Wild Bill

You really should have read the entire thread. The public union has an exclusive on ALL such work!

I'm not sure if such interaction is a good idea, Dr. Dre. While we have witnessed the crowds paying respect along the Highway of Heroes we also have a good many people who are anti-military and police. They would see open access to an RCMP mess hall as an opportunity to stage demonstrations. It could get ugly!

I am surprised the article never mentioned Quebec! Supply management is a sacred cow in eastern Canada but most especially in Quebec. After all, this is a province where it is still illegal to sell margarine that is the same colour as real butter. Dairying is a big business in Quebec and historically has been zealously defended by la belle province. While this might explain why no previous federal government has attempted to dismantle supply management programs perhaps the time is right to take on Quebec. After all, Harper's recent majority has proven that a party can win such without Quebec support. Quebec has left itself with no voice of power in Ottawa. That leaves them with only the perpetual threat of separation as a lever. That situation has changed as well, with large portions of TROC now believing that losing Quebec would save them much money, in a time when money is very tight. I'm not saying that Quebec will be booted from Confederation but times ARE different and likely to work out differently.

Perhaps they should train people in that stuff today. If a society lacks a common baseline of practicality and is predominately academic in outlook it is in serious trouble! However, I have to agree with you that I have drifted from the OP. Perhaps I shall take your advice and start a thread of my own.

Michael, I realize now that something I thought obvious was not to you. The context of my posts is that I don't believe that the majority of today's teachers are very practical. I had direct experience myself when my company brought the first personal computer invented into Canada and I had dealings and observations of the school system. I had thought that teachers would have been on the leading edge of the personal computer revolution. Instead I found that they were among the last to adopt the "new ways", with principals who could not even read their own email and had to have a secretary for such functions! In private industry, personal secretarys for managers had almost disappeared. I truly don't believe that very many teachers could have installed that pencil sharpener! I think that science and math teachers are relatively rare while English and French teachers are a dime a dozen. This may the origin of a related topic that has been getting some MSM play lately - that a new generation is being raised that cannot do some of the simplest things! They cannot change a tire! They cannot fix a leaky tap or replace a bad electrical outlet. They are NOT stupid, just ignorant! Big box stores like Loews and Home Depot are making a good profit selling to people who don''t know how to do these things but are perfectly capable of learning. They have in-store demonstration sessions, trained staff to answer questions and a multitude of do-it-yourself books. When this demographic puts their mind to it they prove perfectly capable of doing such practical tasks. So why don't they know it in the first place? MY generation did! Our teachers taught us! Even Arts & Science boys like me received a minimum amount of basic trade education, to make us more "well-rounded" and capable citizens. Franky, I think it is YOU who are sore about my premises, Michael. One would think you are a teacher, stung by embarrassing accusations! What is the ratio of male to female teachers in schools today, Michael? How much trade education is given? How easy is it to get an experienced mathematics teacher for a school? What is the ratio of male to female principals, after a few decades of affirmative action? Some might jump to the conclusion that I am implying some sort of female English teacher conspiracy that has hijacked the school system as an arm of the NDP, to brainwash students to a socialist point of view and put all the boys on Ritalin. Nothing would be further from the truth! However, I DO believe that things have gotten badly out of balance, so that one point of view has come to dominate, for lack of any other input. Don't believe I have a point? Ask someone in their early 20's if they can change a tire. We have great computer programmers and difficulty filling crews to make a sidewalk. We pay exorbitant fees to install a pencil sharpener. We have to pay a plumber to replace a 50 cent washer in a tap! No wonder the Chinese are out-competing us. They just sent 3 astronauts to their space station! They have one of their own! Someday we may move out into space but it sure looks like Captain Kirk will be Chinese!

Okay! the teachers are blameless! You win! I was totally mistaken! All teachers, or at least the vast majority, would be perfectly capable of installing that pencil sharpener and certainly would have, if only they were allowed! Now, let's debate if they played any part with allowing this situation to develop? After all, they themselves are unionized and appear to practice militant union strategies. Are there enough capable maths and science teachers? How much emphasis do we see today on trades? What would happen if we grabbed 3 teachers at random and place them on "Canada's Worst HandyMan"? How would that compare to say, 50 years ago? Whoops, sorry! I already agreed with your premise, which means I must agree that they all would be excellent handymen, er...handypeople!

