Wild Bill

We've covered this before, Jerry. Remember? I was the guy who used to sell electronic parts to buyers and engineers who had originally worked for A V Roe and the Arrow? We are just starting from too far back. You can't build cars before you can build steel, for which you need to have built smelters, which were an advancement over blacksmith shops, who got their iron from miners, who had to have tools, which were build on previous designs. We would be starting almost from standing in an open field! When the Arrow was built we already had engineering and design departments. We had existing factories built to manufacture Lancasters. We had the infrastructure, both mechanical and human, all in place. That's all gone, Jerry! We have a few branch plants building the odd part for someone else's planes. That's it. You really think that if we are seeing such arguments about the money to buy some planes someone else has already designed and manufactured we could ever see a government spending the money to build the entire infrastructure of the necessary industry to build our own? At least for the new ships we had some shipyards left! Let it go, my friend. In true Canadian fashion, we threw it all the way in favour of a baby bonus or some such thing. As a nation we think we have no need to fear anyone with guns and take it for granted that we can spend all our dollars on butter. Of course, if the butter folks turn out to be wrong then we're all screwed! I'm sure though that they would be quite capable of saving our asses if that should ever be the case!

Topaz, I don't usually support your positions but on this one, I doff my hat to you! Your response was priceless! If I get such a phone call myself I will steal your answer! Thank you!

BC, I believe I asked this several years ago but I don't think anyone ever came up with an answer. There's a Canadian author named Richard Rohmer who has written a number of Tom Clancy-esque novels of Canada and politics. In one of them Canada was taken over by the USA. Most Canadians accepted the action. Anyhow, one of his plot points was that somewhere in the American Founding Documents was a clause that allowed for Canada to join the union - a perpetual open door. Apparently in 1776 the Founding Fathers all believed that people in the Canadas would sooner or later want to break with Britain and become part of a North American alliance. Rohmer painted it very well and I've always wondered if such a clause actually exists or if Rohmer pulled it out of his butt to help his story. Do you know anything about this?

Maybe this is true. It's always been obvious that a government rarely can run a two-car funeral procession properly. Still, is that the whole story? Maybe the world has changed and the union is blind to it? Maybe the Air Canada management is incompetent but it doesn't matter, because Air Canada just can no longer compete anyway! It often seems like unions assume that the company can give them whatever they want - that it is just a matter of applying sufficient force. What if the company simply CAN'T? What if the union is demanding that someone with no legs show them a dance? I'm beginning to think that Air Canada SHOULD die off, to make way for other, more modern companies. Rarely to we see an old-fashioned company successfully modernize. Their people are old and thus they practice old-fashioned business methods. Perhaps Air Canada is an Underwood Typewriter company in a new world of computers and word processors.

I guess I must be outside the average! I do maybe one joint every two to three years. I drink maybe 10 ounces total of alcohol per year. So much for addiction or marijuana being a gateway drug. Gee, I always knew I was special!

So? The company will still be dead! I'm not so sure that the problem can be totally fixed with better management. If the competitive factors are beyond their control, like other countries having cheaper costs, you could put Christ himself in charge and it wouldn't matter. Again, I don't see how being able to blame one side or the other wold be any comfort to those ex employees when they need to buy groceries for their kids.

You've nailed it, Dr. Dre! (once again!)

<sigh> Yeah, sadly you're right about that mindset. I'm not sure if it came from the teachers or if the teachers just reflected the feelings of the general public but the effect can't be denied. As for people wising up being a slow process, that always seems to be the way. Another example of how we think we are competent generals because we are perfectly prepared for the LAST war! And another Poland will send out cavalry against Hitler's tanks...

I stand corrected. That's a good point and worthy of a thread of its own. Why is this so? What about all those government studies, career counselors in high schools, retraining programs and the like? If they all knew what they were doing then why has this situation occurred?

I'm not saying it isn't, my good Doctor! However, that doesn't change the fact that the market or rather the public who use airlines will have their own feelings on the matter and will make their own choices. Too often management and labour take their customers for granted. Then if the customers vote with their feet they point fingers at each other as the bankruptcy accountants move in!

