Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Anti-Scab Legislation


The BQ private members Bill C-257 to Amend the Canada Labour Act to include anti-scab legislation had second reading in the house yesterday. You can read the debate here.

It is one of two private members bills coming before the house on this issue, which was also debated in the last parliament but went down to defeat at the hands of the Liberals.

In his opening comments
Mr. Richard Nadeau (Gatineau, BQ, who brought forward the bill said;

Mr. Speaker, I am very honoured to again present Bill C-257, an act to amend the Canada Labour Code (replacement workers).

The Bloc Québécois has made it a duty to present this anti-scab legislation for the tenth time. There should no longer be two categories of workers in Quebec, namely, those governed by the Canada Labour Code, which allows the use of scabs, and those governed by the Quebec Labour Code, which does not.

This bill is designed to put an end to the inequity between workers governed by the Quebec Labour Code and those governed by the Canada Labour Code. Only Quebec and British Columbia have legislation prohibiting the use of scabs. Four provinces, including Ontario, however, already have anti-scab provisions in their labour codes.

Let us recall that Mike Harris’s Conservative Ontario government, three of whose ministers may be found in today’s federal cabinet, shamefully legalized the use of scabs again.

In Quebec, the adoption of an anti-scab law goes back to December 1977, under René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois government. Getting his government to adopt this anti-scab legislation guaranteeing respect for workers was an impressive leap forward.

Coming at the end of a particularly tumultuous strike at the United Aircraft factory in Longueuil, this legislation, by seriously hindering employers who could not care less about their unionized employees, placed Quebec in the North American vanguard in this area.

Anti-scab legislation will be good for all workers, both in Quebec and elsewhere in the provinces and territories.

In New Brunswick, union leaders have already been asking for some time for anti-scab provisions in their labour code. Likewise in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where the unions are trying to convince their New Democratic governments to adopt such measures.

In federal legislation, section 94(2.1) of the Canada Labour Code contains a prohibition respecting replacement workers, but only if an employer uses them with a view to undermining the union’s representational capacity.

This prohibition is very weak, because an employer simply has to go on recognizing the union in place and go on negotiating to avoid undermining the union’s representational capacity and it is entitled to use replacement workers.

In other words, if an employer refuses to negotiate while using replacement workers, the Canada Industrial Relations Board can prohibit their use. But all an employer has to do is negotiate or appear to be negotiating with the union to avoid this prohibition and go on using scabs. So we can see that this is a ridiculous provision and provides a loophole allowing the use of scabs.

The prohibition respecting the hiring of replacement workers during a labour dispute is therefore more necessary than ever.

The debate was important enough that the Minister of Labour showed up to debate against the bill. No surprise there. However he does defend the principles of class war. Something the unions will have to deal with if either bill fails to pass.

"We must consider another important principle. Let us go back to the negotiations I mentioned earlier. Some say that the employer's right to lock out employees offsets the union's right to strike, but that is not the case. The employer's right to continue operating during a strike corresponds to the employees' right not to go to work."


The point of a strike is to end production, to end the employers ability to operate. And here the truth is told. The provision to lock out which was once considered enough to balance the unions right to strike, has now been replaced with the owners right to hire scabs. And that my friends is class war.

Thus every strike should be considered the basis for a General Strike, since an injury to on, is an injury to all. The State and the capitalists understand and fear this. They understand class war better than the unions, whose purpose is to ameloriate workers demands for the interests of capital and its state.



Also See:

Labour Relations Board Scandal in Alberta

Ralph Klein; Tyson's Bum Boy

Telus Workers Defiant

Union Busting Alberta Style


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The Accidental Budget

Oh is that why the bells were ringing in the house?

Tory budget passes - accidentally Liberals, NDP sat there, unaware

The MPs were apparently expecting Conservative MP Diane Ablonczy to address the House. When she didn't show up, the Speaker moved on to the budget, catching the small smattering of MPs in the chamber off guard. Not realizing they were voting on the budget at third reading, the Liberals and NDP sat quietly, enabling the measure to pass without challenge.

Too bad think what would have happened if they all woke up and realised they could probably defeat the budget.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, wasn't even in the House for the vote

This is a political gaffe.

Gilles Duceppe, the Bloc Quebecois leader, suggested it was either an error, as the parties opposed to the budget bill say, which shows that they are "incompetent," or it was not an error and they are "liars."

Gee Gilles thats the pot calling the kettle black. Guess you didn't take up Charest's challenge to bring down the government over Kyoto and the failure to pay Quebec its due.

Or they could blame it on the devil since yesterday was 6/6/6


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Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Conservative Corruption

Is spelled Rob Anders. Our favorite self righteous right whinger, member of the Fraser Institute Rat Pack along with Kenney and Levant, found with his fingers in the taxpayer till. Lawsuit alleges MP faked office expenses

Now the Liberals see a sick dog and attack.
Liberals call for police probe of Tory MP over fraud allegation

The Progressive Bloggers chimed in with I told you so.

