When good jobs migrate stateside

(November 25) - For 15 years, ending about 18 years ago, I worked as a maintenance millwright in a Kitchener factory. It wasn’t a bad job, all things considered. The people were good, the pay wasn’t bad.

It was noisy, and dirty, and dangerous from time to time. A lot of people lost fingers, two men lost arms, and one man lost a leg. Actually, they weren't really lost. They were usually misplaced in the jaws of a punch press. Lost is a polite euphemism for crushed.

At least nobody died, unless you count all the welders who came down with cancer.

We made outdoor power equipment. All summer we’d turn out snow blowers. All winter we’d make lawn mowers. We’d also make tillers and garden tractors. When we weren’t making them, we’d make steering columns for General Motors and other parts for Ford.

When workers went home at the end of the shift, they were tired. When they retired, they were worn out. They earned their pay and they earned their pensions. They provided good lives for their families. Mortgages were paid, groceries were bought, vacations were taken, kids were put through school, college, university.

It could be a hard life, but it was a good one. It’s over now. The factory is closed. Only a small service department stayed open.

The end of October was the end of MTD’s production in Kitchener. They sold the punch presses, took out the assembly lines, dismantled the paint booths, and sent the jobs south. Over 500 worked there when times were good.

In the middle of October I banked my first pension cheque. Not a huge one, but for the rest of my life I’ll get it in the monthly mail. If Lynne keeps going after I’m gone, she’ll get it for her life. What a wonderful world we work in.

MTD is not the only manufacturing plant to go belly up in this area. There have been lots. Too many. Each closure put working families out of work and onto pogey. Fifty here, a hundred there. Add them up and before you know it you have a lot of people. Find them and you will find the human face of the financial meltdown. You don’t need to look very far, because they are your neighbours. Your neighbour’s neighbour is you.

All things financial might be melting today, but the thaw didn’t start yesterday. It all began when the dollar started rising. The loonie didn’t start soaring because the Canadian economy was strong all by itself. It was because the American economy was tanking. But the stronger dollar took away the competitive edge enjoyed by Canadian branch plants of American corporations.

Twenty years ago the prevailing wisdom was that if the dollar stayed at about seventy cents, jobs were reasonably secure. Sure enough, when we went over ninety cents and started dancing with parity, jobs began their southern journey. Bargain hunters flooded the Buffalo outlet malls and came home to find a pink slip in the pay envelope.

Now that the dollar is settling to a more comfortable balance, the jobs are not coming back. That should worry us all. When good jobs go down, bad ones become the best available.

People shake their heads and go tut tut when union jobs are lost. They priced themselves out of the market, say those very jealous observers. It’s their own fault, we are told, because they didn’t build the things people want to buy.

I have never heard of a factory where the owner lets the workers decide what they will make. Management rights are not up for sharing. Had MTD asked, we might have told them to make electric lawn mowers instead of the noisy carbon guzzling gasoline beasts. We were never asked. Anyway, the company made lots of electric mowers, but not in Canada. They came up from Cleveland.

We lament about the dwindling middle class, but what is it? The middle class is composed mostly of unionized workers, people with incomes that don’t get them into the Swiss banks but do keep them out of the food banks. They are the people who elevate the living conditions of our community while placing checks and balances on our employers.

We need them and we’ll be sorry when they are finally done away with.

Council at the half-way mark

(November 18) - Building a city is a lot like building a dry stone wall. It requires piecing together a lot of parts that look like they don’t fit. You choose the right rocks for the moment. Examine them closely. Chip at them for a while. Place smaller stones to steady the bigger ones. Then move to the next section.

A well made stone wall will stand for thousands of years without being held together with mortar. If it needs repair, a section can be carefully taken down and rebuilt without affecting the rest.

It is in perfect balance. Each stone leans on all the others and gets its strength from the whole.

Looking at it this way, we can see our mayor as stonemason. She leads a crew composed of a mix of experienced, skilled workers and some keen second year apprentices.

They appear to be working together quite efficiently. We are at the halfway point of this council’s four year term and it is going relatively well. Not perfectly, but a lot better than a lot of people thought it would.

