“You bet I protest … What’s a plumber doing with a lawnmower while his son works overtime learning business management …?”
Author Archives: CanucksBanter
Headline Toon: September 9, 1954
“… your missus wishes me to remind you, there’s a couple of other deservin’ unions worthy of your support durin’ this week …”
Headline Toons-August 5, 2013
Opinion: Politicians must step up and make rail safety a top priority
By William Brehl | August 5, 2013 http://rabble.ca
Transport Canada’s emergency safety directive issued following the Lac-Mégantic rail tragedy is welcome but more can be done.
For almost a decade we’ve been campaigning for better rail safety in Canada and the Harper government, to its credit (and that’s not easy for a union person like me to say), has returned some of the independent policing powers to Transport Canada after too much deregulation was granted by previous governments.
Still, the calamity of Lac-Mégantic occurred.
Obviously, more must be done to ensure safety, especially when tens of millions of Canadians live near main rail lines.
Transport Canada’s emergency directive is meant as a temporary fix while Ottawa drafts and passes into law new safety regulations.
The Transport Canada directive calls for limitations on leaving trains unattended and locomotives unlocked, minimum two-person crews when transporting dangerous materials, and clear direction on applying handbrakes to unattended locomotives with one or more cars attached.
As I said, it is a good start, but as someone who spent 20 years working on the track and the last 15 years representing 4,000 men and women who repair and maintain the track, there are three things that the temporary directive overlooked that I believe must be included in legislation.
Away from rail yards, no train should be left unattended for one minute, let alone one hour or more. Although the exact causes of Lac-Mégantic are still under investigation, the tragedy has already taught us this: Deadly and surprising things can happen when a locomotive is running and no one is around. Ending the practice of unattended locomotives will require better staff scheduling by managers.
Safety plans must be more transparent. Currently, federally regulated railways must file Safety Management Systems, or SMS, with Transport Canada. The SMS is intended to be a formal plan to build a culture of safety across the organization. SMS are not intended to be self-regulation, but in the everyday world, they are because a railway’s compliance is restricted to its own filings and infrequent surprise inspections from Transport Canada.
More Transport Canada safety inspectors are needed. Something is amiss when for every one Transport Canada rail inspector there are eight or nine air inspectors. Granted, when there is an air accident, it is usually a catastrophe with loss of life, but, as we’ve so tragically learned, calamity lurks on rail lines, too. The gap between the number of rail and air inspectors must be tightened.
Over the last 15 years or so, train derailments and accidents have been on the rise in Canada. In fact, there have been more than 10,000 of these incidents since 1999, according to transportation safety board statistics. Most are minor; some are major that force residential evacuations and some are catastrophic like Lac-Mégantic.
We cannot turn back the clock and bring back those innocent people in Lac-Mégantic. But we can look forward and create an environment of safety first.
Rail safety is something that must be maintained year in and year out, day in and day out. Wear and tear continually work its way on track and equipment. Short cuts to safety procedures must be avoided. Complacency as time passes since Lac-Mégantic must not occur.
Cynics might suggest that our decade-long safety campaign has to do with maintaining union jobs. But rail safety is not about jobs. It is about lives.
Millions of Canadians live close to rail lines and hundreds of millions of tonnes of dangerous commodities are shipped by rail through crowded urban areas every year. Our economy depends on rail traffic and our lives depend on it moving safely.
It is now time for every Member of Parliament, everywhere in Canada, regardless of party affiliation, to step up and do what is necessary to ensure that safety is given top priority. MPs need to look to their own constituencies, be aware of the possible dangers, and earn the trust their constituents have placed in them.
This fall when the House of Commons transport committee begins hearings it will be an important step toward ensuring no more tragedies like Lac-Mégantic happen again.
William Brehl is president of Teamsters Canada Rail Conference’s Maintenance of Way Employees Division, based in Ottawa, and a member of Transport Canada’s Advisory Council on Railway Safety.