Even the Blogging Tories were aghast. Well one was. The rest were strangely silent over this turn of events. Silent as the grave.

Isvantffy versus Anders
Long-time Calgary MP Rob Anders' staffer James Isvantffy has dropped a bomb shell at the Court of Queen's Bench in Calgary. In his wrongful dismissal claim, Isvantffy makes allegations of fraud within the office of the controversial MP.


Tory corruption in Alberta, say it ain't so.



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LNG

Is it just me or do these two stories have something in common?

Canada Kitimat LNG plant gets provincial OK

PetroChina seeking LNG suppliers - report


Coincidence? I think not.



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Between Coal and a Hard Place

So is it going to be coal or nuclear that Ontario moves towards for its energy needs? Well not coal despite Our King Ralph trying to woo Ontario folks to give his mythical clean coal a second look. Of course there ain't no such a creature yet, however coal prices are still lower than other energy costs And of course the coal lobby in Ontario is linked to the right wing and Klein.

Energy minister dismisses clean coal idea


Of course I guess Natural gas is out of the question. Wait a minute why is that?
Natural gas prices predicted to plummet. And LNG plants are planned for both coasts.

Shell CEO says natural gas prices must be kept competitive
Van der Veer pointed out that gas doesn't have a monopoly over power generation. "Power generation can come from alternative energies," he said, adding that once coal power stations are built, it's not that easy to switch back to gas generation, he said.
"We have to make sure that people make long-term choices which are favorable to gas," he said.
The industry needs knowledge and relationships because of the difficulties faced in creating a secure future for gas production and consumption, "it needs complete value chains," he said.
"There's a very good future for gas, oil companies can help with their knowledge, governments set the framework...you can't do it on your own, it's all about confidence and trust," Van der Veer concluded.


And how about hydro? Why not buy into the Quebec Hydro grid, and look at joint dam construction with Manitoba in the northern border region.

Well because The Nuclear lobby has the McGuinty government ear, thats why.





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Bubble Burst


The current housing bubble in the US is being used to pay off credit cards, as folks take out second mortgages, the elderly take out loans through reverse mortgages (those despicable CHIP ads on TV) and as folks buy and flip homes in heated up real estate market. But has the bubble burst? Forbes thinks so.

Special Offer: What happens as the middle and working classes get priced out of home ownership? They stay in apartments, which is good news for multifamily REITs, which pay fat yields and have returned an average of nearly 20% year-to-date. Click here for the best buys in apartment REITs from the Forbes/Slatin Real Estate Report.


And so does the new Fed Chairman.
Bernanke batters stocks

As I posted here yesterday the US is about to enter a period of Stagflation.

See:
Greenspans Legacy


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Outsourcing IT

After selling off its computer manufacturing arm to China, IBM was cash rich, and what does it do with the cash, why invest in India. The number two growth economy behind China. This will set off Lou Dobbs for sure. Yet why he does not get the neo-liberal agenda is beyond me.


IBM plans to invest $6 billion in India
Global companies are competing here to harness talent and to garner market share in the second fastest- growing economy in the world, after China. Other technology multinationals like Microsoft, Intel, Cisco Systems and Advanced Micro Devices have recently announced investments in India that each exceed $1 billion.Among IBM's operations in Bangalore is a command center, the largest of three such IBM centers worldwide, which monitors 16,000 computer servers and 10,000 applications globally, according to Mats Agervi, vice president for global delivery services. The center has some of the most sophisticated high-technology equipment, huge bandwidth connectivity and workers who back up operations of the firm's customers worldwide, Agervi said.

America is dying as a manufacturing society as it embraces the service economy of Multi-level marketing and internet business. Manufacturing and computer servicing are going offshore, as America merely becomes a nation of sellers and buyers. Which is why its economy currently is boyed up by the housing bubble.


However it is the nature of globalization, capital goes where it can make money, and it makes money through cheap labour and technological advancement. Which produces a new proletariat where one did not exist before. IBM and other American IT companies are doing what the British Empire did in India 100 years ago during their period of Free Trade expansion. Something Marx pointed out about India over 150 years ago.

The British Rule in India by Karl Marx

These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe:

“Sollte these Qual uns quälen
Da sie unsre Lust vermehrt,
Hat nicht myriaden Seelen
Timur’s Herrschaft aufgezehrt?”

[“Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?”]
[From Goethe’s “An Suleika”, Westöstlicher Diwan]



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Stephen Nixon, Richard Harper

Gee this reminds me of when Richard Nixon decided to comment on the Charlie Manson Case.

Before the trial began, the Manson case became a political issue. President Richard M. Nixon condemned Manson on public television, calling him a dangerous cult leader.


Especially when the PM makes it personal.

Terror suspect Chand accused of wanting to behead prime minister ...

