It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, September 11, 2022
Vancouver filmmaker showcases more sustainable life choices in new series
A Happier Planet is now on CBC Vancouver's YouTube channel
CBC News ·
In her CBC Creator Network series A Happier Planet, Jamila Pomeroy explores sustainable living. (Ben Cox)
Jamila Pomeroy was working as a chef when she realized just how much food waste the restaurant industry created.
According to the federal government, 21 per cent of dairy, eggs and field crops, 38 per cent of produce and 20 per cent of meat purchased for hotels, restaurants and other establishments goes to waste.
"The food waste was just really weighing on me," she told Stephen Quinn, host of The Early Edition. "Even if you're doing a really great job at composting and having systems in place, that's still a pretty wasteful industry."
Now a writer, filmmaker and entrepreneur, Pomeroy has turned her passion for sustainability into a series of videos for CBC's Creator Network, called A Happier Planet, highlighting ways British Columbians can be more eco-friendly.
"Normalizing sustainable practices early on is a really great way to ensure that our next generation [is] thinking about the planet when they're doing things," Pomeroy said.
Filmmaker Jamila Pomeroy has created a new video series highlighting ways Canadians can be more sustainable in easy, accessible ways. (Ben Cox)
Second Life
A CBC Marketplace investigation found that textile waste nationwide equals about 12 million tons, and Pomeroy wants to help reduce that as well.
For her, that means shopping for second-hand stores and supporting sustainable brands.
She spoke with fashion designer Kristen Ley about the way the fashion industry is shifting to account for the desire to be more environmentally friendly.
New Growth
Agriculture is vital to human existence, but there may be better ways to use land and create less pollution in the process.
Additionally, climate change is impacting the way crops grow and how farmers work the land.
Pomeroy visited CubicFarm, which has developed commercial scale, automated indoor growing systems so people can grow high volumes of food locally, using little water, energy and labour.
Unhooked
A global shift to a plant-based diet could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 70 per cent by 2050, according to a study from Oxford University — another way Pomeroy has altered her life to be more sustainable.
While in culinary school, Pomeroy found the seafood industry in particular to be quite wasteful, and started looking for ways to enjoy the flavours of seafood while eating a plant-based diet.
She shared her recipe for carrot lox — which she says replicates the smoky, fresh flavours of salmon.
Outspoken
Moss-covered trees, shrubs and wildlife all make forests beautiful, but in the fourth episode of A Happier Planet, Pomeroy learns there's more to a forest's ecosystem than what we see as we wander through them.
She met with nature educator Ross Reid to talk about how deforestation impacts not only the trees we see above the ground, but also the root system and other life below.
The Early Edition7:18CBC's new series "A Happier Planet with Jamila Pomeroy"
Jamila Pomeroy is a Vancouver based writer, filmmaker, entrepreneur, model and actor. Through a series of stories, Jamila will take us through sustainable fashion, clean eating and sustainable living with tips on how you can make sustainable living easier, and even fun.
Canadians come up with new $20 bill designs to replace Queen Elizabeth
The passing of Queen Elizabeth II and the upcoming coronation of King Charles III are fast becoming the hottest news story of 2022, bringing the United Kingdom and Commonwealth nations into a new monarchical era with sweeping changes on the horizon.
Currently, all of The Royal Canadian Mint's production coins, as well as The Bank of Canada's $20 banknotes in circulation, bear the face of the newly-departed Queen. But before either has the chance to mint or print new currency, Canadians are coming up with their own unique designs for our future money.
Some aren't happy about the idea of King Charles III gracing the country's iconic green $20 bills, with one Twitter user showing off a comical prediction of what a Charles-faced banknote might look like.
One viral tweet jokingly suggests an entirely new series of banknotes featuring the three titular Trailer Park Boys from the raunchy Canadian mockumentary/sitcom.
Another person nominated Canada's Drag Race contestant Miss Fiercalicious as a fitting replacement for the late Queen Elizabeth II.
Not every suggestion for a new $20 banknote has to make sense, so here's a cute bunny.
Queen Elizabeth II has appeared on Canadian $20 bills for almost nine decades, predating her reign as Queen. Her first appearance on any nation's banknotes was in 1935, when the then-eight-year-old princess was featured on a Canadian $20.
