Blast from the past... remember the exploding train in Lac Magentic?

The archives at Falling Downs, the precursor of this humble Substack, are chock-full of prescient commentary on the goings on in this messed up world. Looks like Bill Ackman has invested part of his 2 billion $ haul from the rape of CP Rail into taking a position in iconic Canadian asset manager Brookfield. Friday, October 3, 2014 Uber-douchebag Hunter "Hitman" Harrison blasts gov't for overreacting post Lac Megantic You remember Lac Megantic?That was the sleepy Quebec small-town that was literally blown off the map last year when one of Fast Eddie Burkhardt's single-crew oil trains exploded in the downtown.Hardly a year has passed, and CP Rail Boss Hunter Harrison is busy whinging about government over-regulation. Harrison just doesn't get why the busy-body government regulators need to fiddle with the free market, and impose draconian communistic rules about everything from speed limits for trains carrying dangerous goods, to mandating that a mile-long train loaded with dangerous goods should have more than a one-man crew!Well Hunter, let me 'splain it to ya; the reason the government needs to regulate greedy twats like you and your acolyte Burkhardt, is because your logic, your procedures, your unregulated over-weening greed, killed 47 people in Lac Megantic......yet nobody is facing murder charges!The reason Hunter is lobbying for less regulation is obvious. The entire Ackman/Harrison strategy for boosting CP Rail's obscene profits going forward hinges on making trains longer and running them faster with smaller crews!Fuck safety!Fuck sleepy small towns everywhere!Profit uber alles!

Oopsie! There goes another CPRail train off the rails in a ball of fire...

Seems we've seen a lot of CPRail disasters in the news recently.

A few years ago they were in the news a lot too, but not because of their horrendous safety record. No, the story then was all about how two American business geniuses turned CPRail around. Destroying the old culture at the company, their stated aim, payed off big time. Bill and Hunter waddled away with a cool two billion for their efforts.

They were able to add all that value to the company by shedding five thousand workers and ten thousand rail cars. Make the trains longer. You don't need nearly as many locomotives. Let the trains run faster too.


Do you think there could be a connection between that story and today's?

RIP Hunter Harrison

I've written about Mr. Harrison often, and never have I had a kind word to say about him. I'm not going to start now.

That's because I want this blog to be a voice for what's left of that shabby construct once known as the "working class." Hunter Harrison was the enemy.

He is being celebrated across the land today for his "unique genius" in figuring out that if you made trains longer and ran them faster you could move a given amount of freight with far fewer employees. That vision made Harrison rich and famous.

During his career he was lauded for making rich investors richer by destroying tens of thousands of good solid working class jobs.

Good luck with that legacy when you show up at the pearly gates.

Nevertheless he was family to some, and we must respect their loss. He had a role to play and he played it very well. The thousands of lives he destroyed in his pursuit of "efficiencies" were just collateral damage.

Nothing personal.



Rest in peace.

Uber tough-guy railroader Hunter "Hitman" Harrison meets Green Jesus

Damn near shit my pants when I saw the headline, Fossil Fuels 'probably dead' says CP Rail's Hunter Harrison.

Well bugger me britches!

Harrison is probably right of course, but this is not the kind of talk we expect from the guy we love to hate here at Falling Downs.

Here's our theory (and every shock to the cultural code needs an explanatory theory). Hunter recently had a brush with mortality. Yup, he just barely avoided a date with the Grim Reaper.

All of a sudden he steps back from the abyss, looks around, smells the roses, and decides that having a sustainable economy and a future for the planet may not be such a blasphemous idea after all.

Good on you, Mr. Hunter!

Hell, next thing you know the guy's gonna be campaigning for workers' rights...

In spite of all the nasty aspersions that have been spit-balled your way from this blog, we sincerely wish you all the best in your golden years, and may they be full of further startling insights like this one!

John Baird embarks on "stuff-my-pockets" phase of career

After two decades as a high-profile political operator, John Baird has bid adieux to public service.

He's moving on. Last week we learned he had signed on as an "International Strategic Advisor" to Barrick Gold, a "job" that pays well into the six numbers for the chore of attending one or two meetings a year.

When I told Peter Munk 15 years ago that I was willing to be a strategic advisor for a mere $75k a year, he laughed me out of his office.

I even gave him a bit of free strategic advice; a free sample as it were. Put Pascua Lama on ice, I said. It's gonna be a black hole, a money pit.

Get the fuck outta here, he says to me.

Woulda saved him billions to heed my advice.

Back to Baird. Last week Barrick Gold. This week Canadian Pacific. Yup, Bullshittin' Baird is now a director of the new and improved CPR, which also pays well into the six numbers for a couple meetings a year.

He'll feel right at home there. After all, when you listen to Hunter Harrison's bullshit 'n bluster, it's almost like you're listening to a more senile version of Baird.

And you can't blame Baird for looking out for his pocket book. After twenty-plus years of public service, his parliamentary pension is a paltry $65,000 per. Mind you, he must have something coming from Ontario, where he spent some time learning his chops at the feet of Mean Mike Harris, but still, he's gonna have hardly enough to pay for a decent bachelor pad on Bank Street.

