Over the decades, the Liberal Party of Canada has shown little philosophical attachment to any principle other than keeping itself in power.
They shoved their principles under the rug in order to enter an unholy alliance with Social Credit and defeat John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives. They later won election by ridiculing calls for wage and price controls, then once in power imposed such controls. In more recent elections, they have vowed to end free trade and abolish GST.
Once in power, such specific policies are usually abandoned, since to actually try to implement them would mean argument, controversy, lost votes, and perhaps having to admit that the policy was wrong in the first place.
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Kochia has become a significant problem for Prairie farmers
As you travel through southern Saskatchewan and Alberta, particularly in areas challenged by dry growing conditions, the magnitude of the kochia problem is easy to see.
Because of that tradition, we get spectacles like last week’s comments by federal labor minister Alfonso Gagliano, quoted as saying he is considering legislative changes to restrict the right of companies to use replacement workers during strikes.
Gagliano said he was only taking the middle road, between no restrictions and union calls for even more extreme action. But this is a case where the middle road represents a refusal to make a decision on principle.
Farmers have suffered enough from work stoppages at West Coast ports and other parts of the grainhandling chain. Other parts of the economy also lose heavily as demurrage penalties are paid for waiting ships, as export revenues are delayed or lost, and as Canada’s customers lose confidence in our ability to deliver on time.
Even without restrictions on replacement workers, companies would have a difficult time maintaining the grain flow, because of being without regular staff. There would be pressure on both sides, but neither would be utterly at the other’s mercy.
Where unions have the right to strike, companies should have the right to take effective measures to keep their businesses – in this case, often farmer-owned businesses – operating.
A Canadian Chamber of Commerce brief also points out that restrictions on replacements would have an ironic effect – by hastening the collapse of essential grainhandling services, such new rules would produce faster and more frequent need for parliament to pass back-to-work legislation.
The government should, as it once said it was, be trying to improve the collective bargaining process, escaping the strife and irrational working arrangements that result from reliance on confrontation, back-to-work legislation, and high-pressure compulsory arbitration.
Instead, Ottawa seems ready to make others pay any cost just so it can boast that it took “the middle road.”