They say the devil is in the details. If something goes wrong, it is because of something so small it was easily missed. By the same token, when things go right it is because someone looked after the little things. They were put in the proper order in such a way that you barely notice them. You’d know if they weren’t there.

Look at some of the things Council has done. Take the failed Hydro merger for one thing. I never thought joining up with Hamilton was a good idea and still don’t. Some of the councillors saw it as a solid building block for the Community Energy Plan. This plan has been one of Guelph’s best kept secrets. If successful, it will substantially reduce the city’s carbon footprint over the next 25 years. The window of opportunity for mergers is still open. Another one will come along that is better balanced.

Another well kept secret is the development of a natural heritage inventory. We have a good handle now on our structural heritage. We will do better in the future at protecting buildings like the Mitchell farm house. Now we are mapping out the locally significant natural habitats: the wetlands and other ecosystems that must be preserved as we grow.

A healthy city still needs healthy tadpoles.

Then there is parking. I often lament the extent to which an environmentally conscious council is fixated on cars. Their story is that if you want a healthy downtown where people live and shop, you have to stack the cars off to the side somewhere. Then you can build the efficient public transit system that will get more people around in fewer cars.

The mayor has a blog on the city’s web site. In one posting she speculates that maybe, sometime in the not too distant future, we’ll be able to turn the parking garages into apartment buildings.

We need this clarity of vision.

Don’t forget about our children. Sound planning is always about their future. Two items in this year’s budget are particularly important to them. The police want additional money for a new officer to fight child pornography. The library wants additional money for a new worker to program activities in all the branches. Two solid rocks in the same wall. We need both to protect and develop the physical and intellectual safety of children.

Healthy children grow into healthy adults.

This council is doing a commendable job of cobbling together a good city inhabited by a diverse population. There are many different points of view at play and all deserve to be heard and considered.

One good thing about local government is that it is accessible. You can find your councillors, and you can talk to them. If you wonder why they are doing something, just ask. They are never far away.

There is still room for improvement. Council needs to do a better job of communicating its vision and agenda. It must take active leadership. If councillors know where they want to go, they should do more to tell us why and how.

A good stonemason will tell you a wall does not divide. It defines. It sets the landscape and leads the eye to distant horizons.

War game marketing offensive, insensitive

(November 11) - When introducing new products, timing can be everything. Most people in the marketing and communications game understand this. Some don’t. There are people in the electronic games business who don’t get it. Neither do some of the folk at Blockbuster headquarters.

Last week I got an e-mail from Blockbuster saying they would stay open past midnight on the morning of November 7 to celebrate the release of a new Xbox game. Actually, it wasn’t so much to celebrate the game as to sell it. Anyone who showed up to buy Gears of War 2 between 12 and 12:30 a.m. qualified for a free download of the Gold-Plated Hammerburst Assault Rifle. They didn’t sweeten the incentive by throwing in a Hammer of Dawn for customers showing up with a poppy in a lapel. The Hammer of Dawn “can wipe out anything from small Locust squads to entire city blocks.”

All of this was happening just four days before the rest of us observe Remembrance Day.

Okay. I know it’s a game. I have never played it, and I expect to live out the rest of my life without having done so. I don’t think it should be banned. I have never advocated censoring things just because I don’t like them. I would sooner see them languish on store shelves until they are removed because no one would buy them. The introduction of this particular plaything just four days before Remembrance Day strikes me as just a tad offensive and hugely insensitive.

There is never a good time to promote fantasies about war and killing. Never a good time to pretend that wiping out an entire city block could be a good idea. It isn’t. Never has been, never will be. We know this because it has been done in the real world. It was done in Guernica, Spain; London, England; Dresden, Germany; Warsaw, Poland; Hiroshima, Japan; My Lai, Vietnam; Baghdad, Iraq. The list is staggering in its enormity.

There is never a good time to pretend that war is an acceptable way to settle political differences. The violence is pitiless. The suffering is borderless. The victims have no country. Soldiers lie buried in the same earth. Sailors drowned in the same oceans. Bomber pilots descended from the same skies. Nothing is settled. The victors take the spoils. The vanquished lick their wounds, gather their strength and get ready to resume the fight. By the time the city block is rebuilt, someone is getting ready to wipe it out all over again.