But lets not fret. We're up to three or four meetings a year in return for half a million in the bank, and by my math I figure he can still squeeze a couple dozen more directorships into his schedule. A directorship with one of Sheldon Adelson's operations is a no-brainer; a thank-you for the yeoman's work he did promoting Likud and slandering Iran.

Plus, while he's never going to be an A-lister on the public speakers circuit, you can see him making a tidy 25-50k per engagement, mainly due to his extravagantly high profile as Minister of Foreign Affairs, a profile largely earned by being the most inept FM in Canada's history.

Oddly enough, at Barrick he'll be joined by the ultimate carpet-bagger, the Newtster, who managed to coax his net worth from twenty-nine dollars when he entered public service, to multiple millions today.

In the great US political system you don't have to retire before lining your pockets!

CP Rail boss Hunter "Hitman" Harrison wags terror threat

It's not two years since a rail accident caused by criminally negligent railroad managers killed 47 innocents in Lac Megantic, but Hunter Harrison is not afraid of accidents.

He's afraid of terrorists!

Yup, those dastardly terror types could blow up a train-load of Bakken crude any time, any place.

True enough. Yet this potential terror threat he sketches out seems to be strictly imaginary. Those 47 dead in Lac Megantic were totally real.

If there were actual terror cells active in North America, one would expect they might have struck by now. Yet, before and after 9/11 they've done exactly nothing. I think it's safe to say that they don't exist.

Sure, we get the regular headlines about the FBI/Homeland Security/CSIS/RCMP busting up some half-brained terror plot or another, but on close inspection these can uniformly be filed under "informers gone wild." You pay informers millions to lure dim-witted Muslim kids, or even more reprehensible, actual home-grown Canadian kids who have fallen through the massive cracks in our mental health-care infrastructure, into talking stupid shit into the ubiquitous police recording instruments, and voilà, you've busted another terror plot!

But Harrison wants rail traffic re-routed around major urban centres, just in case. This will of course be paid for by the public, not by the railroad that Harrison and his hedge fund bosses are busy looting. That will minimize the chances of a terror attack utilizing a "Bakken bomb" in the downtown core of a major city.

Good thinking, Hunter.

But think about this; we send tractor-trailer loads of highly explosive propane and gasoline and myriad other concoctions into urban cores every day, all across North America, with absolutely no security. Never has there been a terror attack on a single one!

What that tells me is that these terror cells we're supposed to be so afraid of simply don't exist.

Nevertheless, that's what Hunter Harrison felt compelled to talk about in his speech to the Canadian Club today, and it sure made good press!... completely took the eye off the fact that CP Rail's recipe for success since the Ackman putsch consists of nothing other than running longer trains faster with fewer employees.

That's a far greater threat to our safety than the imaginary "terrorists" he's waving around.

It's time to nationalize Canada's railroads

It has taken an act of parliament to coherce Canada's rail duopoly to move prairie grain to ports for export.

Apparently the invisible hand of the free market wasn't enough.

Coming from the corporate bag-lickers in the Harper gang, this market intervention could not have been easy.

They are in effect acknowledging that the "free market" doesn't work.

Which it obviously doesn't.

Both of Canada's national railways were built with huge public give-aways in the form of land concessions and cash hand-outs. The railways have been more than happy to keep the land and keep the handouts. They've not been that happy about keeping up their end of the bargain.

Their end of the bargain was to provide rail transport of both people and commodities from coast to coast. Those railway ties were the ties that bound Canada together.

CP Rail had a wildly self-promoting letter in major Canadian papers the other day signed by Hunter Harrison, the American who has presided in turn over the demise of both CN and CP. The letter was an apology for the cold weather. That's why CP hasn't been able to ship last year's grain crop.

Hunter neglected to mention that since he arrived at CP Rail, 400 locomotives and over 10,000 rail cars have been idled.

I'm no expert on how railways work, but I have a hunch that idling 400 locomotives and 10,000 rail cars would reduce the amount of product a railway could carry.

Which would go a long way towards explaining why Canada's 2013 grain harvest is rotting in grain elevators instead of being shipped to market.

Curiously enough, one never encounters stories about Bakken crude not being able to find rail cars to take it to market.

CP Rail fires engineers, will focus on financial engineering instead

Oopsie!... there goes another CP freight train careening off a bridge in Northern Ontario!

But never mind. Harrison and co. have bigger fish to fry!

Much bigger!

Seems that over the past 100 years as they've sold off 800,000 acres of their original land grants in BC they didn't mean to sell the resource rights along with them.

Those resource rights are worth billions today.

They're going to need them to pay Harrison his next performance bonus.

Dozens of lawyers are going to be making careers out of this for years to come.

Another CP train goes off the tracks, but it's just a "little" oil spill

So don't worry about it.

Hatchet-man Hunter Harrison tells us CP Rail is "investing in technology to limit derailments."