The Queen's presence on Canadian currency — dating all the way back to her childhood — will soon come to an end, but for now, Canucks will just have to wait until the eventual reveal of new designs featuring the current King.
Milwaukee Road turntable will be installed at Silvis shop complex
A former Milwaukee Road turntable is removed from Canadian Pacific’s Bensenville, Ill., yard for donation to Railroading Heritage of Midwest America’s Silvis, Ill., facility (RRHMA)
SILVIS, Ill. — Canadian Pacific has donated the former Milwaukee Road twin-span turntable from Bensenville, Ill., to Railroading Heritage of Midwest America (RRHMA) for use at its Silvis shop complex. On Sept. 8, the turntable, constructed in 1937, was successfully split in two and loaded onto trucks for the move across Illinois to Silvis. Project managers Erik Hoffnagle and Dennis Daugherty coordinated the move for RRHMA.
While Silvis once had a turntable that served the Rock Island shop complex, it was removed and the turntable pit filled in decades ago. RRHMA plans to install the turntable in the footprint of the original, but the pit will have to be enlarged since the Rock Island turntable was 90 feet while the Milwaukee Road table is 110 feet.
RRHMA’s Erik Hoofnagle says the organization plans to repair any steel that needs replacement, sandblast and paint the table before installation. CP also donated the turntable ring and clips, which will be installed after a new concrete pit is poured. A set of plans for the pit was preserved and copies made available to RRHMA. The turntable will allow the organization to easily turn locomotives and other equipment at Silvis.
Part of the timetable is ready for transportation to Silvis, Ill. (RRHMA)
RRHMA President and Chief Operating Officer Steve Sandberg thanked Canadian Pacific for the donation, and donors who came forward at the last minute when plans came together to acquire and move the turntable. Also participating in the move was TN Track Services of Peoria, Ill.; Smith Specialized Heavy Haul, which provided truck transportation; and Cranemasters, which provided the cranes to lift the table.
With the donation, it will be possible to see a Milwaukee Road steam locomotive on its “home road” turntable again. RRHMA owns and operates Milwaukee Road 4-8-4 No. 261, based in Minneapolis, which often rode the table when it pulled trains between Bensenville and Omaha and the Twin Cities in its days of regular service between 1944 and 1954. Sandberg has said that the Northern will visit Silvis at some point, although Minneapolis will remain its home base.
Risley Calls for Expedited Environmental Assessment for Stephenville Green Hydrogen Proposal
Sep 9, 2022 | 8:24 AM
John Risley says he doesn’t mean to be critical of the province’s environmental assessment process, but the current slow pace and uncertainty could threaten the viability of his company’s green hydrogen proposal at Stephenville.
Risley, a director with World Energy GH2, notes a similar project was approved much quicker in Nova Scotia.
He’s urging the province to simply adopt a similar policy and assess its project as one, instead of in three stages.
Meanwhile, Risley all but took credit for landing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Stephenville last month.
On VOCM Open Line with Paddy Daly, he said his company “found out” in mid-June that Scholz was coming to Canada to discuss LNG or liquid natural gas. That was two months before it was announced publicly.
Risley says the company contacted the German Embassy with info on green hydrogen, and an invite to its expo in the west coast town.
He says they were able to convince the German delegation that instead of just the ballrooms of Toronto and Montreal, they should see first-hand what’s happening on the ground to help offset the green energy needs of the future.
As for the World Energy GH2 project, Risley insists they will commit to any reasonable environmental mitigation.
In return, he says they need some assurance that what they’re spending on studies and equipment won’t be a waste of time and money.
John Risley says there's a need for speed to develop hydrogen project in Newfoundland
John Risley doesn’t want to end up at the back of the line.
Risley, one of the directors of World Energy GH2, the company that is proposing to convert wind and water to hydrogen at Stephenville on Newfoundland’s west coast, says the company plans to be a player in the global hydrogen industry. To do that, he said, they need to be early to market.
“Speed is important,” Risley told the crowd at a resources seminar hosted by Atlantic Business magazine in St. John’s on Thursday, Sept. 8
The components needed to generate hydrogen power — mainly wind turbines and electrolysers — are in high demand and the list of customers is getting longer, he explained.
There are only five companies in the world that manufacture electrolysers, he added. Two of them are in Germany and three are in the United States.