You make some good points CC but I still don't think they are all "real world". First off, while it's true that there is no business without labour things are badly slanted against labour today, at least here in Canada. You see, in Canada we have more labour than companies need! Stelco, the steel company here in Hamilton, employed about 20,000 workers when my father worked there. Now they need a bit less than 1,000! It's the same story everywhere. Advances in technology have brought about efficiencies that require much less labour. Of course, this happened a bit too quickly for society to properly adjust. So we have vast numbers of unemployed, often older workers for whom it's a bit late for retraining and certainly they are no longer in the most desirable demographic for employers. What do these workers do? Stay home and watch Jerry Springer? Second, countries like China DO offer FAR lower costs! Few or no pensions or benefits, an artificially low currency, bribes to government officials that are far less than normal taxes...they make it very hard for towns like Tillsonburg to compete. That's why the various levels of government bribe them to stay. They have to! I will agree with you however that not tying the money to staying for a long time and keeping jobs just shows how shallow and shortsighted are our politicos. Smallc has a very good point that you seem to have ignored. He said "And what if there's no Air Canada to return to?" I don't think you can take it for granted that there are no significant numbers who will give up on Air Canada. Most Canadians don't care about who is right or wrong in any labour dispute, or if the government should or should not have gotten involved. They simply resent any inconvenience to themselves. What's more, what happened a few weeks ago to all those riders stranded in Pearson without even someone to tell them what was happening was more than just inconvenience. I' surprised that someone in line didn't "go postal". If it keeps happening someone probably will! If Air Canada gets a reputation for these problems it could be the proverbial straw on the camel's back. Maybe you're right, I dunno. Still, I think we will soon see...

So they will sell at a loss and try to make it up on volume? This is not business! This is just more corporate welfare at the expense of French taxpayers! But then again, we are talking about the French! When it comes to such subsidies, what else is new?

I'm confused about where you stand, CC. I do understand your support for the union folks. However, are you denying that ridership may or will suffer? Do you believe that no significant number of passengers will decide not to fly Air Canada anymore? Maybe that's true. Maybe all those folks stuck in the Pearson terminals are saying "Gee, this is a big pissoff but still, I can see it's all the fault of the government sticking their nose in! I'm on the side of the union and will cheerfully accept all this aggravation in order to support them!" I really don't know how much business Air Canada will lose. Or can afford to lose, for that matter. It would seem that both the union and the management are playing a risky game. Obviously, they either consider their passenger reactions to be irrelevant or not serious enough to sink the whole ship. You've made your support for the union plain, CC. I'm just curious what you think about repercussions to the entire picture. Maybe folks like me, who would resent being caught up as cannon fodder and would never fly Air Canada again are just a trivial minority. There are brand name stores that I have refused to enter since I was a teenager, because of the way I was treated. But that's just me!

Well, unlike some folks (certainly not you, Jaycee!) I can like and dislike certain deeds from my political heroes. I don't blindly support everything they do or did nor do I believe that the "other guys" are always wrong or even evil! Two things I will never forgive Mike Harris for are the 407 deal and amalgamation of suburbs into larger cities. To be fair, the 407 deal began with Bob Rae. Even Wiki acknowledges that fact. Harris should have axed the deal! I don't care if it had gone so far that we would have paid a huge cancellation penalty. In the long run it still would have been cheaper. I had some friends in the Highways Department when Rae took over. They were horrified at Rae's changes to the department and many of the experienced managers quit in disgust. They tended to be "farm boys", since they would be comfortable with heavy machinery and most important - a job with the highways filled in the winter months! So they could afford to walk away from the provincial job. I talked with a few of these people and they all had a common story. They had always believed that politics didn't influence the roads department, since asphalt had to be laid, concrete poured, snow plowed and so on regardless of any political games. Rae's government never cared about making sure those things were done! They actually used the roads department to give laid off workers enough paid weeks to reach EI! These workers were short term so even safety courses were waived! They were sent out on make work projects, pouring concrete in bitter cold that had to be replaced in the spring. So the old hands were given a reality check that killed their morale. They were the guys who knew how to actually do the jobs! Perhaps Rae caused a "brain drain", leaving us with refugees from the 'B' Ark (Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy) running things. A simple lack of wit can explain many things. However, it may have been Rae's fault in the beginning but like the 407, no subsequent government has corrected the action.