My blame is laid at the entire system, Michael. When teachers demand we call them professionals yet they have stood up in Skydome and sang Solidarity Forever with Buzz Hargrove, I see no reason why they should not share the blame! You are attacking my model and not my point! Is it your position that many if not most teachers would have been perfectly capable of installing the pencil sharpener, assuming it were allowed? Even more, that they WOULD have done so? I would think there would be indeed a great deal of discussion there...

Boges, what's worse is that there was apparently no TEACHER who could simply have take a screwdriver and installed the pencil sharpener themselves! It's as if the people who are charged with imparting knowledge to the next generations have no practical skills themselves! I guess we need a 6 month accredited course to be able to screw! The converse being obvious - if you don't have such a certificate then you can't possibly already know how to screw! Yet it is also perfectly obvious that the folks working in this system are very adroit at screwing US!

Ok, I'll bite! Do you honestly believe that we can have a robust economy by drafting everyone into the public service and employ them at shuffling papers for each other? Work is work, right? All work is of equal value, right? Growing food and shuffling paper is of equal value, right?

I don't quite understand your position, Rick. According to the quote in the OP, the alcohol is to be served as a result of a liquor permit issued to a mess that is already built! Obviously, the extra expense is trivial when you already have a mess. A few more glasses in the dishwasher, a bit more room taken up in the fridge for bottles, - where is there a significant waste of taxpayer money? Unless it is your position that there should be no facilities to feed these RCMP folks? They should bring their own paper bag lunches? Or if that is not practical if they are all sleeping in this centre or too far from home, maybe we should have some catering machines serving horrible coffee and chicken soup, along with dry and tasteless tuna sandwiches loaded with preservatives? Or maybe we should instead make it a profit centre and tender for some fast food outlet to serve these officers? McDonalds, perhaps?

Did you read the rest of my post? There is no point in leaving one choice for a few differences if there is no other even close! That's why guys like me tend to be a bit bitter. We never get a choice we truly approve, only one that smells less than the others. Harper makes me gag at times but the Liberals truly reek, while the NDP would knock a buzzard off a manure wagon!

Yeah, once was all it was really worth Cap but the Opposition aren't the sharpest pencils in the box,anymore. Neither are the government MPs, for that matter. They will flog this dead horse for a week because that's all they have to work with! If only John Crosbie had had a son or daughter who would have entered politics and inherited his mantle. There was a man who could insult someone with style!

That would be one meaning, I suppose! I simply meant that even the highest management appeared to be genuinely surprised at how the domestic production suffered, to the point where there was no longer any point to have ANY domestic production! I had been out of the sales end for a few years as a purchasing agent and returned to sales at that time. I began to call all the obvious accounts to try to set up appointments with their engineering departments. This was a standard technique for a good salesman - you would support engineers with data sheets and samples of new and existing devices that could solve some of their design problems. In return, their purchasing department would make sure you were considered a preferred supplier, as such support was vital for new product development. The engineers were so incredibly eager and friendly to see me I was frankly quite puzzled! They waltzed me around their office like I was royalty. At the end of it all, I asked them for the names of people in their purchasing department that I should be seeing, in order to have a shot at quotes for production orders. They all started to look down and scuff their shoes back and forth. Finally one admitted that there no longer was any domestic purchasing. Since all production had been moved to China all purchasing was now being done there as well. Then I understood. Domestic suppliers were no longer supporting NorTel's engineers, since they would never receive any benefit for that support! No wonder the engineers were so lonely! As I drove to my next call I was wondering if NorTel's management had realized that was going to happen? Anyhow, it never seemed to us in the industry that NorTel's management had planned and understood all the ramifications all along. RAther, they just seemed to have gone with the flow, just reacting to what the Chinese were pushing. As I had also said, there was an incredible amount of push coming from the Liberal government, who absolutely wanted more trade with China. I think the Chinese just hosed a bunch of rubes, Michael! Remember, this was the mid 90's. Moving production to China was just starting to happen. What also used to amaze me was an official line that somehow this was all a good thing, as all the grunt jobs would be done by primitive Chinese and all the engineering and brain work would be done by us! This always seemed to me to be just naive arrogance. The Chinese are as smart if not smarter than us and have now proved it over and over! Did you notice in the news how they just sent 3 more astronauts to the Chinese Space Station? It looks like it will be US condemned to do all the grunt work!