The race to develop green hydrogen is also getting more intense, Risley said, noting U.S. President Joe Biden recently signed an Inflation Reduction Act, offering huge subsidies for the creation of green hydrogen.
That means more competition for the components needed for wind farms.
“And many of the manufacturers of wind turbines are committed right out to 2027,” said Risley.
That puts World Energy, and any other Canadian companies, “in a race for equipment.”
Deadline for components
If World Energy GH2 is to reach its goal of having wind turbines set up near Stephenville by the end of 2024, the orders for the components have to be placed before the end of this year, said Risley.
“If we don’t place an order for electrolysers before December, we run the risk of not being able to get them for the next five years,” he said.
He expressed frustration with the pace of the environmental assessment process in Newfoundland and Labrador.
“A project in Nova Scotia almost our size is being permitted in much less time than we are being permitted.
“We can’t hope to get permitted until 2023 and our application was in first,” he said by way of comparison.
In August, the province’s environment minister advised the company that an environmental impact statement (EIS) is now required.
Among the things to be detailed in the EIS are: confirmation of the final proposed locations of wind turbines, worker accommodations, offices, explosive storage facilities, access roads, power lines and substations, as well as their distances from, and potential impact on, nearby receptors; identification of land use overlaps with protected areas, private land, mining operations and traditional land uses; and potential effects on flora and fauna in the area.
That process also provides opportunity for public comment.
The minister will deliver EIS guidelines to the company by Dec. 3.
It could be March 2023 before the minister makes a final decision on whether or not to allow the project to proceed.
Risley said the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador was not ready for the World Energy GH2 plan.
Wind turbines at the Pubnico Point Wind Farm in Nova Scotia. - Kathy Johnson
Moratorium over
It was only this year that the province killed a 10-year moratorium on the development of wind energy and started to consider regulations related to that industry.
“The province is not as sensitive to our time constraints as we would like them to be,” he said.
In a discussion with reporters after his presentation, Risley said to get this project off the ground, things can’t happen in a “sequential order.”
He added the company is willing to follow the necessary environmental process, but it can’t order billions of dollars worth of equipment to build if it doesn’t have some sense that it will get approvals if it does all the necessary environmental work.
“We don’t actually need the piece of paper,” he said, “but we need the certainty of getting the approvals.”
John Risley is one of the directors of World Energy GH2, the company that is proposing to convert wind and water to hydrogen at Stephenville on Newfoundland’s west coast. - Keith Gosse/SaltWire Network File Photo
Regarding the environment, Risley added, “I look at this as the first real opportunity Atlantic Canada has to play a real role in the global problem of climate change.”
He said severe weather events around the world — such as the recent floods in Pakistan and extreme heat in Europe — should put things in perspective.
“Our company will do all the work required to make sure our project is as benign as it can be," he said about the environment. “We want this to be a project that the region … the province and the country can be proud of and we won’t do that by stepping all over the environment.”
Yet he urged people to consider the global environment as well as the local environment.
“Put this in perspective,” he said. “We're losing the war about climate … and if we don't do something about it we’re going to have a lot more to worry about than where the moose cross the road.”
With green hydrogen, he said, Atlantic Canada will help the world decarbonize.
“The prime minister signed an obligation … to be a first mover in hydrogen and to try to deliver hydrogen to Germany in 2025.
“All our premiers endorsed that unanimously,” he said, “so let’s get on with it.”
Yukon's no-cause evictions are little known, poorly tracked, and 'shocked' this former tenant
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'I didn’t realize that was something that could happen to
Karen MacDonald had no idea she could lose her rental unit for no reason. It comes back to a little known clause in the Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, which says a landlord can end a rental agreement any time, so long as they give up to three months notice. (Anna Desmarais/CBC)
Karen MacDonald's apartment in the Whitehorse neighbourhood of Riverdale was more than a rental unit.
It was a fresh start for her and her nine-year-old son after the death of her husband in 2015.
Stricken with grief, MacDonald found she could no longer live in the family home they shared.
So the apartment, down the street from her son's daycare and her job as a nursing home attendant at Copper Ridge Place, came into their lives at the right time.
"It was just such, such a blessing to have moved here," MacDonald told CBC News.
She was devastated when, in May, her landlord left an eviction notice on her door.
"I didn't realize that was something that could happen to us, I didn't know there was eviction without cause," MacDonald said.