I don't know if that would do much good, Michael. One of my early jobs as a young lad was working for a civil engineering firm as a field inspector for concrete, reinforcing steel, soil compaction and the like. We bumped up against municipal and provincial engineering all the time. I quickly learned that most of the public has not even a basic understanding of how such engineering works! One of my favourite comic strips was Calvin and Hobbes. In one, little Calvin is in the back seat with his Father driving and his mother in the passenger seat. They cross a bridge and Calvin notes the load limit sign of 10 tons. "Dad!" says Calvin. " How do they know the load limit of a bridge?". "Easy son," replies his father. " They just keep sending heavier and heavier trucks across the bridge until it collapses, then they weigh the truck just before that and use it's weight as the limit." "OH!" says Calvin, as his mother snaps "If you don't know the answer then don't invent such a silly one!" The general public just takes all highways and structures for granted, with a childlike faith in the competence of the people involved, the strength of the materials and the stresses and strains of weather and the environment. There are Handbooks and Codes which are written and revised by human beings. Moreover, sometimes politics creeps in and over-rules engineering. Even good engineering can be found to be flawed. Lab testing can sometimes be an inaccurate substitute for actual time spent standing in the real world. Your tests can say that a material should be good for 40 years but in the field you might see cracks develop after only 20. House roofing shingles are a good example. There are complaints being heard everyday that shingles that came with a 25 year warranty are coming off a roof after less than 10. Then the warranty fights start, with manufacturers blaming installers, installers blaming manufacturers and the home owner caught in the middle with no redress. Yet older homes are seen all over town with roofing shingles 30 or even more years old that are perfectly fine! What happened is that within a decade or two many of the materials used in roofing shingles were declared as POSSIBLY dangerous to the environment! So they were banned. That left manufacturers with the problem of finding substitutes that worked as well or better. (Such substances are ALWAYS banned before even a search for substitutes!). Shingles made since then are still in a developmental cycle. There hasn't been a long enough history yet to show if they will actually stand up as long as lab tests predicted. Sometimes conflicting new guidelines and rules occur. Perhaps someone somewhere declared that the minimum space for an off ramp should be reduced, to leave more room for roadside development. He may work in a different department from the engineer who actually has to design the off ramp. That engineer would have no choice but to tighten up the curve and hope that sufficient banking may keep it safe. To sum up, I guess my point is that the only way to ensure safety may be some sort of litigation or other responsibility for design failures from public works. It's just not always possible to do all that's necessary ahead of time. I don't have a good answer as to public transparency, except to hope that some citizen somewhere might take the trouble to pay attention and also be competent to judge. I agree that's rather lame and vague but maybe the reason we see troubles today when we didn't before is that changes have been made that ended up not to be positive. If that's the case maybe they could just be reversed?

CC, do yourself a favour and take a blood pressure pill! They haven't even cut a purchase order yet! They haven't bought any jets! The Liberals signed us up for a place in the queue and so far it's still too early for any subsequent government to make the final purchase decision. You're going on like they've already spent billions. Man, you do hate Tories! You're reviling them for what they MIGHT do!

In the main I would agree with you, Michael. However, I'm talking about a specific area, the design of off ramps. Even more, the off ramps from the QEW and 400 series highways around the junction of Hamilton and Burlington. I have lived here all my driving life. As I said, I never even heard of a truck toppling on an off ramp until a new one was built to take traffic from the QEW onto the 403 Brantford. I could see with my own eyes that the ramp was so flippin' tight a coil that even a car at less than 40km would have trouble! So as a techie, who is fully aware that such ramps are not designed by perfect gods but by fallible human beings, I can't help but wonder if somewhere along the way something in the process has changed. Maybe someone was assigned a role for which they are not competent. Or a rule was changed in the Handbooks which was poorly thought out. Or maybe we are all just imagining that the ramps coil too tight!

I see some merit in that! I think it doesn't have a hope in hell of ever being implemented, because of the politics, but for myself I could see some good in it. However, that has nothing to do with my premise about truck turnovers at off ramps. My point was that if the engineers at the Highway Dept are responsible for a dumb design then it is not the driver's fault. Even worse, it is almost forcing accidents to happen. Off course, the driver could never sue the engineers. The government protects them. He could sue the province, of course. The province would then spend a zillion dollars of OUR TAX MONEY to defend themselves. Since they have far more money than any truck driver or even truck driving company it's obvious that regardless of justice they would win.

