Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Tony Clement Plays Chicken WIth Ontario's Economy

Man, is it 1995 around here or what? All that was missing yesterday was a ring of OPP around Parliament. Here is what our Minister of Industry had to say about the auto sector in Ontario:
"The old rulebook is thrown out the window. I don't think anything is too big to fail, but we're going to give it our best shot at having a restructured auto sector and this is all part of it," Clement told CBC television.
This was after he told the unions to go back and rape their retirees some more.

Well, Mr. Clement, I think you are misleading the public with the "old rulebook being thrown out the window", talk. It is more a case of you picking up the old Harris rulebook and reading rule number one. Threaten, threaten, threaten and when all else fails, threaten.

It would be interesting indeed to see how many seats the Conservative Party would get in Ontario if they allowed the auto sector to sink into the Great Lakes on their watch. My guess would be pretty close to nil, so stop the threats and stop pretending that the Canadian auto sector has the same problems as the American one (remember our health system, the one you guys hate? Well the Americans would love to have that about now to lower their costs). Get to work and find a solution that doesn't screw the workers of Ontario.

Update: Even the head of GM Canada thinks Clement is nuts. He claims that the concessions already made by the union makes his Canadian operations cost competitive with other North American plants, including the non-union ones. So, if cost competitiveness is not the issue, then the real question is, what is Clement's and by extension Harper's real agenda here?

Update 2: Oh look, Mr. Dalton "I'm just as Tory as the next guy" McGuinty is piping up, too.

Update 3: And, people are starting to compare and contrast the treatment of stockbrokers with that of auto workers, by the Obama administration.
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