Category Archives: BC Politics

Government bargaining delays threaten to disrupt classes in the fall

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From: http://cupe.bc.ca    August 13, 2013

BURNABY—Despite assurances that the provincial government was prepared to bargain with CUPE education workers in August, negotiations have broken off indefinitely.

“They called us back to the table. We were ready, they were not. As a result, there is a danger that classes will be disrupted this fall,” said Colin Pawson, Chair of the CUPE BC K-12 Presidents’ Council. “Our committee set aside nearly two weeks to bargain, and we came to the table with ideas for cost savings. The only thing missing was a committed bargaining agent on the employer’s side.”

CUPE education workers’ collective agreements throughout the province expired over a year ago. Settlement talks took place in April 2013 but were derailed when it became clear that government had not given the BC Public School Employers’ Association (BCPSEA) a mandate to reach a settlement. BCPSEA is now directly controlled by government, but is still not in a position to bargain.

“If the government doesn’t show a commitment to bargaining, our members will take full scale job action,” said Pawson. “They’re frustrated that we’ve had three false starts to negotiating, and the clock is ticking.”

Once at the table, CUPE representatives emphasize that a fully-funded wage increase is the solution to ending the bargaining impasse.

It has been more than four years since the education assistants, clerical staff, trades, custodians, bus drivers and other workers represented by CUPE have received a wage increase. Virtually all of the 57 CUPE locals representing education workers have had positive strike votes.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees represents more than 27,000 education BC workers in the K-12 system.

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Advice for BC NDP: Court the Rich

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May election results reveal a surprising new voter bloc for the party.

By Tom Barrett, August 12, 2013, TheTyee.ca

As the B.C. New Democratic Party racks its neural tissues to discover how it blew a 20-point lead in the polls on May 14, it might be happy to learn that the news isn’t all bad.

Sure, the NDP was thumped in an election that everybody expected it to win. But it did make gains in some unexpected places.

Among the very rich, for example.

Final election results show the NDP made some of its biggest gains in some of B.C.’s wealthiest ridings. Ridings like Vancouver-False Creek, where the NDP increased its total by a healthy 3,479 votes over its 2009 showing. Ditto for Vancouver-Fairview (up 2,768 votes) and North Vancouver-Seymour (up 2,343 votes).

All three of those ridings are among the 10 constituencies with the highest median after-tax incomes, according to BC Stats. In fact, six of the 10 ridings where the NDP made its biggest gains May 14 are on that top 10 income list. (The figures, while the latest available for income by constituency, come from the 2006 census and are a bit dated. But heck, a riding that was wealthy in 2006 is probably still doing pretty well today.)

The table below shows the wealthy ridings where the NDP vote increased the most. The margin columns show who won the riding in the last two elections and the winner’s margin as a percentage of the total vote.

 

Riding

2009 Margin

2013 Margin
Vancouver-False Creek Lib 28.9 Lib 15.5
Vancouver-Fairview Lib 4.9 NDP 5.1
North Vancouver-Seymour Lib 31.8 Lib 18.0
Vancouver-Point Grey Lib 10.1 NDP 4.4
Surrey-Cloverdale Lib 32.9 Lib 30.5
West Vancouver-Capilano Lib 53.0 Lib 44.7

As shown, two of these wealthy ridings, Vancouver-Fairview and Vancouver-Point Grey, abandoned the Liberals for the NDP. And the Liberals’ victory margins fell in all of the other four. Clearly, in B.C. the class war is riddled with quislings.

As the NDP pores over its election flop, there is an obvious message in these numbers: it is time for the NDP to go after the crème de la crème. For whatever reason, British Columbia’s plutocrats are starting to take a shine to the left. New Democrats would be fools to rebuff them.

No big electoral shifts

It’s true that marketing the NDP to the one per cent would present some challenges. The party grassroots would be sure to cause a fuss, and making gains among the economic elite would require a long-term strategy.

Most of the ridings on the table above still boast pretty fat Liberal margins. If the trend from May 14 continues, the NDP won’t capture West Vancouver-Capilano, for example, until the election of 2037.

Still, that kind of long-range thinking might be what’s needed to succeed in B.C. politics. As the graph below shows, things haven’t changed much lately.

BCElectionGraph_600px.jpg

Ever since British Columbians recovered from the 2001 Liberal landslide, all the scandals and fevered rhetoric that B.C. politics is famous for have produced bupkis in terms of big electoral shifts.

Even the one bit of movement that shows up on the chart — the uptick in the Conservative vote — is misleading. The Conservatives ran 24 candidates in 2009. They ran 56 official candidates in 2013, plus another four candidates who weren’t listed as Conservatives on the ballot because of a paperwork snafu.