Yeah, but how would the food you eat and the very computer you used to make your post have gotten to your local store without them? Star Trek transporter? You know, there are taxes on diesel fuel, too! If you were to increase the taxes on trucking, they would have no choice but to raise their rates. This eventually means a higher price for your food and your computer. Is that what you are calling for?

You know Peeves, I've been wondering if there has been some change in the engineering expertise of the provincial Highways Dept. For the first 40 years of my life I think I saw a truck overturn on a ramp maybe once! It was almost unheard of! Then, a few years after Bob Rae's term as Premier, they re-did the QEW-403 connection north of the Skyway Bridge, where if you are leaving the QEW Niagara you have the choice of going to Brantford or Toronto. I don't think they opened the new construction for more than a week and they had had several truck topplings on one of the ramps. It wasn't hard to see why. The ramp was coiled tight for someone in a car! A large semi would have to slow down to less than 10 kph to make the turn safely! Some remedial work was done, some warning signs were put in place and a very slow speed limit sign was posted for trucks. Yet it seems that every so often we hear about it happening again. I wonder if we found out where the trucks involved came from it would tell us something. I suspect that domestic truckers get the word fairly quickly but perhaps a trucker from the USA, new to driving in Ontario, ends up flopping over because never in his career has he come across such tightly curved ramps! Or am I just once again being too cynical?

Maybe you're right August but it would be just as dangerous for the NDP! Like it or not, the NDP has long been thought of as a party that is not fiscally responsible, at least in Ontario. True, there have been NDP provincial governments that were sensible but the federal NDP has never benefited from any comparison. Let's suppose that young Trudeau does indeed cross the floor. The Liberal party becomes a lost orphan and let's further suppose that the NDP wins power! The only way the federal NDP could garner enough votes to displace the Tories is if they appeared to have modernized and become much more realistic. No more blaming everything on business, no more thinking they can solve unemployment by increasing the public sector workforce while allowing real jobs from industry to flee the country and no more increasing welfare doles with no thought about how to pay for it. They had better get it right the first time! The NDP would have only one chance to prove they are up to the job! If they screw it up or even if economic things happen that were not their fault but still hurt the average Canadian much of their new found support would drop them like a hot potato! This might not be fair but I truly think it is human nature. The federal NDP has a bit of a historical rep to bear with many voters. It didn't hurt them in Quebec last time because Quebecers didn't know anything about them anyways! Still, they are well known in the rest of Canada and to win power they absolutely HAVE to take some Tory support! So that demographic that would put them over the top would be very wary of having made a mistake. Electing Mulcair as leader went a long way to encouraging confidence with such voters. If they governed in an old-style bash-the-rich Peggy Nash fashion and the economy tanked then next election and those for many terms afterward, they would be toast! Hopefully for the NDP their leadership understands this and act accordingly. Canada would be better served with a return to a 2 party system with clear differences between the choices. The Liberals as yet have shown no signs of getting their act together. A collapse of NDP support would be the best shot in the arm they could hope for!

You don't get out much, do you? During the native protests in Caledonia the townsfolk were often almost completely ignored by the national media. They were denied the protection of the law and many suffered, both emotionally and physically. Old folks were driven from their homes, an old man was smashed in the head with a piece of lumber and left with permanent brain damage and so on. Blatchford covered the story for the Globe and Mail. Later she wrote a book called "Helpless - Caledonia's Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy". She took no stand on the validity of the native land claims but instead simply interviewed hundreds of townspeople and natives, compiling all the incidents, violent and peaceful, that had been occurring in Caledonia. Her book received much media coverage, including interviews on TVO, CHCH, CBC, radio stations and others. She stood up for the townspeople and it would be very surprising if virtually all the townspeople were not aware of this. You might try talking to a few of them. This is the sort of thing where you won't find a poll cited on the Internet but if you actually sit in a Caledonian Tim Horton's and talk to people it will quickly become obvious.

Blatch is exceeding well thought of by the citizens of Caledonia. Certainly Dalton's government did bugger all for them!

Would that not make more sense to do when we are actually ready to buy something? So far all we've done is take our place in a queue so that we can have a shot at some manufacturing contracts. We haven't issued any purchase order!

Max, all you've done is convince me of what I already knew - you can't trust any of them!