Whew! In the nick of time, I might add!

Since he's axed 4 or 5 thousand of the guys who used to maintain those tracks I guess it's a good thing derailment-limiting technology is available to take their place.

Mr. Harrison has reaped a $50 million windfall since he climbed aboard Bill Ackman's plan to goose the share value of the venerable CPR.

Bill is doing that by firing all the workers and making the trains longer. Why did no one think of that before?

I'd guess because they were interested in running a trans-national railway in a socially and environmentally responsible way, which everybody knows doesn't cut it in this day and age.

Anyway, this makes it three spills in three months for Bill and Hunter and the little railway that used to could.

But watching the Bill and Hunter show has become a lot like watching NASCAR; we know "the big one" is coming.

Bill Ackman's "vision" for CP Rail already fraying around the edges

Not that Ackman ever had a vision for CP that went beyond making a quick buck.

Business media were over-the-top today in praise of the quick turnaround Ackman has engineered at the railway.  Hunter "Hitman" Harrison, the Ackman installation as Chief Engineer, was busy bragging that  things were going so swimmingly that pink-slips might go to 6,000 from an initially projected 4,000.

Alas, late in the day the Montreal Gazette dropped this stinker into the celebratory punch bowl. Seems the outfit that runs Montreal area commuter trains has a few issues. They can't get their trains to the station in time with any consistency because of the newer leaner CPR's "...poor track-maintenance planning, switching errors, and communication problems. Strained relations between CP and its employees are another big part of the problem..."

Well whadya know... maybe you can't run a railroad without people after all?

Ackman's vision for CP Rail vindicated by record quarterly results!

Read it and snivel, Ackman haters. Bill Ackman's vision, being executed by $50 million man Hunter Harrison, has left the doubters in the dust.

Profit up by over 50%!

Most profitable quarter in the history of the 130 year old company!

This should secure Bill's place in the pantheon of top hedgies once and for all!

Ackman's "cost-cutting" at CP Rail; 50 million for the new CEO

Outgoing CPR CEO Fred Green would have had to work another ten years or more to get the kind of green Harrison Hunter scored in his first year at the venerable Canadian railway.

Hunter's first year compensation is reported to come within a whisker of 50 million.

That of course will come out of the hides of the 4,500 CPR employees scheduled for redundancy in the next couple of years.

But what the hey, everybody knows you can let track maintenance slide for a few years. And squeeze a few more years out of those rail cars that were scheduled to be replaced. And whatever lawsuits result from the horrendous accidents that will inevitably result from all this cutting will take so long to drag through the courts that Bill and Hunter will be long gone by the time the shit hits the fan.

Long gone with their pockets bulging with cash... long gone with the applause of the Canadian business media still ringing in their ears.

You're fired... and have a Merry Christmas!

That's the fare-thee-well some 1,700 CP Rail employees got this week, with a further 3,500 put on notice that this would be their last Christmas with the company.

The self-proclaimed "new sheriff in town" is showing the workers what he's made of. Hunter Harrison is no bleeding heart sentimentalist. He's been brought in to turn around CPR's "spoiled, bad, horrible culture." What better way to impress upon the workers that times have changed than to announce massive lay-offs three weeks before Christmas.

The media love this stuff. The fawning over Harrison and his boss, "activist shareholder" Bill Ackman has been nothing short of revolting.

Story after story portrays the duo as heroic knights who have ridden to the rescue of a struggling CPR in the nick of time. What rubbish!

CPR was consistently profitable before the "activist investor" began accumulating his 14% position in the company. Ackman then began to agitate for a change in management, which he won in a proxy battle earlier this year.

Out with the old, in with the new, and thanks for the memories, you 1,700 we don't need on the payroll anymore.

This is yet another sad example to underline the point that any notion of a "social contract" is dead in today's corporate climate. You don't fire those 1,700 employees because the company is struggling, but simply because you can, knowing that the news is going to further goose the share price, which in the end is all that Harrison and Ackman are concerned about.

It's the same logic that allows Caterpillar to close a profitable operation in London because workers in Indiana have been sufficiently beaten down to do the same jobs for less. It's unnecessary from a business point of view.

The long term interests of the workers, their communities, and even the company can all be sacrificed to the short-term greed of these corporate rapists.

And their shills in the media do nothing but applaud.

The rape of CP Rail

CPR stock swooned to new highs today after it was announced that up to a quarter of the work-force will be dismissed over the next coupe of years.

Hedge fund visionary Bill Ackman and his management team have figured out that if you just make the trains longer you can get by with fewer crew.

Guess that's why he's a billionaire and I'm not.

Bill is no ordinary hedge-fund shit-bag. He is an "activist investor," as the papers never tire of telling us. That means he takes a minority stake in a venerable company and uses that to bully the existing management out of the way and install his hand-picked rapists.

Rapist-in-chief at the new CPR is Hunter Harrison, the man who successfully did away with the eight hour day at rival railroad CNR a decade ago.

That's the least of what you can expect at the "new" CPR.