Here comes the latest attack on police unions

And who better to lead the attack than Stephan Cretier, boss of Garda, the biggest private security company in the world, and his eager minions among the think tanks and the media.

Until now, at least in Canada, policing has been one of the few professions that has successfully avoided being ground down to poverty-level shit-job status, along with nursing and teaching. Why?

Essentially it's because policing, nursing, and teaching can't be outsourced to Mexico or China.

Mr. Cretier thinks he's found a compelling argument to circumvent this problem, and it certainly hits a lot of the right buttons. Let's re-define policing!

Yes, real he-man cops don't want to be receptionists at the police station!

Let his private mall-cop agency handle those duties, at major savings for the taxpayer!

Real cops don't want to direct traffic and answer burglar alarms.

Let the private security companies do that!

That'll free up real cops to focus on all that real crime that's been decreasing year after year, decade after decade.

In other words, if we restricted "real cops" to "real cop" work, we'd only need a quarter of the cops we have now.

The other three quarters of their work could be done by... his company!

At massive savings to the taxpayer!

We can turn tens of thousands of police jobs into security guard jobs! After all, they have "similar educations."

That's true. Over the last twenty years there's been an explosion in "Police Foundation" programs at colleges across the land. They graduate ten times more qualified applicants than can be absorbed by police forces. A lot of them end up as security guards while they await their big break into a "real" job.

Cretier is being truthful when he says they don't want to replace the police. They want to be police.

So, going forward, this is how things will shake out. The public will gradually come to the realization that Police Foundations programs will train your kid for a job as a security guard. Interest will rapidly wane. Once we've stripped actual police of all duties other than armed confrontation, the same right-wing ideologues driving this anti-cop agenda will propose that armed confrontation is best left to the military.

Voila! We won't need cops at all! It'll be min wage security guards for the light-duty stuff, and the Canadian Forces for the heavy duty stuff!

Good-bye police unions!

Good-bye, tens of thousands of well-paying middle-class jobs.