It appears that “conservative” Ontario Premier Doug Ford has caved and will be opening up taxpayer wallets to his unionized public sector workers:
An ill-fated attempt by Premier Doug Ford to cap the wages of public sector workers has been wiped off the books.
His government has followed through with a promise to repeal its controversial Bill 124 public sector wage restraint legislation, cementing a win for thousands of unionized workers.
Twice struck down by the courts as unconstitutional for restricting collective bargaining rights, the 2019 law limited pay increases for most public sector workers — including hospital nurses, teachers and civil servants — to one per cent annually for three years.
h/t James MacMaster
Screw elections. We’ll just have the judiciary make policy. Oh wait, they already are.
Funny how the Charter suddenly becomes relevant when it suits them.
In the US they would table it as new legislation to give the unions bigger raises and once passed would call it the anti-inflation act.
How it all ends.
Taxes are raised to pay the bureaucrat’s salaries. The taxpayers eventually tap out and go on the dole. The government prints money to pay the bureaucrats and the people on the dole.
Until…
“Honey, I’m going to run down to the store and pick up a loaf of bread.”
“Do we need a bigger wheelbarrow for the cash?”
“Not yet. Maybe next week.”
Yeah HR?
Then you get mugged on your way to the store, and they dump the useless cash and steal the wheelbarrow!
That actually happened in Rhodesia er um, Zimbabwe a few years back!
Yeah, it gets really bad when you run out of Other People’s Money, GerryK.
Didn’t hear about that one but sure, the wheelbarrow had value. The cash? Not so much.
“What’s in your
walletwheelbarrow?”I’m reading a lot of whining here. Does anyone imagine that Ford had any choice here? Does anyone have any worthwhile suggestions as to how to stop this?
Reduce the number of public servants and let the electorate know why. Say it over and over again like Barbie McKenna.
Here ya go, you get a raise, but no new hires for 10 years and no replacing anyone for 10 years.
Realistic?
I don’t care.
If the government won’t/can’t balance a budget due to the courts, crush the court’s budgets the most.
“If the government won’t/can’t balance a budget due to the courts, crush the court’s budgets the most.”
So you want more violent criminals on the streets and less prosecution of them for the crimes they commit?
“Reduce the number of public servants and let the electorate know why.”
How? Collective bargaining agreements prohibit this.
Your second suggestion about no new hires is reasonable and doable. However, government has a severe shortage of employment particularly in the armed forces. Also, with no new hires, there will be increasing backlog of tasks taking much longer to complete. This particularly applies when public contact is required for things like pension or veteran benefits. Also this means that down the road parts of government may no longer know how to carry out certain basic functions of government as required by the existing legislation.
So it can be done, but there will be an unpleasant cost.
Funny thing is it’s the courts that are leaving the bad guys back on the streets
So you want even more bad guys on the street?
Somebody please tell me what the “basic functions” of government are.
Daycare?
Pharmacare?
Climate Emergency Care?
Employment Insurance?
Welfare Cheques?
Impotent Armed Forces?
Porous Borders?
Racist Heritage?
Indian Act Suppression?
Via Fail?
Christ Jesus you could privatize or eliminate 90% of all of it at all levels.
The Number 1 most important thing the governments do for me is provide me with clean drinking water. #2 is (heh) taking away my shit. #3 garbage. That’s all from the city.
After that its as thin as Rideau Canal ice in March.
Yes, city stuff for #1 and #2; I pay for my own systems. #3, yeah its nice but I would be okay with burning and a hole at the back of the property like was previously done.
Agreed. Keyboard warriors with no understanding of the LAW surrounding collective bargaining which has quasi-constitutional force. This is not a fight the Tories can win. Like the Supreme Court of Canada would side with the government. Cut the line and move on. Bargain hard during the next round.
Quite accurate, and I agree. That said, bargaining hard means getting the public to tolerate a work stoppage by the civil service. This is usually why school teachers’ strikes end badly for government and voters both. Strikes by municipal garbage collectors was only avoided by contracting out. So this approach only works if the public is prepared to endure a great deal of personal inconvenience.
Please please bring on the inconvenience. Nobody deserves inconvenience like far too many Canadians & Ontariowers who always want the government to Do Something for them.