Photo: flickr / mcwetboy
Corporate elite grumbles over possible CETA failure
By Stuart Trew | August 5, 2013 http://rabble.ca
John Manley, the former Liberal deputy prime minister and current mouthpiece of Canada’s corporate elite, wants Prime Minister Harper to send a “high-level” political mission to Europe to save the stalled Canada-European Union free trade negotiations. Manley made these comments in an interview with The Canadian Press last week, a few days after publishing an op-ed in the Globe and Mail that argued “quitting [the CETA] is not an option.”
“Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched the talks on Canada’s behalf, and he is the only person with the authority to make the hard choices that inevitably arise in negotiations this complex,” he wrote on July 25. “On the EU side, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso must summon the political courage to carry his 28 member states over the finish line. No new issues or backsliding can be tolerated. The only acceptable direction is forward.”
It is typical Manley — not a second thought for democracy, just big, strong leaders making tough decisions that will help us all in the end because they help Big Business.
Manley also doesn’t explain what would make this urgent political delegation different from the past two or three attempts to seal a deal, including Harper’s multi-country trip to Europe before the G20 summit this June.
But cut the guy some slack. The CCCE has not been paying as much attention to the CETA negotiations as past trade efforts or Canada’s current Asian trade and investment talks like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and bilateral negotiations with Japan. At least that’s how it seemed until now.
Is corporate Canada getting nervous? Maybe. And it’s probably not because of the actual payoff from a deal with Europe, which is flimsy. (See Public Citizen’s recent assessment of the value to the average American — a chocolate bar a month, starting in 2029 — of a proposed U.S.-EU trade deal.) This is about free trade machismo.
“Canada needs to demonstrate that it can reach an agreement with Europe if it is to have much hope of making headway in trade negotiations with emerging markets in Asia,” wrote Manley in the Globe and Mail. “The government’s trade policy is dependent on this,” he later told CP. “If we don’t do Europe, there’s not a lot to show for our trade policy.”
The CP article explains that that the problems facing the Canada-EU talks include “counter-balancing Europe’s need to win greater access for cheese producers, with Canada’s demand that Europeans open the gate to Canadian beef and pork exports.” As well, “Canada is being asked to accept stricter European standards on patent protection for pharmaceutical drugs, which provinces have resisted because it could push up drug prices by as much $2 billion annually.”
The article also quotes trade lawyer Laurence Herman suggesting the government and business sector have not done enough to sell the benefits of CETA to the masses, “particularly as the critics — such as the Council of Canadians and other civil society groups — have been successful in underscoring the concessions Ottawa and the provinces must make.”
So when might a Manley-endorsed high-level meeting be possible? Not until after the European vacation month of August, according to iPolitics.ca.
“One challenge that we face is that in the summer — August, usually — the Commission…this is their period where they usually close down, so it is more challenging right now to engage with them,” Frédéric Seppey, Canada’s chief agriculture negotiator, told iPolitics at the U.S. Grains Council Annual Board of Delegates last week. “But we’re hopeful that in September it can resume and conclude in a timely fashion.”
Take action
Two billion bucks in extra drug costs is not chump change. The drug patent demands of the European Union are unacceptable. They render any modest economic benefits almost meaningless to Canada. The new limits CETA would put on provincial and municipal public spending, on the creation new public services, on telecommunications policy, on financial services regulation — all of this already in Canada’s offers to the EU, which have leaked — are also already too much to pay for small potential market access gains in Europe for Canadian agricultural products.
Manley says quitting CETA is not an option. We think it’s the best one. Whichever you believe, we can’t let Corporate Canada’s rush for an EU deal get in the way of democracy and our right to have a say in the CETA negotiations before anything is signed. You can tell the PM and opposition parties how you feel by using our action alert, WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH EUROPE? As always, let us know what you hear back from the government and opposition parties.
Andrew Phillip Chernoff 