CBC reached out to MacDonald's previous landlord but was unable to arrange an interview by press time.
'Enough is enough'
In Yukon, a landlord can end a rental agreement any time so long as they give two to three months notice, depending on the length of the lease.
That means a landlord can serve a tenant with an eviction notice even if they haven't broken a condition of their rental agreement.
The Yukon NDP, long advocates for changing the territory's rental legislation, held a couple of press conferences over the summer to raise the profile of the issue. The latest, on Aug. 26, put forward two tenants from the same rental address who said everyone in their building was being evicted so the landlord could raise rents. That's the third recent so-called "mass eviction" in Whitehorse's downtown, the NDP claims.
"It is building after building after building of people being evicted," NDP MLA Emily Tredger said at the Aug. 26 press conference. "Enough is enough."
The party also tabled a petition by the Anti-Poverty Coalition in the Legislative Assembly last November to stop no-cause evictions temporarily until the tenancy act can be reviewed.
The Safe at Home office in Whitehorse. (Anna Desmarais/CBC)
Some, including the NDP and groups like Safe at Home and the Anti-Poverty Coalition, say the Yukon is one of the only jurisdictions in Canada that allows no-cause evictions.
If a tenant wants to fight an eviction, they can apply for dispute resolution at the Yukon's Residential Tenancy Office — a legally-binding process where an adjudicator makes a decision after gathering evidence from both the landlord and tenant.
Eva Wieckowski from the tenancy office said her office saw 201 disputes filed between April 2021 and March 2022.
The tenancy office doesn't track the nature of the complaints, so Wieckowski said they do not know how many are attributed to no-cause evictions. That means the prevalence of this kind of eviction is disputed.
Volume of problem disputed
Lars Hartling, the president of the Yukon Residential Landlord Association, said the rhetoric that evictions are happening without cause is just one of the challenges facing property owners in the territory right now.
He said his own real estate business hasn't made investments in residential properties in the last two years.
"There's just a ton of uncertainty in the market," Hartling said. "For every investment that's made in the Yukon, there is a landlord behind it trying to make a wise, educated decision.
"This [evictions without cause] discussion just adds to the fire and doesn't allow a certainty in the market for people to feel that they should invest here."
If a landlord does choose a no-cause eviction, Hartling said, there's always a "back story" for why. For example, the landlord could be moving back to Whitehorse or concerned about their property.
Hartling said the "vast majority" of tenancies are ended by tenants, not landlords, so he thinks the no-cause evictions issue is "very minute."
Moving boxes piled up at MacDonald's home. (Anna Desmarais/CBC)
Kate Mechan, executive director of nonprofit Safe at Home, sees things differently. She believes no-cause evictions are playing a major role in homelessness in the territory.
There are roughly 200 homeless individuals, including 60 children, in Whitehorse, Mechan said. She doesn't know how many of these people were evicted without cause, but she said it's likely a "high percentage."
"Essentially anybody who's being evicted right now, who is, you know, of a certain income bracket or can't afford housing or is stuck in the rental market, will be homeless," Mechan said.
Mechan gave some reasons why tenants could face this type of eviction: landlords looking to raise rents and avoid the territory's new rent cap; renovations coming to a particular unit; or landlords moving rentals to short-term Airbnbs for the summer.
No commitment to review residential tenancy act
NDP Leader Kate White said her party raised concerns with the Residential Landlord and Tenancy Act as consultations took place in 2012. Chief among those concerns was no-cause evictions.
But she said those concerns weren't acknowledged by the government — or now, 10 years later, as the same problems persist.
"It doesn't make sense because there's an opportunity for the government to close that loophole and protect people, and they're just not doing it," White said.
Instead, her statement said ending no-cause evictions would mean passing an amendment in the Legislative Assembly — in what she calls a "lengthy process."
The NDP could have tabled amendments in either of the last two sessions, the statement continued, but the party did not.
"It's clearly not that much of a priority for them," the statement ends.
There is no legislative procedure that gives members a timeframe where they must review a bill, according to Dan Cable, the assembly's clerk.
Cable estimates small amendments take a year before they come into effect.
More comprehensive reviews or bill redrafts could take at least three years, he continued.
Yukon tenant association in the works
The only reason MacDonald can share her story publicly, she said, is because she's found a way out.