So, while the party’s overall share of the vote went up on May 14, its vote per candidate didn’t do much. In 2009, the Conservatives got 1,435 votes per candidate. In 2013, they got 1,532 votes per official candidate — 1,483 votes per candidate if you include the four “unofficial” Tories.

On the other hand, the other third party, the Greens, saw their share of the total vote stay flat at just over eight per cent. But that masks a remarkable increase.

In 2009, the Greens ran a full slate of 85 candidates. This year, they ran only 61 candidates. The Green vote per candidate jumped to 2,403 from 1,584 — an increase of 52 per cent.

The Green vote more than doubled in seven ridings, all but one of them in southern Vancouver Island.

And, if you’re wondering, while the Greens won their only seat in wealthy Oak Bay-Gordon Head, they didn’t make any real gains in the other most-affluent ridings.

Which still leaves the champagne-slurping fat-cat vote wide open for the NDP to exploit. [Tyee]

Show Canadian Parties Who’s Boss

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Voters, think yourselves employers, and would-be politicos your job seekers. Give ’em hell.

By Crawford Kilian, August 9, 2013, TheTyee.ca

Ever since the failure of the B.C. New Democratic Party to win the May election, dissidents within the party have blamed everyone from Adrian Dix to campaign manager Brian Topp and party president Moe Sihota. Plenty of outsiders have offered their own analyses and recommendations, not always well meant.

No doubt the usual suspects deserve the criticism, but I suspect the real problem is voters’ failure to remember that a democracy is an enterprise where the voters — not the parties — are the boss.

Politicians pay lip service to that idea, but they’re happier with promoting themselves as “leaders” we should happily follow. The media take the cue from the politicians, running endless stories about what the prime minister, premier, or some cabinet minister is doing. Then they profess to be scandalized to report how politicians are exploiting their perks and charging $16 orange juice to the voters’ tab.

Running in parties is a convenience for politicians, who get a better chance of election in exchange for accepting party “discipline.” The parties are less convenient for voters because party promises rarely match performance. This leads to cynicism among politicians and voters alike, and that leads to apathy and still more political abuse. A democracy can’t prosper with absentee owners; someone’s got to mind the store.

While voters have ignored their responsibilities, all parties have ignored the demographic, environmental and economic changes transforming Canada along with the rest of the world. Older Canadians may still be voters, but they notably failed to bring up their kids to take voting seriously. Robins are showing up in the Arctic while swallows vanish from the Lower Mainland. Technology has made countless industries obsolete.

Reframing the parties

We won’t solve our political problems with a reformed or abolished Senate, or a more civilized Question Period, or less whipping of backbenchers. We can’t get rid of parties, but we should reframe them, so they always remember that they’re just so many job applicants. We are their employers, elections are hiring interviews, and once hired they had damned well better deliver on what they promise.

Here’s what every federal and provincial political party, regardless of ideology, should offer Canadians:

1. Its own concept of a social contract, explaining its view of taxes and what we can reasonably expect from our investment: a country where we collectively look after basic support systems so we can individually get on with our lives. The difference between parties would be in the definition of “basic support.”

2. Redefinition of the role of MP/MLA, not so much as “people’s representative” but as “people’s agent,” like the agents of movie stars and athletes: MPs would look after the details to ensure their constituents have both immediate work and meaningful long-term careers. Like agents’ income, MPs’ income would depend on that of the voters. Government MPs and MLAs would take pay cuts based on double their home riding’s unemployment rate: a five per cent unemployment rate this quarter means 10 per cent less on the MP’s next-quarter take-home pay and eventual pension. That might make backbenchers less whippable.

3. A detailed business plan for the province or country. This wouldn’t be just to go on doing what we’ve always done, but also to argue what we should plan to do when the resources run out or a natural disaster hits. The Finnish government is currently working “to make Finland the most competent country in the world by 2020.” Canada could and should give the Finns some competition on that score.

The business plan would include how to fund full healthcare, with demographic sustainability over next 50 years, minimum; provide free education to all as an investment to ensure sustainability; strong support for young families; and active recruitment of immigrants who can also maintain cultural and trade links with their home countries.

The plan would also include heavy support for scientific and technological research and development: R&D will drive change in all countries, so we need to keep pace. The next tech revolution could come in computers or synthetic biology, or something completely unforeseen. So the party wouldn’t bet on training particular kinds of workers (which would subsidize industries that may already be finished), but on the general education of highly literate citizens who could well invent a scientific revolution we can’t even imagine yet.

A party without such a business plan should be shown the door.

4. A vision of the poor not as a problem to be solved but an opportunity to be seized, through better education and the provision of more meaningful work. With so few young workers and so many retirees to support, we can’t afford to waste the productivity of any worker. We may quarrel about levels of support, but not about support itself.

