Issue is Closed

After long months of silence, the Ontario government has now stated that it will not cover any shortfall in the pension plans for GM and Chrysler when they go bankrupt.

Both companies and especially GM have committed a form of fraud over the past generation, underfunding their pension plan while, at the same time claiming they were too big to fail and did not need to pay money in the trust fund maintained by the Ontario government to protect employees in the event a company goes bankrupt.

Many stakeholders, including U.N.C.L.E., made it clear that the Ontario taxpayer is not responsible for covering a private pension plan for which the taxpayer could not benefit from if it was over funded, and was never invited to the bargaining table.

The UAW and GM employees, especially, are livid with the decision. After decades of fleecing the car buyer and the taxpayer, the people in this industry formed a culture of entitlement which was not sustainable. When organizations like U.N.C.L.E. called for restructuring and change, we were told where to go.

We sympathize with the employees, many of them who put their trust in an incompetent union negotiators and equally dumb GM management. However, this is not a new issue. For at least 20 years, all industry stakeholders except for the union and management warned of the way the pension deficit was ballooning.

While the taxpayer is not required to foot the bill for the unfunded pension, the government should still act. Senior GM management as well as UAW management should be held under criminal arrest until it is determined whether a crime has been committed. All vehicle inventory plus factories need to be seized by the government and auctioned off to compensate the pension plan.

Pot Calling the Kettle Black

Canadian university professors are complaining that their first year students in Ontario are lazy, relying on Wikipedia to collect information for assignments rather than doing work.

Maybe assignments should be based on something more than simply gathering information, maybe analysis might matter LOL.

After living in Latin America for three years, I was astonished to see the university program highlights in B.C. that were outright lies about life in Latin America. You see, the professors who design these programs have NEVER been to Latin America. They design the programs based on elitist academic views which have no relationship to the on-the-ground truth. For example, here in B.C. there are programs that discuss how NAFTA has been to the disadvantage of Mexicans. But, in Mexico, the VAST majority of people think NAFTA has made them equal to Americans and Canadians.

The hubris of the typical North American professor-type is offensive.

And the qualifications of many of the high school "leaders" who are responsible for graduating some of these students are suspect. Tonight on CBC, they interviewed a typical high school principal in Ontario. His name is Tom Shultz. I know Tom, very well. He was a phys-ed teacher at Merivale High School when I attended there in 1975-1980. At risk of being sued for slander, I won't say much more about Shultzie.

The White Man's Burden

It started as Imperialism, when the British ruled the world. But its beginnings started in Rome a couple of thousand years previous.

It is really just hubris after all; the belief that one is superior to another and can provide advice and counsel. And run the shop better than the shop owner.

Once the twentieth century arrived, Imperialism had a bad name. Sadly, it was replaced by other isms which have fared much worse. Fascism and communism are examples. Then, once we white folks were blamed for all the ills of the world by the very people who benefited from such ills (a.ka. fully tenured university professors), we decided to go about fixing those problems. Give us your starving children, your dying grandparents, your drunk Indians etc. etc. and we will nurse them back to life.

Along came the Red Cross and Oxfam, and the like.

This institutionalized, and almost, Jungian, unconscious guilt over the perceived mis-deeds of long-dead Caucasian generations has caused many Western nations along with their living, Caucasian, male leaders to do some of the darned things.

When Afghanistan, a nation of nothing more than a bunch of heroine exporting, ignorant dumb assess who live mainly in huts, herding goats, decided that it would harbour the Taliban and Al Queada, some of us decided we needed to fix the place. So we invested billions of dollars. Only to find out that some guy wearing a Shriner's hat has decided that its ok to rape women, and actually codified it into law. Wouldn't we have been better off to just close our borders to anyone holding an Afghan passport, or even anyone who had visited the place in the past 10 years?

I don't suffer from White Man's Burden. I don't blame myself nor my ancestors for the fact that people in Afghanistan just don't get it. My accountability and responsibility in life goes no further than my backyard. And my offer to help those who can't help themselves doesn't extend outside my neighborhood.

Its not that I am selfish or lazy, qualities which every human being shares, whether in Canada or Afghanistan. It's that I am not lost in my own hubris. I am no better than anyone else. I am just a simple fellow who knows I cannot help someone who doesn't realize that I have help to give.

So its time to exist Afghanistan quick as a fart in the wind. By staying there, we perpetuate the culture of guilt which takes resources away from the people who really need it - the people in our house, our backyard and our neighborhood.