On the same day as Blockbuster sent out the poorly timed e-mail, the names of 68,000 Canadians who died in World War One began appearing on public buildings in seven Canadian cities. The names of all the men and women ion the armed services known to have died in action are projected onto the buildings during the dark hours of night. It took seven nights to do them all. It ended at daybreak this morning.

The artists who designed the project chose WW1 because this is the 90th anniversary of its ending. If they projected the names of all the Canadians who have died in all the wars since then, we might have seen close to a month of Remembrance Days. Then add in all those killed on all sides of the conflicts and imagine how long it would take. Gather up the names of all the civilians who died – the collateral damage, as they are so callously dismissed – and project them onto a war memorial wall. How long would it take?

There would be no end to it. The remembrance would never stop. Nor should it. When we remember, we don’t just think about those who died. Many come home in coffins, many more come home on stretchers. Brave men and women who will learn to adjust to a life without legs.

Last year at this time, the Canadian death toll in Afghanistan was 72. Today it is 98. One quarter of all our military deaths over there happened in the last year. What will it be when we put on our poppies next year?

There has never been a successful war because it is, in its essence, a failure. It is well past time to come up with a better way.

A parking lot budget

(November 04) - What would you prefer? Two hours of free parking downtown, or two and a half new police constables patrolling downtown?

Over the course of a year, both options cost you about the same amount of money. Fortunately, they are not mutually exclusive, and you'll probably get both free parking and more policing. The comparison gives an idea of the juggling city councillors have to do at this time of year.

They have to weigh apples against oranges. The final budget has to balance the good of the community against the ability of citizens to pay for it.

Last week, the council committees took a look at the budget submissions coming from the various boards, commissions and agencies and anyone else who lives on the municipal purse. In another month, at the beginning of December, council will meet on two consecutive nights and adopt the budget for 2009.

Requests range from an extra police officer to fight child pornography to an extra library worker to program children's activities. Both are needed.

It's safe to predict downtown shoppers will keep their free parking. It breathed too much new life into the downtown. It is nearly impossible to put a dollar value to that, but I expect it would measure up favourably against the lost parking revenue.

This is not the only way in which parking is dominating the budget. A huge sack of money is being set aside to build a parking garage on Wilson Street. Another bundle is going towards the redevelopment of the Baker Street parking lot. Some consultants even want to carve out a new street from Wyndham to Baker.

In many ways it's a parking lot budget.

How strangely counterintuitive that the greenest council we've ever had must devote so much attention to making room for cars downtown. Why not put the parked cars in the lots and turn Wyndham Street into a pedestrian mall? It would be a lot more pleasant, but would still come with a price tag.

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Speaking of cars, only a complete idiot would pull out a cellphone and send a text message while driving. The very thought of it makes me shiver. Just try it and see the result. You'll either rear-end the car in front of you or, even worse, make so many spelling mistakes the message will be incomprehensible. It is about to be outlawed.

As is often said, they can outlaw the act but not the stupidity that causes it.

It will also become an offense to talk on a cellphone while driving. Some people even wanted to ban the use of hands-free phones, but enforcement would be too difficult.

They say talking on the phone is too distracting. What about talking to your spouse while driving? Can't that take your attention away from the road? What about pre-pubescent kids in the back seat? Did you ever hear the noise they can make?

Instead of you driving them to Granny's, they drive you to distraction. Am I the only person who ever pulled onto the soft shoulder and yelled at them to stop their nonsense or get out and walk? Compared to this, talking on a cellphone can be relaxing.

No one wants to ban driving with family. Or while listening to the radio. Or while conversing with a passenger. Everyone wants to ban driving while conversing on the phone.

In the words of a song I recall from half a century ago: keep your mind on your driving, keep your hands on the wheel and keep your filthy eyes on the road ahead (I'm having fun, sitting in the back seat, kissing and a-hugging with Fred).

There's a story about two priests who argued about smoking and praying. They agreed to ask the bishop to resolve it. One asked if he could smoke while he prayed and was told no. When praying, you must give it your full attention. The other asked if he could pray while he smoked and was told yes. It's always good to say a prayer.

It's getting to be the same with driving. Should we drive while we think? Can we think while we drive?

Or should we just take the easy way out and move closer to a complete ban on thinking and driving.