King Arthur Movie Tristan

Two days ago Buzz Hargrove was mentioning "Canada's Manufacturing Crisis," which lets face it, is Ontario's Unionized Manufacturing Crisis, and he laid the blame squarely at Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty. They are the guys who should be losing their jobs, paraphrased Hargrove, not 1,000 GM workers. Interestingly, while Buzz was blaming Harper and Flaherty for not creating enough US demand for pick-up trucks, Dalton McGuinty was making the crisis worse, to stunning unionized silence.

The CAW will tell you they have a very tough round of negotiations coming up with the big three next year, where GM, Ford and Chrysler will all be looking for concessions from their workers. The concessions will be in the form of wages, benefits and paid time off. So in the middle of this crisis, in the middle of a good, the right wingers aren't left wing enough rant, Buzz's left leaning buddies in the provincial Liberals decide to create, one more paid day off.

We can debate the merits of the day off pro and contra until the cows come home, but if we are in the middle of a job-loss crisis, this is not helpful, it's harmful. And, if that is so, shouldn't Dalton be called out on that fact by Buzz, Jim Stanford et al.? And if they don't call Buzz on this one, does this mean there is no real crisis?

Oh, and memo to the CBC: back in September 2005, the CAW lost zero (0, none, nada, zilch, soccer score) "jobs at DaimlerChrysler in Ontario." Many workers, some of whom I knew, worked with, liked, in fact did lose their jobs. But the CAW? They weren't their jobs, they don't own the jobs, thus they cannot have lost the jobs. Just sayin'