That is your opinion punked and you are certainly entitled to it! However, I have no wish to be taxed for another 10 Billion dollars, plus interest, on what still could become a bad debt. Your opinion will not cover it! So while you may not vote for Harper because of this, you would never vote for him anyway! Meanwhile, folks like myself would perhaps NOT vote for him if he offered to have Canada stand behind any IMF loans! That's assuming of course that any other party offers us an alternative choice. Often ALL of them take the same side so we are just stuck if we don't agree.

Michael, either I'm explaining it extremely poorly or you are very distracted while reading my posts. Perhaps we should just move on...

Are you sure, Topaz? I'd really like you to provide a cite or two to prove this. Frankly, I think you are wrong and I will not believe you until you back up your words with something more.

They did NOT go to China to reduce production costs!The initial idea was that China had no telephones or telephone systems and would be a huge new market for NorTel here in Canada. Chretien got as many photo ops as he could of shaking Chinese hands. We were all led to believe that it would mean megadollars of production in Kanata and Toronto. AFTER the deals were signed the deal started to be changed. The Chinese were not stupid, at least not as stupid as our people, and demanded that NorTel build factories in China and show Chinese workers how to build the phones and their associated systems. They wanted to develop an industry for themselves. NorTel went along with this with some kind of naive arrogance! They didn't appear to have any idea what this would do to their operations at home! When the domestic production began to suffer NorTel's managers did not appear to be happy they had saved some production costs. Rather, they began to panic! The intent was never to close their domestic production but of course, that's exactly what had to happen! We never saw so many high level managers appear to be so blind! That is when I began to lose all faith in management when I was first introduced - waiting until I saw some history before I would place my confidence with them. So it was not a deliberate move to reduce production costs, Michael. This was just blind, arrogant ignorance! Most of those managers involved lost their own jobs later on. The Chinese likely thought these were the biggest patsies on the planet!

Michael, it appears you did not read my post about what happened. That's NOT what I said, in any way, shape or form! Sorry, I haven't had enough coffee yet to want to type it all over again.

Good point, MCC. It's amazing how so many folks today seem blissfully unaware of the concept of primary, secondary and tertiary industries. Even those who would not think of themselves as socialists seem to have a Marxist definition of the value of work, where it doesn't matter what you do or if anyone has any use for what you produce, all work is of equal value. This of course is totally nuts! Work has no value unless someone is willing to pay for the product or service generated. Sweat in itself is not a medium of exchange. Wealth comes from something being grown, dug up or fabricated. Farms, mines, factories, oil fields, fishing boats are primary industries. Making the picks to dig in a mine is a secondary industry. Giving manicures or massages to mine workers is a tertiary industry. Wealth must first be created. Secondary and tertiary industries just re-arrange it. If there are no primary industries then we have no economy. You cannot survive by drafting everyone into the Postal Service and delivering letters to each other!

I never thought it was anything more than posturing on Andrea's part. She took the opportunity to enhance the NDP position as a true player, having and wielding some power. She grabbed a bit of glamour, that's all!

Look at the time scales, Michael. The events I described happened in the early 90's, before the swindle you describe. By the time the stock manipulation started happening, Nortel was already just a pyramid scheme, no longer having a giant base manufacturing business to support itself. Everything by then was in China. If Nortel needed phones for Canada it bought them from the chinese operations. They no longer had a manufacturing revenue creation stream. They were just complicated deals at high levels that no one outside could clearly see and understand. I think they started down the path to pulling a swindle as a frantic attempt to stay solvent. In their own greed and ignorance they had killed their own goose! But that's just my POV!

