CBC runs infomercial, pretends it's news

Check out the latest iteration of this same-old story at CBC; A 'demographic tsunami' is about to make Canada's trucker shortage even worse.

That reads a lot like an infomercial for the Ontario Truck Driving School to my eye. That's an outfit that lures gullible young (and not so young) people, quite often recent immigrants, into its driver training programs, from which, after dropping eight to ten thousand dollars in tuition and other fees, they graduate into a poorly paid job with long hours and zero work-life balance.

Sure there are drivers making $70,000/year, but they more or less have to live in their rigs to do that. And forget about the Ontario Trucking Association doing anything about it. They're the employer lobby group largely responsible for turning truck-driving into a shit job in the first place.

The OTA figures the solution lies in bringing in foreign workers. That's a strategy premised on the belief that somewhere in the world, in some refugee camp in some shithole country we've destroyed, there must be folks desperate enough that a shitty job in Canada looks like manna from heaven.

It's a time-tested strategy. Look what happened in the meat-packing industry. Canadian icon Peter Pocklington led the charge with his lock-out of Gainers workers in '86. He generously offered his unionized workforce a 45% reduction in pay. Before that, meat-packing plants offered hard and unpleasant work at a decent wage. A job in a packing plant offered an opportunity to buy a home and educate your children.

After that, not so much. It didn't take long till most meat-packing jobs went to foreign workers willing to "do the jobs Canadians didn't want to do."

Of course they did! If you're starving to death in a refugee camp in Somalia, a slaughterhouse job at ten cents over minimum wage in Alberta looks like a pretty good deal. To this day, the backbone of the meat-packing industry workforce is made up of foreign workers.

It's a strategy that solved the labour shortage in meat-packing. There's no reason to think it won't solve the truck-driver shortage too.

The question should be, is this a strategy that's good for Canadian workers, or is it a strategy that benefits only company owners, at the expense of Canadian workers?

Wayner proves he's been a Weener all along

Back in the day, when a lot of beer guzzling mullet-heads in rec-rooms across this great nation watched Hockey Night in Canada religiously, we referred to The Great One as "Wayner," or the Trumpesque "The Wayner," and later in the evening, after a few beers and maybe a bottle toke or two had taken the edge off our religious experience, "Weener."

We were a million Bob and Doug Mackenzies in basements across the land, and the day Peter Pocklington sold The Great One to Bruce McNall, we wept as one.

Both McNall and Pocklington ended up in jail, but not for the crime of trading Wayne Gretzky to the Kings.

For his part, Wayne got over his betrayal by Peter Puck and struck up a bromance with McNall. Today's news that he's endorsing Big Steve shouldn't come as a shock. As great as he was as a hockey player, he's consistently been a failure as a judge of character.




Seems The Wayner's been a Weener all along...

XL Foods and the Peter Pocklington legacy

For quite a few years Peter Pocklington was the darling of the Canadian media. They loved his rags-to-riches bullshit story. He was big in the business section and also in the sports section. In fact, thanks to his ownership of the Edmonton Oilers he was considered such an icon in Canadian hockey circles that he was known as "Peter Puck."

Peter Puck has long been exposed as a fraud and a charlatan, but there is still one bit of his putrid legacy making waves today. Peter Pocklington revolutionized meat processing in Canada. The tainted beef recall at XL owes everything to Peter Puck.

You see, it was Peter Pocklington who made meat processing a race-to-the-bottom industry in Canada. His Gainers lock-out and union busting destroyed the old model of meat processing.

The old model had career employees staking their livelihoods on the quality of the product they put out every day.

The new model has recent immigrants or temporary foreign workers busting their asses to meet meat quotas every minute of the day. They have no long term stake in the steak.

Twenty thousand gringos get sick from e-coli? Oh well, guess I'm going home early... easy come easy go!

And it would never have happened without Peter Puck.

Celebrating great entrepreneurs - Peter Pocklington

In May of 1979 I watched Wayne Gretzky in the penultimate game in the history of the WHA. Next game was in Winnipeg. Wayne's team lost, the Jets won the Avco cup. By September the WHA was no more, and both the Jets and the Oilers were in the NHL.

Peter Pocklington owned the Oilers. He owned a lot of stuff back in the day. You could hardly get through the business section of the paper without reading about Peter Pocklington. The slobbering sycophancy of the Canadian business press was so over the top it was embarrassing. High school drop-out makes good. One of the richest men in Canada... yadah yadah blah blah blah. Day after day, the greatness of Peter Puck.

(A quick p.s. to any investor types who may peruse this; said press is still on with the over the top stuff. A quick countervailing opinion: short RIM big time. There is no possible way they can compete with Google and Apple in the long run. However, they are a sturdy little company with a lot of patents etc, so you can bet that before they go through the floor somebody (I'm guessing Google) will scoop them up at a nice premium to share price, so hedge your bets with a pile of call options. You're welcome.)

As he was rocketing into the ranks of the entrepreneurial elite, at least in the minds of most Canadian business journalists, he picked up a mid-size meat-packer called Gainers, I suppose to complement his collection of sports franchises, trust companies, and car dealerships. I think it's called 360 degree integration.  Over-leveraged out the ying-yang in a time of rising interest rates, Pocklington decided to do what every self-respecting entrepreneur would do under such circumstances; fuck the workers.

Now, slaughterhouse work is a shit job no matter how you look at it. It's always cold. It's always wet. You're up to your knees in animal guts all day long. I frankly don't know how anybody can do it for ten minutes. But people did it. And over the years, the union that represented those people had won them wages that would at least enable a half-decent life. So you put in your daily eight hours in hell, but you could go home to a modest bungalow in the suburbs,  feed your family, pay your mortgage, and save for your children's education to make sure they never had to do what you did.

Pocklington had a vision. Bust the union! Why should a business genius like him pay union wages? After all, somewhere on this planet there's gotta be people willing to do the job for less. True entrepreneurial thinking. There followed one of the most violent and divisive strikes that Canada has seen in the last half century.

Long story short, Pocklington won. Slaughterhouse work in Canada today is marginally above minimum wage and done mostly by recent immigrants. There was a picture in the paper recently, eight Somali's living in a little company owned trailer outside one of the big meat plants. They're grinning like they won the lottery. And they did! Instead of starving to death in some African refugee camp, they're making more money than they ever dreamed of. Sure, they'll never own a bungalow in Edmonton, but what the hell, times change.

Don't know what happened to the original Gainers crew, but that's their problem I suppose. As for Peter Pocklington, he's gone bankrupt a couple of times. Wasn't ever one of the richest men in Canada after all. Just finished a six month spell of house arrest for bankruptcy fraud.

The Gainers workers arrested on the picket line while trying to save their livelihoods got far harsher sentences.