It's all relative

There's a story out there about Louis B. Mayer, favourite son of Saint John, New Brunswick, and his meeting with Albert Einstein.

Mayer had been briefed by his staff re why Einstein was famous; he'd come up with the theory of relativity.

So when they finally have a face-to-face, Mayer is alleged to have said, "hey, great to finally meet you! I've got a theory about my relatives too!"

I bring that up only because me and the Farm Manager got into a bit of a shooting match today. She'd read something on the internet about Trump going after Canada's dairy farmers.

"So it looks like your pal Trump is going after our dairy farmers," she says.

My pal Trump?

Them's fightin' words.

I owe Trump a debt of gratitude for the same reason every thinking person owes him; he deep-sixed two of America's most toxic political clans!

Beyond that, there's not much of a palship. Besides, who knows how toxic the Trump clan is gonna be. It's an open question.

Be that as it may, I passed over my initial impulse to ignore the FM's provocations and came back with, "don't worry about our dairy farmers. Trudeau already sold those guys down the river with the European trade deal."

And that's true. Under CETA the Europeans will bring an extra hundred tons or so of real European cheese into Canada every year. That's the kiss of death for pretty much every artisanal cheese-maker in the land. Who's gonna buy Canadian "Swiss" cheese at the Metro when the Swiss Swiss cheese is on for half the price right next to it in the deli counter?

Nobody, that's who.

But that's not what got her pissed. No, she's a Trudeau fan from way back. She even named one of her kids after Trudeau the elder. She didn't waste any time coming back against my Trudeau diss.

Next thing I know she's standing there with the Cooey repeater pointed in my general direction.

Ha ha! She doesn't even know how to load the thing! No worries!

"Just back off on Justin," she says.

"Ha ha..." I rejoinder.

She pulls the trigger.

Holy shit! That just missed my head! Did I leave a round in there the last time I was ground-hog hunting?

I made a break for the stairs and retrieved the old Browning side-by-side out of the dressing room.

This is dicey. I've got the advantage in fire-power but that side-by-side is overkill when you're having an indoor gun battle.

Put a .22 slug through the wall and you can patch up the damage with a dollop of drywall mud.

Loose a couple rounds from the Browning, and holy shit!...

You pretty much have to hire in a contractor to fix the damage.

And that's never a good idea. They've always got nosy questions... "so how did you manage to accidentally discharge your shotgun twice while walking down the stairs?" Next thing you know the cops are there enquiring about gun permits.

That kind of thing.

So I knew it was time for de-escalation. Talk her down instead of take her down. After all, in spite of these occasional gun episodes me and the Farm Manager don't actually want to harm one another.

We engage in a protracted debate about the pros and cons of "free trade."

We both heard Dominic Barton on Michael Enright's show last week. Dominic was all about how great "free trade" is and what a great contribution temporary foreign workers are making to the economy.

I knew I could use this avenue to smooth over my Justin diss. "You know," I said, "Irving doesn't really need to hire tree cutters from Romania. They could just pay a decent wage and the local folks would be all over it."

"And maybe if the lobster processors on the East Coast paid a living wage, they'd find help at home too."

She was warming up. Realized I hadn't intended a personal insult on Trudeau the younger.

"See, it's all relative. Eleven bucks an hour may be a shit wage in Canada, but get a guy out of Romania or Bulgaria, or even better, Somalia, and eleven bucks an hour is golden!"

It's all relative.

And that's why temporary foreign workers are so beloved by Canadian employers.

Walloons save Canada from CETA

CETA, the latest "free trade" boondoggle, negotiated by the Harper gang but now fully embraced by the Justinians, has been dealt a hopefully fatal blow by the Belgian state of Wallonia.

Trade agreements are so beloved by Canada's opinion makers that it has for a long time been deemed unnecessary to explain WHY these deals are good for us. They just are.

CETA offers little or nothing in gains for the average Canadian, but brings a whole lot of risks.

CETA will open up labour mobility for Canadian workers!

In fact, that will be Canada's biggest "win" under the agreement.

Whoopee!

Yup, Canadian workers will be able to collect those massive EU paycheques our brothers and sisters in France and Germany take home!

Only one problem with that scenario; why would an employer in a high wage EU country hire Canadians, when they've got ready access to workers from EU members like Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and Slovakia, where wages are typically less than half of what they are here or in Western Europe?

They wouldn't.

But under CETA Canadian employers would have access to those eastern European workers.

CETA also opens up government infrastructure programs to foreign companies. So, in the event that Toronto ever gets around to letting contracts on that $3 billion one-stop subway line Mayor John Tory has been touting, there's nothing to prevent a EU conglomerate from bidding on the contract and then building it with Bulgarian labour.

And this is a good deal for Canadian workers?

Get the fuck outta here!

We're all niggers now

Back in the day, when I was a gas-pumper at John's Supertest on Wellington Road in Guelph, there was this guy who drove in a couple of times a week in a new Lincoln Mark III. Actually, there was a couple of guys who came in regularly with their new Mark III's. There was Harold Knight, who owned a local lumber yard, and there was Buddy who was a crane operator in the Operating Engineers, a construction union.

The construction unions are one of the few labour groups who have managed to more or less hold up the standard of living for their membership. The others are the cops, the teachers, and the nurses. What do they have in common?

What they have in common is that their work can't be out-sourced to Mexico or China.

You can't send a classroom of local kids to Mexico for the year to learn the three R's from dollar-a-day peons.

You can't out-source policing to Mexico or China either. And it goes without saying that your local health care providers are going to stay local. You might be able to medi-vac the local trauma patients to the nearest regional hospital by helicopter, but those helicopters won't make it to Shanghai.

Till now, the construction trades were safe too, but Big Steve's got a plan that's gonna change that.

One of the big "wins" for Canadian businesses under the pending CETA "free trade" agreement with the EU is enhanced labour mobility. Note that this is a "win" for Canadian business; not for Canadian workers. Buddy and his new Lincoln would never happen if Canada's construction work was thrown wide open to crane operators from Poland and Hungary and Estonia.

But it gets even better; at least for business owners, not workers. That hush-hush TPP trade agreement that Big Steve has been busy with is gonna throw open the door to crane operators from India and Bangladesh!

That's really gonna piss off the guys from Poland who just moved here to take away Canadian jobs that used to pay $50/hr by doing them for $20/hr. By the time the Bangladeshis settle in, a tower crane operator in Toronto is going to be working for five bucks an hour!

Around the time Buddy was pulling into John's Supertest, Pierre Vallieres was sitting in a cell in New York State penning a book called White Niggers of America.

Pierre was a bit ahead of his time. His provocative use of the "N" word was meant to draw attention to how Quebecois workers were exploited. Sadly, time has passed Pierre by...

We're all niggers now.