We've had such arguments before, August. While I have always agreed with you in theory I still think your view is too academic. You see, we don't have capitalism in Canada - never had! The market is skewed and I believe that adds much to the pain of change. Politicians have meddled without understanding or likely even caring about the eventual effects! We have lost so much manufacturing far more rapidly than we had to and this has caught so many workers in a position where they are too old to change to another source of income anywhere near as lucrative. It took far longer for automobiles to kill off the horse carriage industries than the loss of manufacturing jobs here in Ontario. Why? Several reasons. One is how we have levied high anti-pollution costs on our industries while allowing countries like China access to our market with NO such extra costs! We also had a Liberal government hand over our entire telephone and telephone system manufacturing industry to China - decimating our domestic electronic manufacturing industry. This was NOT a case of another country getting into the game and later out-competing us! The Liberals greased the entire deal with a country that had NO such existing industry, actually throwing shovelfuls of OUR money into the deal to grease the way! There are many other such examples. If the market had been allowed to proceed at its own pace it is likely that much of our domestic manufacturing would still be here and still be profitable. It is mind boggling to consider that Chinese and Russian steel can be shipped into Canada in flippin' immensely heavy ingots weighing tons and tons and tons to be sold at a price FAR below that of steel produced right here in Hamilton! Mind boggling indeed, until you realize that those countries have ZERO "green" costs. For that matter, some days it seems the entire green movement is a plot to transfer all our manufacturing to other and ironically dirtier countries! There are about a BILLION dollars of vacuum tubes still being manufactured and sold today, virtually all for the audiophile and guitar musician market yet NONE can be profitably made in Canada or the USA! 5 minutes away from my home is a site where once Westinghouse made hundreds of thousands of such tubes every month, until the transistor revolution became the mainstream in the 60's. One might think that with such a niche market today someone might consider opening a vacuum tube plant here again, perhaps on a bit smaller scale. Forget it! NOT possible to be profitable! He could not compete against the Chinese and former countries of the old USSR. Why not? Are you familiar with the term "WHMIS"? The Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System? If not, it's worth a google. Thanks to WHMIS we are forever locked out of such an industry. I am NOT saying we should be just as "dirty" as those other countries. I am saying that we should mplement green tariffs against those countries to equalize the market! As I said, there are many, many examples, August. How on earth could anyone think this to be a capitalistic economy? It is so badly skewed by politicians operating by ignorance, greed or both. Maybe you should leave your ivory tower once in a while, my friend!

You've discovered for yourself how shipping paperwork can be a PITA, BC! As you likely remember, I build/fix guitar amps for a living. I had an instance to turn this PITA into a positive. Nowadays we are seeing lots of little "boutique" guitar amp makers springing up. Perhaps its a reaction to all the standardized Chinese stuff. Even the classic big names like Fender are all made in China now. Anyhow, because they are a bit different and have some "snob appeal" they are carving out a bit of a market niche. The major chains of music stores have started carrying them. Unfortunately, often they take them on without considering how to give warranty support. A fellow rang my door with a brand new boutique amp from an American manufacturer. It had a warranty problem but the manufacturer, being a "little guy", never knew about the ins and outs about shipping across the border. In the States, if a customer had a warranty problem he had him ship it back to him, cheaply by UPS. He didn't think to check if UPS from Canada was also cheap and of course, it isn't! To his credit, he wanted to honour his warranty and keep his customer happy but the customer was already pissed at paying a couple of grand for a brand new amp with a problem! He certainly didn't want to have to ship it back to the States. Canada Customs tends to be a bit simple and often confuses a repair situation with a brand new sale, charging fees each way that can take months to get refunded! The customer was hoping I would look at his amp and be able to fix it cheaper than all the aggravation. I took the amp in and called the manufacturer. As I said, he was an honourable guy and he explained that the problem was actually a wiring error from some poor assembler help he had had. When I learned what was involved I knew that I could easily have the amp in perfect shape for much less than an hour's labour. So I suggested to the gentleman that I would be glad to take care of his problem for my standard minimum fee of $60 for an hour's time. He asked me if I had a PayPal account and two minutes after I hung up he had paid me, trusting that I would look out for his interests! This was a far cheaper solution for him! That afternoon his customer had his amplifier back and was not just satisfied but impressed! Maybe I should hope for things to STAY screwed up!

Topaz, when you say we will never pay for the bridge from tolls in our lifetime, could you show us some math? Also, as far as First Nations ironworkers, they were never operating as a First Nations company or guild! Companies building high rise stuff hired the best guys for the job. A lot of them were of First Nations stock, that's all. They were never considered natives. They were just guys who were very good at the job! So of course they will be included in building the bridge! What are you suggesting? They only hire for such jobs according to race? Business just doesn't care! It takes a special kind of person to work at such heights. It has worked out that many First Nations folks are good at it but nobody cares if the worker was Chinese or Martian! Frankly, sometimes you make supposed connections that confuse the hell outta me!