Listening like smart employers

When elections come, we should consider ourselves employers listening to very anxious job seekers who want control over very large sums of our money. They should be able to tell us what they’d do with that money, and what kind of return they’d get on it.

Smart employers know bullshit when they hear it, especially when it’s obviously what the applicant thinks they want to hear: “Gee, I’m a team player, I’ve got ideas that will save you money, I’ve got a passion for this field, you won’t be disappointed if you hire me.”

Better to hear an applicant who looks you in the eye and says: “You’ve got big problems. This is what I think they are, this is what they’re costing you, and this is how you might start to fix them. If you don’t agree, thanks for your time and good luck.”

We’re too big a country for populist micro-management. But on the day the government calls a new election, it should be legally obliged to submit a balance sheet on what it’s spent, what it’s borrowed, and how many of its promises it’s actually kept. The balance sheet would be drawn up by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, not by anyone answering to the government itself, and the Opposition would be free to present its own critique.

Reframing our parties along these lines wouldn’t solve all our problems. As the great American journalist H. L. Mencken observed, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

But we’re all the common people, and we sometimes learn from experience whether we like it or not. We don’t always fall for warmongers, racketeers, or pretty faces. If experience teaches us that the present party system (which has never been in any of our Constitution Acts) is treating us poorly, we can still remember who’s supposed to be the boss, and who are just the well-dressed flunkies we’ve hired to work for us. [Tyee]

Corporate elite grumbles over possible CETA failure

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By Stuart Trew   | August 5, 2013   http://rabble.ca

Corporate elite grumbles over possible CETA failure

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.

Bateman Advocates A Race To The Floor For Minimum Wage….You First, I’ll Give Ya A Push….Just Saying….

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August 3, 2013   Updated on August 15, 2013

By Andrew Phillip ChernoffJust-saying

I came across an article titled, “The pay of government workers is way out of line” by Jordan Bateman.

At the start of his opinion piece, Bateman, makes a conclusion that is somewhat  true in municipal politics, but also provincial, federal politics. Even private business, multi-national companies and private corporations practice overpaying their upper management people.

Bateman states:

    • Taxpayers and watchdogs often focus their attention on the top of the government salary spectrum. Government executives are increasingly overpaid, especially at the municipal and regional district level. And the problem is growing.
    • For example, the District of North Vancouver, had 62 employees making $100,000 or more in 2011. A year later, that number had jumped to 93.

Then Bateman goes off into his way out stupor and churns out that “taxpayers are overpaying for labour throughout the system.”

Provincial government deals with their own government employees.

Municipalities and regional districts are separate and distinct from the provincial government and negotiate on their own with their respective employees.

Front-line municipal and regional district workers are not overpaid in my opinion.

Front line workers have wages and benefits that have been negotiated in fair and good faith bargaining in line with their respective municipal and regional district finances of which their councils and boards are charged with being proper stewards of.

Management contracts are not negotiated in the same manner as above.

The public never hears anything in the press, radio or television as to what the management staff in municipalities and regional districts are getting in their contracts….unless somebody applies under the Freedom of Information Act. Through the Statement of Financial Information, which is made available every year, for the last audited year, taxpayers are able to find out some salaries of municipal staff and council members.

Yet the employees have a very public collective agreement that spells it all out. Yet, management contracts are hidden under private and confidential legislation for the most part…..just saying

Front line workers at the municipal and regional district level  do the grunt work out in the field. It is the non-management employees that have the qualifications and certification to do the work on the front line. And work they do.

Front line workers correct the mistakes of contractors; don’t play politics when working; and are the first to hear of the public dissatisfaction.

Municipalities and regional districts MUST balance their budgets.

Provincial governments while they should balance their budgets, are more often than not, tabling unbalanced budgets.

Bateman then defies all sense of logic by taking on the City of Burnaby with its desire to hire a bartender for a wage negotiated through collective bargaining, providing a wage higher than minimum wage:

  • The City of Burnaby is looking for a bartender. B.C.’s minimum wage is $10.25 per hour but liquor servers can legally be paid as little as $9 per hour, plus tips (where they make their real living). Ignoring the bizarre idea that property taxpayers have a bartender on the payroll, Burnaby should be able to get a suitable swill slosher for $10.25 per hour, tops.
  • But this is government – where your hard-earned money gets spent freely. Instead, Burnaby is offering its future bartender $13.65 per hour and 12 per cent cash-in-lieu of benefits, plus tips. That’s $15.29 per hour plus tips, for a job that could be filled for 70 per cent less.

For twelve years the corporate tax rate in BC with a BC Liberal government in power was kept at 10 per-cent.

During that same period, BC has consistently had the worst child poverty rate in Canada and the worst reputation for providing support to highly vulnerable families and children in Canada as well.