"A lot of people that I've been connected with so far have been really afraid … of retaliatory evictions," MacDonald said. "And in this market, the idea of potentially damaging, endangering your housing — it's incredibly intimidating."
MacDonald is now in the early stages of creating a Yukon tenancy association that can step in for renters who are struggling to keep their landlords accountable when things go sideways.
In the August Labour Force Survey, 11.9 per cent of full-time employees said they are thinking about leaving their current job, which is 5.5 per cent higher than January’s data.
Brendon Bernard, senior economist at hiring lab for Indeed.com, said this data could represent Canadians wanting to leave the labour force, but it also includes workers wanting to change jobs.
“I think there's a bit of a catch-up that we'd kind of like expect to see in those numbers, especially given that opportunities have been quite plentiful in the Canadian economy,” Bernard said in an interview Friday.
Bernard added that the lack of job hopping and quitting over the past year could be one reason why “Canadian wage growth has taken a bit longer to ramp up than it did in the U.S.
“But, if job seekers are starting to be a little more fluid now, that's another factor that could cause some (wage) pressure in the labor market,” Bernard said.
Average hourly wages gained 5.4 per cent compared to the same time a year ago, which
is up from 5.2 per cent in July.
Bernard said he’s been “expecting stronger wage growth momentum for a while,” but it’s coming at a time where the Bank of Canada is “really doing whatever it can to bring down inflation.”
“I think like there's going to be a bit of a tug of war between the momentum in the headline figures we're seeing and what's going on in pay.”
Statistics Canada reported overall employment levels fell for a third-straight month in August, as the economy shed 39,700 jobs.
The jobless rate climbed 5.4 per cent, from the record low of 4.9 per cent a month ago.
Workers falling behind as some firms see record profits: Labour leaders
Nojoud Al Mallees, The Canadian Press
A record labour shortage and rising wages may seem like good news for workers, but labour leaders say employees aren't seeing the gains that corporations are experiencing amid sky-high inflation.
Canadian Labour Congress president Bea Bruske says workers are feeling the pinch as the cost of living rises.
Canada's year-over-year inflation rate was 7.6 per cent in July, while wages grew by 5.2 per cent over that same period.
Meanwhile, Bruske says corporations in industries like oil and gas have been posting record profits.
Addressing that imbalance, she says, is one of the priorities of the labour movement going forward.
"It's making sure that we actually meet the affordability crisis by addressing inflation and by having governments look at the gigantic profits that many employers are reaping right now," Bruske said.
The NDP have been pressing the federal government to extend the windfall tax levied on financial institutions to oil and gas companies, as well as big box retailers.
But some economists are weary of windfall taxes over concerns they could scare away business investment.
According to analysis conducted by David Macdonald, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, after-tax corporate profits reached a historically high percentage of the total Canadian economy output in the second quarter of this year.
In contrast, Macdonald found workers' compensation as a share of gross domestic product trended downward, falling to the lowest level since 2006.
"It's pretty clear that we're seeing record high profits, and record high proportion of our economy is going to corporate after tax profits as opposed to workers wages," Macdonald said.
The economist says the current windfall tax is "very limited" and suggests expanding it to the entire corporate sector.
Ottawa and District Labour Council president Sean McKenny says there are some businesses that undoubtedly took a hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, but seeing the high profits of some corporations has been frustrating for workers.
"That bugs workers in general, because, again, the fairness is not there," McKenny said.
Private sector wages up six months in a row as employees push firms to counter inflation
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 09 2022
Wages in the private sector have risen for the sixth month in a row as workers demand higher pay to help fight the soaring cost of living. FILE PHOTO | NMG
Wages in the private sector have risen for the sixth month in a row as workers demand higher pay to help fight the soaring cost of living, findings of a monthly survey suggests.
Companies in key sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, construction as well as wholesale and retail— which largely rely on casual labourers — have reported higher pay demands between March and August.
The pay raises have, however, been marginal at a time when firms largely hired to “boost client services and complete work on time” amid falling sales, according to Stanbic Bank Kenya’s Purchasing Managers Index (PMI).
“Firms that saw an uptick [in pay] mostly attributed this to higher compensation offers due to the rising cost of living,” analysts at Stanbic Bank and American analytics firm, S&P Global, wrote in the PMI report for August. “Despite picking up slightly from July, however, the rate of staff wage inflation [in August] was only mild overall.”
