dues of two dollars a month. In a company of over a hundred and twenty thousand employees paying dues, nearly a quarter of a million dollars a month went into the union’s coffers. Back then, that was a hell of lot of money. Nowadays union members pay a lot more than two dollars per month, putting hundreds of millions into union coffers every month, such as the teachers’ federation. That is a lot of power to control. Unions long ago lost sight of their original purpose, which was to obtain fair pay, decent working conditions and some benefits for their members. Now, it is: “Get as much as you can get from the ‘greedy, capitalist, bastard employers’ or the taxpayers, regardless of what it does to the economy.” It is the only way they can justify the continued existence of the unions and their executives so they can keep on collecting the monthly union dues and control very lucrative pension plans. Over the years, governments have poured billions of dollars into a multitude of useless research projects by people too lazy to get real jobs, most of whom work in universities or some government office that serve no better purpose than to keep useless people employed at taxpayers’ expense. Various levels of governments, from municipal to federal, constantly hire extremely expensive consultants to tell them what some homeless druggie could do for a bowl of hot soup and shot in the arm. In fact, we have become a society of experts and consultants on which all levels of governments rely before making any decision so as not to be held responsible for those decisions since these were in fact made by the experts, the consultants, the advisors, the court jesters. Perhaps the information exists somewhere, perhaps with Statistics Canada, but somehow I doubt that anyone has actually attempted to study the direct and absolute effects on the economy and on society of the cyclical union demands and eventual signed labour agreements, not to mention the indirect effects. But I have kept a running analytical tab of the consequences of labour’s demands on the economy and on society for over half a century (the subject of future musings). For now, let me tell you of one of my personal experiences relating to this subject matter. Nearly twenty years ago, I took on an assignment to go to the twin mining and logging towns of Chapais/ Chimbaugamau in northern Quebec, about a thousand kilometres north of Montreal. At that time, the population had gone down to about half of what it had been in its heyday. And that trend was not abating when I was there. Businesses were closing and the general mood was a rather pessimistic one. People were reluctantly leaving in droves for a number of reasons, but mostly because of union demands for more money to make up for the higher cost of living resulting from the decrease in population and the subsequent loss of business. And the wheels go around. One of my clients was the local union steward at the mine. He informed me that the union contract was up for renegotiation. Every two years the union sat down with the mine bosses and negotiated a new contract, he said. “Even when there is no money to be had?” I said. “Of course,” he said, “because there is always money somewhere. They just try to hide it, but we know they’ve got it.” For years the price of gold had been in the dumps so mining was not profitable enough for the company to be very generous with extra pay and benefits. But every two years the company would finally agree to the union demands with the caveat that some workers would have to be let go. This loss of spending power affected the local economy across the board from the supermarket to the bank, the schools, churches, the community centre, the barbers and hairdressers, the drugstore and the restaurants, truck and skidoo dealers, etc., because those who lost their jobs moved back to the cities a thousand kilometres away or beyond, never to return. Government subsidies helped but could not make up for the loss to the local economy to keep the towns going. After seven months I left as well. Recently, Buzz Hargrove was steadfast in his demands from the Canadian automobile manufacturers As usual he demanded more money and greater benefits for people already earning much more than the national average. To avoid a strike the companies acceded to his demands. But shortly after the agreement was signed the bad news came that thousands of layoffs would come into effect within the year, if not the next few months and plants would be closing. That was Hargove’s Christmas gift to his members. It is well known that the North American car industry is going down the tubes because of excessively high labour costs, and also because, unlike their Japanese and European counterparts, they refuse to build cars people want or that meet today’s requirements of fuel efficiency and durability. One would think that a labour boss would be more interested in doing what is necessary to keep his members working, including convincing management of the effects of the market forces at work, rather than to try to suck blood out of a pound of steel. You would think that instead of just asking for more and more, they would work with the industry to help design and build better cars more suited to today’s needs. But, typical blowhard that he is, Hargrove was very proud of the sucking sound of his accomplishment. Later, arm in arm with Paul Martin, sharing a touching moment with his brother in arms, he tried to convince his membership that they should vote Liberal at the January 23 election. Another Liberal minority government was needed so that the NDP could hold the balance of power in order to suck more promises out of the Liberals, which like that famous NDP budget of last spring, would never be kept. In a subsequent news item, he claimed the RCMP was wrong in announcing their investigation into the leak in the Income Trust fiasco that enriched a lot of Liberal insiders, during the election. It was a partisan move on the part of the RCMP, he said. Oh really? Since when is the RCMP beholding to anyone but the Liberals? During the sixties revolution as I worked at the University of Toronto, because of situations I kept encountering, one phrase kept coming to mind: “We live in the age of mediocrity,” I would say. Contrary to the laws of evolution, which dictates that the next step in the process must be an improvement over the last, for all the technological innovations and scientific advancements in our society, in our world, I get the distinct impression that sociologically, we humans have indeed regressed. This is no longer the age of mediocrity. It is rather the age of apathy, ignorance and political correctness. It is the age of socialism, which is the art of getting more and more for doing less and less. It is the art of bringing everyone down to a common denominator. It is obvious that we have learned nothing from the failed seventy-year socialist experiment of the Soviet Union. And I find it very difficult to function with any degree of satisfaction in such an environment. It seems that every time the brilliant minds of the world take us a step forward, giving us hope for a better future, the progressives, the agents of mediocrity, of socialism, do everything in their power to drag us back into the age of darkness and stupidity. And they generally succeed because there are more of them than there are of us. But as Ayn Rand said in her book “Atlas Shrugged”, what if the innovators, the thinkers and the doers of the world decided to go on strike--where would that leave the leeches? Where would that leave the remnants of society, the world and humanity? L. Sebastian Anders [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on January 17, 2006]