Mike Harris championed the silent majority – at least for a bit -when he put the stop to welfare rises.
“Does anyone imagine that Ford had any choice here? Does anyone have any worthwhile suggestions as to how to stop this?”
Start by firing any staff that thinks a good strategy is standing silently behind Justin Trudeau and smiling for every photo op he can get while NOT speaking out over the beating of the freedom convoy and riding of stomping horses over crippled geriatrics.
Show what “public sector workers” do to us over and over.
Funny that, another fake-conservative doing exactly what a non-conservative party would have done.
Remember, your vote matters…
Watto. To cgh’s point. What exactly would you have Ford do in the face of the court decision?
Buddy’s suggestion was right on
The problem here is that collective bargaining agreements have protections against firings or layoffs by employers. This is particularly true for public sector unions. Because a collective bargaining agreement is a contract, the courts will enforce its provisions.
No government can simply do what it wants in the face of a court decision. If it tries to do so, that’s what we call a dictatorship or its very ugly form: national socialism.
It has been protected through section 2, the freedom of association. Supreme court has changed its mind on this before, so you could replace the judges like the libs did and wait and see. Other option is to use the notwithstanding clause as it is available to cancel section 2 ‘freedoms’ (Santa suits would need to come up with new excuse).
A conservative might also put in right to work legislation. Cut the due taxes that are funding their political enemies.
Should not have been a shock to Ford given previous Supreme Court rulings. Lower courts need to follow higher court. Appealing to Supreme Court would be waste of time; those libs are not changing existing law.
Probably if he could deal honestly in the first place, by why not give in, he does it so easily.
67 billion $ a year for the federal lamprey’s “wages and benefits”; how much for the secondary blood sucking, freedom hating, violent retards?
The most obvious thing would be to declare them — by definition, if not always in fact, “essential workers”. No “public servant” should be unionized. There’s no competition, no opponent — just a free ability to hold (bend?) the public over a barrel every time they feel like it.
I was in a real union, UAW, and always wonder why they fall into lockstep with these spoilt children.
Associate all you want, but you don’t negotiate salaries except to the extent that your bosses do, based on individual use to the enterprise.
I’d be content with here you go, however you willingly suspend your right to vote while you work for the government, think of your pension.
Mugs, what do the bosses do? If you add value, you get paid; otherwise, find another job in the real world.
Oh I agree, but Unions …. I would think it entirely fair they loose the ability to elect people that feather their bed.
Well I would argue the real world is how we learned, to the up and comings the real world has been slightly adjusted for those stunted by Inclusion, diversity, and equity along with a few tidbits like math and such. Never mind work ethic .
I wandered in on a job interview while grabbing a coffee last week at break. I have to say, I had to look twice hearing the questions put towards the sixteen year old male, just to see if he was in a high chair.
Maybe I’m wrong and many older kids learned something from the pandemic but for some reason I’m thinking the Progs will have that covered.
It is “essential” they don’t do what only they consider their “work”.
Make a video depicting the trans LGBT classrooms, the fake titted shop teacher, men in women’s bathing suits in little girls chagerooms, nurses holding crying babies and injecting them with stuff they wouldn’t willingly take, rifle butt to the head of restrained freedom protester, stomping horses, OPP cruisers stopping local traffic around Indian reserves, taped off shore access and ticketing for fishing during covid theater, Michael Bryant’s smashed car, Benjamin Levin’s curriculum binder, there’s a thousand clips that can be brought together.
We have Diefenbaker’s minority government and Lester Pearson to thank for making it law for sniveling servants to unionise. Things went downhill pretty fast afterwards.
Why even bother voting conservative in Ontario, when all you’re going to get is more of the same garbage Lie-beral policies that Ontarians had to endure for 15+ years of McGuinty/Wynn.
If you want to vote for a lie-beral government then damn-it… vote for the real thing, not some quasi-liberal, Conservative-in-name-only fraud by the name of Doug Ford.
And just think those kids that where first raised on I-phones and I-pads will be the new voters or about to be…… after Fords done . Promise easy street and they will be all yours.
Doug Ford is Kathleen Wynne in a fat suit.