Inflation — a measure of the cost of living over the last 12 months— climbed to a 62-month high of 8.5 percent in August, the fastest since 9.21 percent in June 2017 when the country battled a biting drought.
The deepening cost-of-living crisis this year has largely been exacerbated by Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine which disrupted global supply chains and affected the availability of items such as wheat, edible oil and fertilizer, thus raising their prices.
That has been compounded by below-average rainfall since last year which has hit agricultural output, including staple maize, and a weakening shilling against the globally bullish US dollar in a net import economy.
Unlike back in 2017 when the Treasury largely allowed waiver of import duties to smoothen the purchase of key food items such as maize, rice and milk powder from abroad for several months, the government in July entered into a month-long subsidy deal with maize millers.
The Sh4 billion deal, which targeted to halve the price of a two-kilogramme packet of maize meal which had crossed Sh200 for the first time, failed to benefit the majority of consumers who struggled to access the subsidised flour.
Manufacturers last month flagged rising labour costs as a key driver of operational costs in an economic setting of depressed sales amid the fastest climb in inflation in more than five years.
cmunda@ke.nationmedia.com
Hard bargain: Unionized workers prepare to battle for big pay hikes amid super-charged inflation
Unions winning hefty increases as Bank of Canada chief warns employers not to dole out whopping, multi-year salary hikes
Author of the article:Joe O'Connor Publishing date: September 2, 2022 •
Mark Hancock, CUPE president, speaks during a rally in Saskatchewan, in 2019.
PHOTO BY LIAM RICHARDS/SASKATOON STARPHOENIX/POSTMEDIA FILES Article content
Mark Hancock thought he wanted to become a teacher, a career path he imagined would be a much better fit than the two potential avenues his high-school’s aptitude test spat out.
“The test came back with funeral director or hotel manager,” he said, from his hometown of Port Coquitlam, B.C., where he’s sitting in a one-bedroom apartment that has a bare bones home office three steps from the coffee maker in one direction, and three steps from the balcony, where the 57-year-old heads for cigarette breaks between work calls.
Hancock never did become a teacher. But as national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) — the country’s largest union with more than 700,000 members — he represents the interests of tens of thousands of education workers as well as paramedics, health-care workers, airline staff, librarians, hydro crews and municipal employees, right down to the “rink rats” who keep the teenage “hooligans” in check during public skating hours on city rinks
“I did a couple years on rink patrol,” he said. “We had these ugly green jackets, so people could tell us apart from the other teenagers.”
These days, the union leader’s work outfits tend towards comfy blue jeans, running shoes and a collared short-sleeve shirt. For more formal occasions, such as labour conferences, he’ll layer on a dark-coloured sport coat worn with a sort of rumpled, working-person’s pride — minus, of course, a tie.
Mark Hancock during a recent visit to an ongoing strike in Mount Pearl, Newfoundland
. PHOTO BY CUPE NATIONAL
Those clothes are going to be logging some serious mileage in the months ahead as unionized workers — CUPE’s and otherwise — and those who employ them haggle out the particulars of new collective bargaining agreements in a super-charged inflationary time, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the 1980s, when the annual consumer inflation rate often exceeded five per cent.
Ever since, inflation has seldom strayed outside the Bank of Canada’s targeted range of one to three per cent. Labour negotiations came and went. Unionized workers got annual raises of two and sometimes one or even zero per cent.
All was well enough until a pandemic happened, supply chains snarled, consumer demand built up and then boiled over and fuel prices soared. Now we’re fretting over grocery bills and practically fainting at the pumps, as the year-over-year consumer price index rose 7.6 per cent in July, after rising 8.1 per cent in June.
“I think you have to put this in the whole context of workers and frustration,” Hancock said. “We lived through the pandemic — and I retreated to my apartment and did my best to help bend the curve — but so many other workers, union and non-union workers, kept going to work. Workers have had enough.”
Take the 55,000 CUPE education sector workers in Ontario — bus drivers, custodians, early childhood educators, just about everybody except teachers and management — who are calling for an annual wage hike of 11-plus per cent in negotiations with the provincial government. Or else.