The lawyer chastised Harper for expressing "happiness" that the suspects had been arrested over the weekend.

"I expect my client to get a fair trial; as fair as every other trial that occurs in Canada," said Batasar.

"In fact the comments made by the prime minister himself with respect to his happiness that these persons had been arrested certainly is surprising and shocking."

"I believe the prime minister should keep out of the process and let justice take its course."

And like the Manson case with the hysteria around terrorism innocents are bound to be locked up and have the key thrown away with our new law and order security state under Harper. Especially when he has already declared them all guilty.

Bobby Beausoleil, the intended beneficiary of the copycat Tate-LaBianca murders, remains in prison despite his having been convicted of a single murder that was not aggravated by factors like torture or rape. It is probable that the specter of a headline reading "Manson follower paroled" is behind his continuing imprisonment. The Manson Myth

Snipers, leg irons, selected evidence, police brass — all calculated to sway the public, lawyers and security experts say

However after the inital media hysteria dies down and the real facts are placed before the courts the chances are very good that this was all a tempest in a tea pot. Used to assuage the US Public, bolster the Harper Government and of course put more bucks in RCMP, CSIS and local cops budgets. This high profile bust comes after CSIS claimed it needed more money to detect immigrant terrorists entering the country, and while the current security state anti-terrorism law is being reviewed. Coincidence, I think not.

As for the innocent they will have to wait for their day in court to overcome the social pariah status they currently face. Most so called security cases in Canada have ended up with NO convictions according to the panelists on Mike Duffy's show today. And they too recommended that Harper should have kept his trap shut.





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Double Jeopardy


This is a case of double jeopardy where in the victim is subjected to both the sexist regime of Sharia law in Iran and the ruling classes discrimination against ethnic minorities in Iran.

Today on Parliament Hill MP's from all parties gathered to denounce the pending death sentence for Nazanin Fatehi who killed a rapist attacking her. She is Kurdish in a largely Farsi country. Double Jeopardy.

Congratulations to all the Women MP's who united to make this case their cause and held an all party joint press conference withNazanin Afhin-Jam on Parliament Hill today to celebrate the news that a new trial for Nazanin Fatehi maybe pending.


Update: Nazanin's death sentence has been overturned by the Iranian head of Judiciary Ayatollah Shahroudi. The case will now be sent back to a lower court Read more


And congratulations to Nazanin Afhin-Jam who has used her celebrity for a just cause.
Ex-beauty queen spearheads fight

Sign and spread this petition, started by the Canadian model and singer Nazanin Afshin-Jam.

The MP's should offer Canada as an asylum for Nazanin since we know she will not get a fair trial under the Ayatollahs.



18-year old Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi (f) was sentenced to death after she reportedly admitted stabbing to death one of three men who attempted to rape her and her niece in a park in Karaj in March 2005. She was 17 at the time. During her trial, she reportedly told the court “I wanted to defend myself and my niece. I did not want to kill that boy. At the heat of the moment I did not know what to do because no one came to our help”.


NAZANIN FATEHI: The Kurdish woman awaits execution in an Iranian prison for killing the man who tried to rape her NAZANIN AFSHIN-JAM: The Canadian model is leading a growing international campaign to spare the jailed woman's life

Bodog Music Recording Artist Nazanin Afshin-Jam Pleas to World Media, Kofi Annan and the UN to Save the Life of Another Nazanin in Iran

Save Nazanin

This website was created to spread information about the 18-year old Iranian girl Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi, who has been sentenced to death by hanging. Nazanin`s "crime" was killing a man who ambushed and tried to rape her. Please take a few moments to read about her case and what you can do to stop the execution and save Nazanin`s life.





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Blame the Workers

In a sleazy move that is typical of B.C. Ferries management they are now blaming the mariners, the Ferry Workers for not being trained on new equipment installed on the Ferry, Queen of the North, that sunk earlier this year. The equipment an automatic pilot and navigation computer were installed only weeks before the sinking, and none of the ships crew were trained in their operation.

The Transportation Safety Board considered this failure of management so serious that they wrote the B.C. Ferries Corporation with their preliminary findings. B.C. Ferries response, provide training for the workers heck no. Blame the workers, issue a new form letter demanding the workers sign that they are trained, failure to complie and you are fired.


Lack of training cited in fatal BC ferry sinking

The TSB said some crew members on the bridge of the ship felt they did not have enough training to work with the new equipment — specifically the newly installed auto-pilot system. "These are master mariners, so again I'm having a little trouble that they would want to be in control of a ship and not be familiar with their equipment," said David Hahn, president and CEO of BC Ferries. Hahn said the company is taking the preliminary findings seriously and have already taken steps to address the training issue. "We've introduced a new form that we're asking all the officers to sign, stating that they're familiar with the equipment, they're comfortable with it," he said. "We have to remove that doubt."



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