How or when will it end? When enough people start to realize the inherent corruption of Judge made law here in Canada. If the existing laws are sacred and untouchable, what is the point of even convening a legislative branch. Well some laws are untouchable.
A typical comment on that site would confirm the impossibility of fixing stupid.
“There is no waste in public service. Supplies are bought at cost and the wages of public services go straight back into the economy. Without public services there would not be an economy. Public servants pay taxes, buy housing, food goods, none of that is a waste.”
Judges in Canada enforce existing statutes; they cannot and do not invent statutes of their own. That’s the business of Parliament and the provincial legislatures. YOU vote for them, so YOU are responsible for whatever laws they put in place. What a legistature does, it can undo. IF the voters want it to.
“How does it end?” It never does . That’s life in the real world.
Anyone paid with tax dollars does not pay taxes. Some monies paid are clawed back and other monies are reallocated. That also includes “private” sector firms that do government contracting. Taxes DO NOT grow or support an economy.
The debt clock spinning, street people, tent cities, broken car windows, fat police officers eating in their cruisers, graffiti, foriegn interest protesters swarming out onto the Gardiner Expressway,fully armoured swat teams in blacked out suburbans, blocked downtown hospital core in Toronto every night during lockdown, boarded up buildings, empty industrial malls, piles of illegally dumped garbage, police bringing coffee to jihadists, flags for Hamas over highways, electric vehicle fires, electric busses towed by wreckers, garbage being trucked to the US, gas prices, stacks of household bills, CTV and CBC million dollar vans with the huge antennas, Trudeau’s mansion cottage and entourage, cops beating David Menzies….
At least try, what have we got to lose?
richfisher, Paradise lost eh!
In the case of Canada, it wasn’t lost, it was deliberately abandoned!
The present system is beyond repairing/fixing. There are more people on the government payrolls than there are true taxpayers funding the system. We might make an attempt by adopting proportional representation, that is if you are working in the private sector your vote counts for ten government workers. Employed under a public sector contract for a private company your vote is worth five government workers. No government private sector bailouts! No foreign aid. A taxform where you can dictate where your taxes go, ie. National defence, national infrastructure, education, miscellaneous. That is just off the top of my head I’m sure if I thought about it I’d come up with other ideas. Oh! and forget government involvement in subsidizing airy, fairy, pie-in-the-sky, net zero, global saving, programs that you are told will save the world, governments can’t solve homelessness, hunger or crime so why do you think any government program can save the climate.
We think on similar lines but could not has itemized it better than you have. Bravo.
bverwey
L – Reducing the number of staffed positions is not unconstitutional. If the Supremes say
otherwise. Then they’ve staged a coup. Usurped Parliament/Legislatures and have
seized absolute power. If so, the sooner the citizenry decide if they want to retain
responsible government; that is responsible to the citizenry or abandon our Common-Law
heritage and revert back to feudalism. A neo-feudalism run by High Priests (Mullahs) in
black robes.
Only the judiciary and Law Societies can truly bring the administration of Justice into
disrepute. Most of the citizenry in the prairies wish to retain citizens, as individual
and sovereign, who delegate that authourity to elected representatives; but don’t
and can’t relinquish that power. The *responsibility is ours! Exercise it or lose it.
*(every Right is one side of a coin of the Realm, the other side is Responsibility.)
Doug Ford is an opportunistic liberal asshole pretending to be conservative.
Maybe Ford should talk to Milei in Argentina
We see the lack of intellect daily, all across the board, from office workers (paper pushers), tradesmen from all trades, so called educators, (communists) in drag. I know that the people today have little or no knowledge as to how the world and real economies function. I have said this many times over the years, but the stupid will kill us all.
It was doomed to fail but served its purpose: a bit of theater to pretend that Blubber Douggie & Co. were serious about controlling public spending. Meanwhile, 29 ministries and 549 Agencies, boards, and commissions remain untouched.
Ralph Klein campaigned on, and received an overwhelming Alberta mandate to; privatize government services, break the backs of public sector unions, balance the budget, and piss off all the Left people. He succeeded in spades because The People demanded it on behalf of their children and knew who the real enemy was. Still do, commie teachers and nurses be damned.