Unreliable workers unite!

According to this news item, a British business was told it could not advertise for “reliable” workers because to do so would discriminate against “unreliable” workers.

… recruitment agency boss Nicole Mamo was especially careful to ensure her advert for hospital workers did not offend on grounds of race, age or sexual orientation.

However, she hadn't reckoned on discriminating against a wholly different section of the community - the completely useless.

When she ran the ad past a job centre, she was told she couldn't ask for 'reliable' and 'hard-working' applicants because it could be offensive to unreliable people.

Can we be far from someone deeming unreliableness (if that’s a word) a medical condition with unreliable employees being eligible for long term disability? I think left the workforce too soon.

In Memory of Kate McGarrigle

 

We will miss you.

The ReformaTories response to voter feedback on prorogation?

Just ignore it and it will go away.

True to form, my totally useless Con MP, Scott Reid, deals with his email by not dealing with it. This is not the first message I’ve sent to the not-so-honourable member, but at least he read and then ignored all the others. This time he didn’t even open it. Do you suppose it might have had something to do with the Subject line?

Copenhagen and the HarperCons

As John Ivison reports in the National Post, “Stephen Harper trudged up the steps of the plane taking him to Copenhagen with the reluctance of a Jenny Craig client learning to love lettuce.”

And then sums up with, “Not only does Mr. Harper find himself obliged to support such a process, it sounds very much like he might have to sign up for a carbon tax to help pay for Canada's contribution to the climate protection fund.”

Well guess what. That’s what happens when you ignore your responsibilities and choose to follow instead of lead – you have no choice but to tread in the footsteps of the lead dog, and you don’t get to pick who that is.

The Harper Conservatives – and it must be said, the Liberals before – have done their best to ignore the climate change file as it is widely viewed in political circles as a no-win issue that will ultimately pit energy-producing provinces against energy-using provinces. This need not be so, but certain lobby groups have a vested interest in maintaining the big lie. And so, instead of assuming the lead years ago, Canada now finds itself in “me too” land, with no influence, no credibility, and no choice.

Way to go guys, you make us so proud.

 

“Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.” – John Gardner.

CBC, what hast thou wrought?

It’s a few weeks now since the much ballyhooed facelift at CBC News. Although my first impressions were less than positive (to be charitable) I decided to give them some time to shake the bugs out and for me to get accustomed to the new shows and format.

Well CBC, your time is up, and if anything the more I see of the changes, the more I dislike what you’ve done.

What finally put me over the edge was watching The National last night. It was actually painful to watch Keith Boag, one of the CBC’s better parliamentary reporters, doing a fluff story on Tiger Woods’ indiscretions from LA. Tiger doesn’t even live in LA for Pete’s sake, so you can tell how much hard news there is for a veteran reporter to cover in the City of the Angels. Putting Boag on that beat is treading dangerously close to constructive dismissal in my opinion – but perhaps that was the plan all along.

And consider some of the other changes. Evan Solomon, a terrible interviewer who doesn’t hesitate to let his biases show, gets to replace Don Newman (another long-term, highly skilled veteran) on Power and Politics. Connect with Mark Kelly is a total dud in which his talents are sorely wasted. Local supper-hour newscasts now span 1 1/2 hours of the same stories being repeated over and over for those with short attention spans. And finally will someone PLEASE give Peter Mansbridge a chair!

Nope I’m not impressed. CBC you’ve created the Spruce Goose of network television news. Time to toss it on the woodpile and get back to focussing on content and quality rather than trying to be CNN north.

Some people are put on this earth just to piss me off.

Was running short of cash the other day and so I stopped at the bank to use the ATM. There was no one in line and only one person at the machine… well actually two people, a woman and a child about 6 years old. So I expected it to be quick. What I didn’t know was that she was using this as a “learning experience” for her son.

As I waited… and waited… the conversation went like this.

Mom: “No sweetie, not that button. This button.”

Son: “Why” 

Mom: “Because we want to put this money in the bank. That’s what deposit means.”

Son: “Okay.”

{beep}

Mom: “Now press the buttons to put in the amount. This amount. Here, on the cheque.”

{beep} {beep} {beep} …

Mom: “Okay, now press the Okay button. No, not that one…”

{beep} {beep} …

Mom: “Oops, that’s not right. Press the Cancel button… Here… Okay. Now we want to make a deposit, right?…”

And so it went for about 10 minutes as the line-up to use the cash machine grew longer, and longer, and the temperature in the small enclosed space rose considerably.

Finally, totally ignorant of the inconvenience caused to others, they finish and as they leave mom says to the boy, “There now, wasn’t that easy?”.

An unprincipled stand on Jordan’s Principle

On December 12, 2007, the House of Commons voted unanimously in support of a private member’s bill that became known as Jordan’s Principle. Named after a young Aboriginal boy, Jordan River Anderson, who died after 2 1/2 years in hospital while the Manitoba and federal governments squabbled over who was responsible to pay for the services he needed in order to go home, the motion was intended to implement a child-first responsibility in jurisdictional issues. In other words, the welfare of the child was to be paramount; the bureaucrats could fight over who paid for what after the fact.

So two years later, how well have the Harper Conservatives done with implementing Jordan’s Principle? Not so well it seems.

On the CBC’s The Current this morning, Cindy Blackstock, Executive Director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society described how her organization has filed a human rights complaint in an attempt to force the government to implement Jordan’s Principle. The Harper Government’s reaction? According to Blackstock, it was to sic the lawyers on them.

Well, you know, they’ve fought it, right from the very beginning. They are challenging the jurisdiction of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and in fact they’ve appointed lawyers from the Residential School Division to fight this case. They have spent literally thousands of taxpayer dollars to fight the case of equality instead of meeting the needs of children like Carolyn’s.

She goes on to say,

… these are services available to every other Canadian child. If this is where we are in this country, where our government thinks it's okay with any rationalization to racially discriminate against vulnerable children and their families just because of who they are, I personally think that we've hit a new moral low as a country and I think that we absolutely stand for better. That's why all those young men and women over the years have fought for those values of freedom and equality in such a dignified way, during the Second and First World Wars and in Korea and now we’re sending young men and women to do the same thing in Afghanistan, but we're not prepared to do it at home. I don't think that's right.

Listen to the broadcast here.

To be fair, the underlying funding issues that caused the Jordan Anderson tragedy (and others) were not created by the Harper government; it’s been problematic for generations. However it is the Harper Government that finally has a solution in hand and has had for almost 2 years, but instead of implementing the unanimous will of Parliament appears to be content to let the bureaucracy continue to fight Jordan’s Principle to the ongoing detriment of First Nations children living on reserves. It is truly unconscionable.