AW, my career was in business, selling electronic parts like resistors and semiconductors, with almost all of them imported into Canada from American suppliers. I have first hand experience with this problem and have been watching it happen for years The market adjusted for electronic goods back in the 80's. It wasn't just Free Trade/NAFTA changes. It was a total restructuring of how goods were brought in and sold in Canada! Long ago, when an American firm wanted to export into Canada, he rarely set up a direct pipeline. The Canadian market was considered a bit on the small side and with a lot of aggravating little peculiarities with duties and tariffs and shipping paperwork. It was also a pain to cross that border at so many points, from Maine to the Dakotas to Washington State. So what they did was to make an agreement with a Canadian "rep" house, which would act as a representative for an American firm in Canada. These rep houses would usually represent a number of American manufacturers of associated kinds of products. They could then use their own sales force to push all of them to customers in Canada. Often the rep house would stock products at a Canadian warehouse. Now instead of just consolidating many smaller Canadian orders into bigger ones, which would be easier and more profitable for their American principal to process, they would only place large stocking orders from the US and they themselves supply all the Canadian end customers. Of course, a rep house needs to make money itself and the way it was done was to add a markup of their own into the price. With electronic parts it was usually as much as 30% or more. This was added to the cost of a Canadian wholesaler, who would mark it up more to sell to a retailer and again to the end customer. By the late 70's and early 80's this system for electronic parts began to totally breakdown. The world had changed. Volumes purchased by Canadian electronic manufacturers had increased dramatically. The markups in between had become so high that larger volume customers began to buy directly from American distributors, since their price from an Buffalo NY outlet was cheaper than a Canadian distributor's wholesale cost! Of course, at that point, Canadian distributors began to drop many products where this was happening from their product line. Why carry a line that you couldn't sell for a profit? So the "middle men" rep houses began to disappear. Canadian wholesalers were allowed to buy directly from the US factory the same as any American wholesaler. The extra markup disappeared and Canadian sources were just as price competitive as those in the USA. Rep houses became just local sales forces, where just as a factory in upper NY might contract a rep house in California to push their products and pay them a commission they would do the same in Vancouver, BC. As I said, this adjustment happened in the early to mid 80's and is likely forgotten history to younger folks in that industry today. However, it is still very much alive in most other industries! A tire store, even one of a national chain, usually cannot buy directly from the same factory source as an American tire store. He must buy from a "middle man", at a higher price. If he is unfortunate enough to be located in a border town, he CAN'T lower his price to compete with a store on the American side! It would be below his cost! A classic example is Wabasso sheets and linens sold in Windsor, Ontario. They are simply brutally uncompetitive compared to the same sheets sold in Detroit. Worse yet for him, our greedy Canadian governments likely have a few taxes or user fees they have added onto his overhead, which of course must be reflected in his resale price. So far all these middlemen, especially in consumer goods areas, have managed to keep their place in the loop but it has been getting harder and harder for them. Their American suppliers don't really care about their troubles. They will sell their products no matter what happens and besides, the Canadian market is usually not big enough to command their full attention. It tends to get taken for granted. After all, the entire Canadian market for most products is about the same size as that of California. So as Canadians flock across the border to shop the pressure builds not just on our retailers, who as I said CAN'T lower their prices but also on those middle men! Some of these guys have never actually touched their products! They simply operate from a small office and handle the paperwork. Some of them claim to "value add" when all they are doing is slipping a sheet of paper with instructions in both English and French into the package. The middle men try to let their retailers take the brunt of the problem but of course, that's just hiding their heads in the sand. Their retailers are going bankrupt and not ordering from them anymore! Now Harper is making it even easier. I suspect this was done not just for the obvious one of pleasing voters but also as a blow against organized crime! Smuggling has always been a HUGE and lucrative business between our two countries. Lord knows there are dollar stores everywhere that will buy "hot" tooth paste, household goods and the like. There is a crooked path for almost everything to get resold, escaping all the extra costs in doing it through legal channels. One extra cost for Canadian sellers that always ticked me off was that although NAFTA had eliminated the duties and tariffs on the electronic parts I sold, my government kept all the paperwork! I still had to spend the same amount of time on forms as before. That of course cost money too! So here it is nearly 30 years after the re-structuring I saw in the electronics manufacturing supply industry. Things have caught up in the consumer goods market in the same fashion. All the talking heads keep talking as if Canadian resellers are to blame, showing that as usual they have no in-depth knowledge of how things actually work. After all, reporters are not hired from the world at large anymore. They all come from the same journalism schools and thus have a very limited knowledge of the world in general. Things appear to be coming to a head. I predict that within a VERY few years we will see most if not all of those middlemen finally just disappear. The cross-border phenomenon will just vanish as prices on both sides of the border will be virtually equal.