Canadian Trumphobia not as bad as originally feared

Here's a story from CBC that says Canadians are making more trips to the USA since the election of you-know-who. That figures. Canadians tend to be a smug and hypocritical lot. They may despise that vile man in the Oval Office, but Girl Guides aside, they're still gonna cross the 49th if they can save ten bucks on a tank of gas.

On a related note, here's a point of view on the Muslim ban that hadn't occurred to me. Seems that within hours of its implementation the high-traffic freight crossings from Ontario into Michigan and New York State were getting seriously bunged up.

Here's why; back in the day, when the Teamsters were a serious outfit and the vast majority of drivers were members, driving truck was a respectable career. If you were a Teamsters driver in the middle sixties you were solidly "middle class" income wise.

There weren't a lot of guys named Mohamed in the Teamsters at the time.

Thanks to fifty years of deregulation and union-busting, truck-driving has become a shit job, and you know who takes those. As has always been the case, the recent immigrants end up in the shit jobs. When the Irish were recent immigrants, they got the shit jobs. Same with the Italians, the Ukrainians, the Poles... everybody started out at the bottom of the ladder.

When my dear Daddy got off the boat in 1956, his first job was shovelling coal at Kloepfer Coal in Guelph -  with a hand shovel, not a power shovel.

Guess who you're likely to find behind the wheel of the typical big rig today? That's right - a recent immigrant, and a lot of those guys have Muslim names.

So Mohamed pulls up to US Customs with a 52 foot trailer loaded with a million dollars in auto parts from Linamar or Magna. Customs guy notices driver was born in Somalia.

"Ya'll park that rig in the lot over there and come in for a chat, Mohamed."

Well guess what? If the driver isn't crossing that bridge, the truck ain't either!

That million dollars in auto parts is heading for a Ford or GM or Toyota or Mercedes plant somewhere. Thanks to the magic of JIT and all that stuff, those car plants cripple up pretty quick.

Team Trump may take their sweet time returning calls from lawyers for the ACLU, but they pay attention right smartly when lawyers from GM and Ford are on the line. By the end of day one dozens of those trucks were parked and Team Trump knew they had a serious problem.

Judge James Robart's overturn of Trump's travel ban was actually a huge face-saver for Team Trump. Anything else you're reading is just spin and optics.

Screwing Mexican workers is a win-win

Here's a nifty read from the CBC about Canadian manufacturers decamping to Mexico, as they've been doing ever since Lyin' Brian Mulroney lulled us into bending over for NAFTA.

Seems the big car builders are flocking to Mexico to take advantage of wage rates a quarter of what they are in Canada. And who can blame them? Those mollycoddled Canadian workers are cry-babies well known for demanding a so-called "living wage," not to mention pensions, benefits, sick pay, health and safety legislation, overtime pay, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Those hard working Mexicans are thrilled to make a quarter of the Canadian pay packet without ever imagining all that other stuff is even imaginable!

But imagine my surprise when smack-dab in the middle of a story about auto parts and car builders, we get to meet Mr. Bill Hammond of Hammond Power Solutions.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit I've met Bill a couple of times before, back when he was doing the show-and-tell leading up to the Hammond IPO, which must be close to 25 years ago. I'd been busy building up a modest but tidy position in the shares pre-IPO, buying up warrants from folks who worked there, and I was hoping to make a killing when the shares sky-rocketed after their listing.

After all, that's what had happened to Linamar, another Guelph success story.

In the event, I would have done OK in the first couple of hours of trading, but no, I had to hang on for the big kill... and it was a big kill alright...

I got killed big.

So it's interesting to meet Bill again after all these years;

Bill Hammond. whose company has been making electrical transformers in Guelph, Ont., for about a century, says Mexico has made great strides in addressing its quality problem.

"There was a time when Mexico had a reputation of building shoddy product," he says. "We're finding now that global manufacturers are more than willing to accept products coming out of Mexico because the quality levels are as good as they are out of the United States or Canada."

Hammond is among the Canadian companies to have set up shop down south, with three plants in and around Monterrey. Workers like Crisanto San Martin came to the plant with no experience eight years ago, but have slowly risen through the ranks thanks to their diligence, hard work and eagerness to move up.

"They gave me good training," San Martin says. "When I got here, I didn`t know anything, I didn`t even know what an electrical transformer was. I didn't know any of that and they told me, 'Don`t worry, don't be afraid, you will contribute your part, you will do this,'" he says.

Hammond says his Mexican workers make about 10 per cent of what corresponding workers in Canada would. Although San Martin says it's not enough to live on — his wife still has to work, he laments — he's grateful for his job, and notes that Hammond pays better than most other factories in the area.

Note that where the other manufacturers are thrilled to be paying out a quarter of a Canadian wage, Bill's got the Mexicans down to 10%! And listen to his peon Crisanto; it's not enough to live on, but he's grateful for his job! 

Then note that even though Mr. Hammond pays a quarter of what the big boys pay, it's still way more than the local employers pay.

Contrast that to the aggrieved attitude of Canadian workers!

Truly a win-win!

Words of wisdom from Frank Hasenfratz

The Globe and Mail had a brief interview with Linamar Corp founder Frank Hasenfratz today. I'd link you to it but getting around their paywall is rather time consuming, and I think I can give you the gist of his wisdom without the link. I suppose I could start paying, but hell, I pay enough for their paper when I pick it up at the corner store. I shouldn't have to pay them twice.

