Category Archives: Canadian politics

Opinion: Politicians must step up and make rail safety a top priority

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By   William Brehl  | August 5, 2013  http://rabble.ca

 

Photo: flickr / mcwetboy

 

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

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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.

Opinion: Canada’s labour model is broken

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By Brian Dijkema, Edmonton Journal July 16, 2013

 

Opinion: Canada’s labour model is broken

The Harper government needs to reshape labour relations to reflect that workers and capital both win when they work together.
Photograph by: Jacques Boissinot , THE CANADIAN PRESS

 

Pop quiz: which Canadian politician was responsible for the first piece of legislation allowing trade unions in Canada? J.S. Woodsworth? Tommy Douglas? Ed Broadbent?

The obvious answer — one might say the conservative Canadian answer — would be one of the above. The correct answer is, in fact, none of the above.

None other than Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, passed the Trade Unions Act in 1872. You read that right: it was a Conservative prime minister who first legally recognized trade unions in Canada.

That this would come as a surprise to many reflects our assumptions about the way conservatives react on the labour file, instead of leading in step with their principles. Recent efforts are a case in point.

For those who haven’t been following, the current government’s efforts in labour relations reform have been limited to nibbling at the edges via private member’s bills. Bill C-377, which sought to force labour unions to disclose to everyone, not just their members, all spending over $5,000, loans over $250, and wages of employees making more than $100,000.

The other attempt at reform was Bill C-525, which would require unions to achieve a threshold of support in workplaces of 50 per cent plus one of all employees (not just those who vote).

In other words, it would require unions to receive a mandate not currently enjoyed by any current governing party in Canada, or any government in Canada ever.

Bill C-525 didn’t make it to second reading, and Bill C-377 was deemed — by the normally compliant Senate, no less — so poorly written that it was infamously sent back to the House of Commons with amendments.

Both of these bills are efforts to solve real problems with Canadian labour unions. Union spending on fringe causes — Israel apartheid week anyone? — is worthy of scrutiny. So are many of the deceptive practices unions use to get members in the door.

But what both bills have in common is that they buy into the very adversarial mentality that many of the socialist labour unions in Canada have against conservatives. In doing so, the federal Conservatives (and conservatives) are letting the left frame the conversation instead of taking a page out of Macdonald’s book and charting their own course.

Canadian labour law has not fundamentally changed since 1944 when Canada adopted the American model based on the Wagner Act of 1935. That model is based on the false premise that workers and owners are adversaries rather than parties with different, yet entwined interests.

There are rumours the government is considering bringing back a version of C-377 this fall. Let us all hope it is not so.

The choice facing the federal government over the summer is whether to continue symbolic tinkering with a broken model that diminishes mutual respect and trust, or to substantially reshape labour relations to account for the fact that workers and capital both win when they work co-operatively.

The latter approach reflects values inherent to Conservative governments: recognition of the entwined nature of labour and capital, respect for the limited role of the state, and the value of private associations.

Framing the debate according to conservative principles of limited government with a view to increasing competition between unions would break up the current anti-conservative labour monolith and, paradoxically, lead to the development of more unions.

In other words, it would be good for workers, and good for the country. It would be a legacy worthy of Sir John A. Macdonald himself.

Brian Dijkema is program director for work and economics at Cardus, a think-tank that researches renewal of North American social architecture.

© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal

Reverse public spending cuts, introduce progressive measures to boost jobs and growth: CUPE

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Government spending cuts have increased unemployment, are slowing economic growth, and are diminishing services and standards for Canadians.

In its pre-federal budget submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance, CUPE is expressing deep concerns over the harm these imposed austerity measures are having on Canadians, and the need to strengthen social programs, like the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Employment Insurance (EI).

Canada’s economic growth has been much slower than it was in previous recoveries. Federal spending reductions will slow the economy by an average of one percentage point (or close to $20 billion) a year and reduce employment levels by over 100,000, as estimated by the Parliamentary Budget Office last year.

CUPE is recommending an expansion of public services that could generate hundreds of thousands of additional jobs, boost wages, living standards and economic growth. The vast majority of individual Canadians and businesses would benefit from federal government measures focused on improving public services, boosting the economy, generating jobs and reducing inequality.

CUPE also recommends expanding the Canada Pension Plan by phasing in modest contribution increases over seven years that would in time double benefit levels. Improving CPP would benefit all workers, help stabilize existing workplace pension plans, increase economic security and stability for communities, reduce poverty and reduce pressure on social assistance programs.

When CPP contribution rates were last increased, unemployment fell significantly. The increase in contribution rates that we envision is considerably less this time. Polling shows that 75 per cent of Canadians support an expanded CPP, as do many pension experts and the majority of provinces.

CUPE is also advocating for the immediate reversal of cuts to Employment Insurance made in Bill C-38 that reduce eligibility for benefits, force claimants to take unsuitable and lower paid jobs and eliminated the EI Board of Referees.

Introducing different classes of claimants and changing access to EI benefits particularly hurts seasonal workers and those in precarious employment most, including women, youth, low income and other marginalized workers in communities across Canada. Changes to the appeals process has reduced fairness for claimants unjustly rejected. All workers are negatively affected as such changes drive down wages.

Pre-budget submissions are being accepted until August 5, 2013.

Read CUPE’s pre-federal budget submission
(357 kB)