Assigning blame instead of offering help

The Electro-Motive lockout ended today with the parent company, Caterpillar, announcing that they are going to close the plant. 450 workers are now unemployed, and that number will increase as the effect of the plant’s closure is felt in the companies that supplied Electro-Motive. The most immediate concern for all levels of government should be: how can we most efficiently and effectively assist these workers in accessing the services they’ve paid for , and help them return to the labour market? No matter what the political ideology that drives your particular party, your job as an elected representative is to provide the service that the citizens have paid for. In my opinion, there are concrete and reasonable steps that can be taken: The federal government should ensure that there are additional resources allocated to Service Canada, so that the EI claims of the locked out workers can be processed quickly. The provincial government should facilitate access to the Second career program, so that the workers can find retraining as quickly as possible. And the municipal government should extend a limited term property tax amnesty for the affected workers, to give them the financial breathing room to regroup and re-enter the workforce.

But instead of offering assistance, we have several groups jockeying to assign blame instead. The Prime Minister has officially pointed the finger at the Provincial Liberal government for being ” unable to mediate a solution to the dispute between the company and its employees”.  As a private dispute between a company and its employees, there was no legal ground for direct governmental intervention, and Mr. Harper knows that. He then tells these people who are wondering how they’ll pay the bills that “Our Government will continue to work on a plan that will generate new jobs and opportunities for those affected by this closure, including implementing strong measures to protect Canada’s manufacturing sector”. I would ask Mr. Harper to explain, if his government has such a clear vision of whats needed to protect the manufacturing sector, why hasn’t he put those measures in place already?  His non-offer of help amounts to nothing more than “walk it off and find another job.”

And the NDP have responded by blaming both the Provincial Liberal and the Federal Conservative government for offering tax cuts without job guarantees. This is a very good example of the NDP’s habit of identifying a problem and hurtling past a reasonable solution towards an unsustainable, economically damaging and interventionist solution. Guaranteeing jobs sounds like a good thing at first, but once you start examining the complexity and difficulty in establishing a method of monitoring and enforcing such a requirement, and the once you consider the chilling effect it would have on international investment in Canada, you start to see why the NDP are still not ready to lead the country. Putting arbitrary restrictions like job guarantees into a business agreement impedes business growth, and the only jobs that would be saved would be at the law firms hired to find a way around the restrictions.

There was a real opportunity for all levels of elected officials in London to put aside their party talking points and work together to offer aid and comfort to a traumatized community. It’s a shame that Conservative MPs Ed Holder and Susan Truppe, NDP MP Irene Mathyssen and NDP MPP Teresa Armstrong couldn’t manage to put their partisan campaigning to the side to help the people they represent.

The everybody Impossibilty

When you’re in any position of authority or decision-making, you cannot make everyone happy. And yet, so many “leaders” try to bounce from outraged group to outraged group, hoping to magically make the majority happy enough that they won’t set something on fire.

Here’s the bind the local city council has painted themselves into: a good chunk of the current administration (including the mayor) ran on the “zero percent tax raise” promise, and a few of the ones who didn’t explicitly run on that promise are still trying to meet it. But, as budgets are wont to do, the current revenue doesn’t match the upcoming costs, so currently there would have to be about a 1.5% tax increase. Low, but not zero, and they ran on an absolute, so zero they chase after. Now they are considering tinkering with the multi-year infrastructure budget in order to meet this year’s big zero promise. So there are 3 possible outcomes:

1.magic money from out of the blue pays off shortfall.

2.city taxes are raised by 1.5% and the politicians are branded as liars and hated.

3. Repairs and maintenance are delayed, increasing the final deferred cost and infuriating the voters when a big section of road disappears into another sinkhole (sinkholes are kind of our thing).

Barring the magical solution, city council will be making some big group of residents pretty angry. Add to the mix the inconsistent prioritizing of the mayor and council, where they vacillate between complete stinginess and wide-eyed no-expense-barred city beautifiers, and you have a recipe for a messy and unproductive 2 years until the next election.

Whenever you make a promise that is rigidly defined, you remove your own ability to adjust your plan to meet an unexpected situation. If you vow to scrap a law, for example, then you’re bound to doing that no matter what. Even if there are some sections of the law that still have value, or if there are ancillary elements that are functional and beneficial, you have to throw it all out. Those kind of promises are clear examples of bad leadership, so please be wary when they start wooing you. Of course, when you don’t make simplistic vows to make specific changes, your opponents accuse you of standing for nothing and having no plan.  Can’t please everybody.

 

I’m bluffing!

I’ve been tinkering with my writing process again, or maybe it’s more accurate to say I’m continuing to work on how I work. If I wanted to make it sound more impressive, I’d say that I was continuing to refine my creative methodology to maximize the innovative potential as I establish best practices. I’ve spent too much time exposed to business meetings, I suspect.

So, to catch everyone up to speed, here’s a snapshot of what I have in place so far. I use a giant whiteboard as a workspace, a place to park ideas/plot notes/bits of dialogue, and when it’s full it…stays full, I guess. Anyway, it did, until I had a revelation about the uselessness of a whiteboard full of disjointed ideas from several different phases of the project. Some of those notes were incredibly outdated, and the actual plot had left those notes abandoned in a corn field as it drove away laughing. So, I transcribed the notes with pen and paper, and wiped the board clean. In the process of copying and erasing, I was actively thinking about the story (the sequel to WitchKids, if you were wondering), and I resolved a few of the plot elements that were bothering me. I’m very glad that I could work out a solution to these rough patches, because enough of them had accumulated that I was having real trouble writing the story and enjoying it despite the rough spots.  After the board was cleared, I picked up the ol’ dry erase marker, and I wrote out the story synopsis, and a few more rough spots were smoothed out.

Yes, I am going to explain the picture above. Geez, you’re impatient. As I stood in front of the refilled whiteboard today, I prepared myself to move on to the next step, until I realized that I didn’t know what that step was. Come to think of it, I didn’t really know what the previous step as going to be until I stumbled into it, and that’s how the writing process has been for me from the start. Sure, there are hundreds of how-to books on creative writing, but in the end the process you use is entirely self-created. The real plan you have to fully adopt is:

Step 1) look into the chaos of the unplanned future

Step 2) will yourself into the chaos to shape something out of it.

Most of the new things that I’m working on now, whether it’s novel-writing, parenting, freelance writing, or political activity, are without clear roadmaps. there are a lot of opinions, and some of them are very helpful, but ultimately it’s still advice. I come up with an idea, and then I jury-rig some kind of plan to (hopefully) move towards making that idea real.  And when I’m sitting in a meeting of my riding association executive, or interviewing Marc Garneau for an article on space exploration that I hope I can sell to someone somewhere, or trying to manage dinner at a restaurant with just my 3-year-old and myself for the first time, I can’t help but feel like that confused dog up there in the picture. Who put me in charge of stuff? I have no idea what I’m doing. Oh well, better keep faking it until I make something interesting happen.