Workers have had enough
MARK HANCOCK
The government is offering two per cent a year for the next four years for those making less than $40,000, and 1.25 per cent for the rest. The potential for labour Armageddon is in the air, and that’s just one situation in Ontario.
Hancock isn’t afraid of a good scrap, but he’s also old enough to remember the 1980s when inflation was last a major issue. Construct a graph charting the course of inflation versus wage negotiations through the 1970s and 1980s and what emerges is a pattern of generally higher wage settlements in high inflation years.
“It is never 100-per-cent compensation,” Anil Verma, an industrial relations professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said. “But, historically, if inflation is up five per cent, the union might win a three- or 3.5-per-cent wage increase.”
A lot can depend on where the bargaining starts, and who it involves. Consider the case of Toronto’s aquatics staff, a.k.a. lifeguards, swimming instructors, kiddie pool minders and outdoor pool staffers, who generally skew from teens to university-age in profile.
Lifeguard certification programs shut down when the world shut down in March 2020. The potential crop of new lifeguards and swim instructors, who typically replenish the ranks of those who age out and move on, dried up, as did wading pool staff. Stir in what tend to be unbearably hot and humid Toronto summers, and the lifeguard shortfall was the perfect situation for CUPE to request the city review their wages earlier this year.
Without a hostile shot being fired, the winner was … the lifeguards, who, as they survey the pool in their mirrored sunglasses this Labour Day weekend, are earning $21.19 an hour, up from $17.80. That’s a 19-per-cent increase in pay.
And the lifeguards aren’t the only ones getting paid.
Lifeguards are back on duty at Sunnyside Beach on Saturday June 5, 2021.
Veronica Henri/Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network Thousands of private-sector janitors in Ottawa won a 6.4-per-cent hike in year one of a new deal struck in July. Federal government data that tracked seven major union settlements from March and April showed an annual average wage increase of 3.1 per cent, which is almost double what unionized workers were signing up for between March 2020 and January 2022.
“These are human services,” Verma said. “And I expect with human services, like health care and like lifeguards, where the demand for them is strong, that employers should be willing to pay them more.” Emphasis on “should be.”
One of the things that most worries Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem, as he related during a July 14 panel discussion with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, is creating a dreaded wage-price spiral.
At a macroeconomic level, some wage increases are self-defeating for labour unions
ANIL VERMA
It starts like this: To attract workers, businesses begin upping wages and then pass the cost of those hikes onto consumers. Higher wages stoke consumer demand, so prices go up even more. Then wages go up again, prices follow and the entire wage-price shooting match starts spiralling out of control in a self-perpetuating cycle.
“At a macroeconomic level, some wage increases are self-defeating for labour unions, because if you become very successful in gaining wages, that adds to the inflation, and then the inflation brings the economy back to where you started,” Verma said.
Macklem’s advice to CFIB members in July was to allow inflation a couple years to get back to his comfort zone of about two per cent, and to beware of doling out whopping, multi-year salary increases to workers.
Hancock’s response to the central-banker’s wage-spiral cautionary messaging to business: “It is BS, and Macklem should stay in his own lane.”
His point? Nobody, not even a brainy economist, has a crystal ball capable of foretelling with certainty when inflation will find its way back to the central bank’s two-per-cent happy place.
Macklem should stay in his own lane
MARK HANCOCK
In the meantime, there is plenty of contract negotiation to be done, and the high inflationary era of bygone years may offer a useful guide on how best to keep the labour peace.
Consider COLA, not the soda but cost-of-living-adjustment clauses. COLAs were commonplace in most collective bargaining agreements in the 1970s and 1980s, according to Statistics Canada. If inflation ticked up to six per cent in, say, year two of a contract deal where workers were slated for a three-per-cent raise, a COLA clause would bump it to four per cent.
Stable inflation all but did away with such clauses, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for them at the negotiating table again.
Another potential way to tackle things, Hancock said, is to shorten the contract term. Doing so means more work for negotiators, and likely more year-to-year uncertainty on both sides of the bargaining table. But if 2022 truly is an inflation anomaly, then pounding out a one-year deal and seeing what happens 12 months from now may just make the most sense.
“There are solutions there, and you don’t have to look outside the box — you have to look into the box — and see what it used to look like,” Hancock said.
Pretty wise words from a guy who, once upon a time, figured he’d become a teacher, but caught on as a rink rat and got bitten by the union bug instead.
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