According to the article, “ Why does B.C. have the highest poverty rate in Canada?” by Iglika Ivanova:

“The reason why B.C. has the worst poverty rates in Canada is not poor economic performance but lack of social spending, a large low-wage sector, and big gender pay gaps, especially at the low end.

The government needs to step up with a comprehensive poverty reduction plan to boost social supports to a level that covers basic costs of living. Other immediate priorities include providing affordable, universal child care for families (for example, the $10/day plan) and investing in affordable housing for families.

Training and education also jumps out as an area of government responsibility that hasn’t received enough attention over the last decade. That’s why many of the newly created resource sector jobs aren’t going to unemployed British Columbians but to temporary foreign workers and/or migrants from other provinces because we don’t have the skills needed. And since resource expansion is essentially the basis of our government’s Jobs Plan, such job growth is unlikely to make much of a dent in poverty rates.

But while the government must play a leadership role here, poverty is not just the government’s problem. All citizens have a responsibility to tackle poverty, including those who own and run businesses. Business managers are understandably focused on their bottom line, but as members of the community they need to consider the kind of jobs they create, and the kind of life their employees can afford on the wages they pay. Is there job security? Are the wages so low or the shifts/hours so few that they keep the employees in poverty?

35 Vancouver employers have committed to pay a living wage to all their workers and more large companies should follow their example.

But not all jobs created in B.C. are well-paying, family-supporting jobs that offer benefits and a reasonable level of economic security. Despite recent minimum wage increases, a person working full-year full-time on minimum wage earns less than the poverty line for a single person in Vancouver. There has been an explosion of unpaid internships, with the most recent scandal exposed by CBC here.

The bottom line is that we need a combination of good quality jobs and social supports for families who have fallen on hard times. This is particularly important now when we’re seeing a worrisome and rather steep increase in poverty in what’s arguably the best measure of poverty, Statistics Canada’s Market Basket Measure (see here).

Poverty is not an intractable problem, other provinces and countries have taken action and are seeing results. B.C. should too.”

Would Bateman regulate everybody, including himself, to a below poverty line lifestyle?

I call on Bateman to give up his upper tax level “living wage” for the bartender’s job and wage for one year, and then tell his readers the same thing he is saying now.

It is clear that the City of Burnaby, and other municipalities, regional districts are doing their part to provide above minimum wage jobs where they can; to insure stable economies in their communities and regions, where the monies they give in wages are not only possible but are put back in local and regional economies providing spin off jobs and new business opportunities; diversifying local and regional economies at the same time.

Bateman further proposes legislation similar to CETA, that would take local autonomy and control away for decision making by municipalities and regional districts.

Once again, Bateman lacks knowledge and shows his ignorance and audacity to impose his political will and beliefs for all municipalities and regional districts, considering he lives in one community and belongs to one regional district.

Municipalities and regional districts levy taxes in their respective areas. The provincial government does not provide municipalities and regional districts with their operational budgets.

I would tread lightly Bateman, when you suggest, a provincial Compensation Equity Act.

Municipal and regional district employees are not provincial government employees. The Community Charter and Local Government Act, set out the powers of the municipalities and regional districts.

Further, many BC municipalities and regional districts have told the provincial government of their concerns and lack of support for CETA.

I guarantee Bateman if you come to my community and try to impose your ridiculous ideas, you would be met by concerned taxpayers who may not take to kindly to you interfering with local autonomy and local democratic decision making for affairs affecting the community and region.

Further, I would find it difficult to believe that what happens in Penticton, Richmond, Kelowna and the regional districts those communities reside in, presents hardship and dire tax consequences to his community and regional district.

If anything, people from those communities visiting where he lives, would actually aide his community as they spend their hard earned dollars, helping his local business; help to provide living wages for workers including  students going to high school and earning money for post secondary education.

Would Bateman really deny what he benefited from?

I would argue that multinationals and corporations benefiting from low cost labour in BC, ravaging our natural resources; leaving taxpayers to live with the cost to our wildlife, environment and water, are the leaders behind the inequality issues in this province.

They take……10 per-cent corporate tax rate for twelve years, until this year when it was changed to…..wait for it…to 11 per-cent.

They don’t give back…..why?

They use tax payers dollars; take our raw materials; abuse BC labour workers; make gross profits; do nothing to improve well-paying, family-supporting jobs that offer benefits and a reasonable level of economic security.

Bateman’s ideas, and the system he proposes doesn’t work for the best interests of British Columbians, municipalities or regional districts.

If Bateman is advocating a race to the floor for  “minimum wage”, then by all means…..you first….. lead the way Bateman…..get out in front…..I’ll give you a push……just saying…..

COPYRIGHT ANDREW PHILLIP CHERNOFF 2013