But back to Frank.

Frank is one of those old school capitalists who made his money the old fashioned way; by working really hard at making things other people were willing to pay for. In his case it's been mainly auto parts, with a variety of other precision machined goodies thrown into the mix.

During my high school years Frank's original factory, one concession over, right beside his house, was the employer of last resort for high school drop-outs and others on the lower rungs of the employability ladder. While I was a high school drop-out I always had the good fortune of finding better paying gigs than what Frank had on offer.

That story took a turn in the 1980's when Frank took his company public. He offered pre-IPO shares to his employees and quite a few took him up on it.

And quite a few of them became millionaires.

But that's quite beyond the ken of Frank's interview with the Globe today.

On the subject of training skilled workers, Frank had this to say; everybody pays lip service to it but nobody does anything about it.

Exactly!

That's what I've been saying for at least 25 years! In Canada, about 20% of companies who employ skilled trades have any sort of training/apprenticeship program to develop skilled workers. The other 80% of employers are content to poach them from the 20%.

And what sort of a leadership role has government taken in creating a skilled work force? Aside from the aforementioned lip service, absolutely nothing.

In fact, the government bends over backwards to accommodate employers when they apply to bring foreign trades into the country.

Meanwhile, well over a million Canadians are unemployed.

I'm aware that working as a welder or a carpenter isn't everybody's cup of tea, but for the sake of our future, isn't it time we got serious about this? 

When the wheel of karma gets stuck in the mud

Finally culled enough of the crap in the garage to make room for the Mustang Fifty. She's going to be sleeping there till spring.

There's guys who go all out when they park a car for the winter. Take the wheels off, put it on blocks, drain the fluids.

Bit excessive if you ask me. Besides, thanks to the benefits of global warming, I might be able to take her out for a rip in the middle of January.

My buddy Jimmy Lippert, may he rest in peace, always took the battery out of anything he stored. Claimed that was the only way to ensure that there was no chance of a barn fire. Just disconnecting the battery cables wasn't good enough for him. You take the battery out and store it in another room.

I don't know. If batteries can start fires, wouldn't the fire just start in the other room? Maybe that was a bit excessive too.

Back when I stored the SD 455 Trans Am for the only winter I owned her, I didn't disconnect or remove anything. When it came time to pull her out she fired up and I drove away. Simple as that. Kurtz's barn didn't burn down.

Kurtz's barn was just by Ariss Ontario, which was up the road from me. At the time Ariss had two variety stores and four houses. And Bill Bailey.

I met Billy at Marden Public School. He was the first guy I met my age who bragged about feeling up girls boobs. That was on the school bus in grade six, a point in time at which it hadn't occurred to me yet that I would want to touch boobs.

Funny how things change.

So old man Kurtz had a farm outside Ariss and I agreed to pay a hundred bucks to park the Super Duty there for the winter. There were a couple of camping trailers stored there as well. I knew him because I knew a couple of his youngsters, who were more or less my age.

Five years later I was on the ferry between Vancouver Island and the mainland, and I'm sitting there, and I'm thinking I'm seeing a couple of the Kurtz boys, but I can't be, because they live on a farm by Ariss and I'm on a boat in the Pacific Ocean.

So I'm sitting there staring at them and they're sitting there staring at me and finally somebody says "hey man, you look just like....  "

Sure enough. It was them.

The Super Duty was one hell of a piece of machinery. She'd break the tires loose in every gear if you wanted. If the road was a little damp she had a tendency to do that even when you didn't want it.

For me, it was the right car at the wrong time.

Life does that to you. Right car at the wrong time. Right woman at the wrong time. Great job but I just gotta follow the call of the wild...

Finest shoes you've ever owned but they don't go with your suit. Finest suit you ever owned and you've never looked better but by God here comes a hemroid flare-up... The hemroids fade away and the job's working out and the suit and the shoes are working out and the woman is working out and everything is A-plus and then the cops show up while you've got the mother-in-law over with a warrant from five years ago.

Fuck me!

So I get to talking to the Kurtz boys and they've been in the Okanogan for the last month picking cherries, and they did the math and realized that compared to a shit-level job back in Ariss, home base of the Hasenfratz Linamar empire, it was actually costing them money to pick cherries.

So they buggered off and decided to see a few sights.

I knew a variety of Kurtz's back in the day. Even dated one once. One of the girls. That didn't go anywhere. Right woman at the wrong time.

Bill I ran into years later at a gas station in Guelph. He was back for a visit from a job in the Yukon. He'd settled down.

"Ya can't just loot and pillage yer whole life" he said.

He's right.

But it gets me thinking about how what goes around comes around.

Karma.

It wasn't till I got to Falling Downs that things seemed to work in harmony. The shoes, the suit, the woman, the job, the friends, the life...

The vehicles tend to be older and rusting, but they start up every day and they're paid for.

For a long time everybody I knew eventually got stuck in the mud. You'd get the dream house with the dream kitchen and your husband would leave.

Or the best job ever and a shop out back and your wife would leave.

And hemroids can rear up any time.

So there's something comforting about finding everything fitting into place when you're well past ever hoping that's gonna happen.

Unfortunately this place is called Falling Downs because it's falling down.

It ain't gonna last forever.