Road Warrior of the Week

Heroes and Good Samaritans

Postal strike isn’t in the public interest

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Jun 202011
 

By Terry O’Neill – The Tri-City News
Published: June 17, 2011 1:00 AM

FACE TO FACE: Should the posties be able to strike to back their demands?

Sorry to disappoint all my red-meat readers but I won’t be “going postal” over the ongoing postal strike. And neither will I be “mailing it in” to outline the reasons for my opinion on the matter.

Of course, it would be easy enough to oppose the economically destructive strike on multiple grounds related to the generous provisions of the deal the strikers are trying to protect, including the workers’ high starting salaries, their ability to bank sick days and their right to retire with a full pension at age 55.

These factors have certainly led many people to side with management at Canada Post and not the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.

But it’s clear to me that, under the current system, the union has every right to fight for every penny of pay and every extra day of paid time off.

The problem is that the current system simply doesn’t serve the public interest. Specifically, it is unreasonable and against the public interest to allow government workers of this sort to strike.

Private sector-workers should certainly have the right to walk off the job to support their collective demands. And so, too, should government workers in sectors where there is competition with private-sector workers.

But if a service is so important that it must be provided by government on an exclusive basis, then it must also be considered important enough for lawmakers to ensure that service is delivered without interruption.

Conversely, if a service is not so important as to ensure its uninterrupted delivery, then the government should question why it’s in the business in the first place.

My colleague’s knee will likely be jerking rather acutely now but this is the predictable response of a person who sees nothing wrong with a group of workers’ ability to blackmail the public to back up contract demands.

But this ability clearly works against the public interest. And anyone doubting the union’s commitment to serving its own interests first should read a few lines from its constitution. “CUPW,” the document declares, “rejects all forms of trade unionism that fail to pose the basic division between the interests of workers and the interests of the employer.” So much for “public” service.

An award-winning journalist, a writer with Edmonton’s Report Magazine and Toronto’s Catholic Insight magazine, and co-host of RoadKillRadio.com, Face to Face columnist Terry O’Neill is a long-time Coquitlam resident who sits on the board of the Coquitlam Foundation and chairs the finance committee of St. Joseph’s Catholic parish.

Canada needs tools to make peace

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Jun 112011
 

By Terry O’Neill – The Tri-City News

FACE TO FACE: Should peacekeeping Canada be shopping for bomber jets?

In a perfect world, the Canadian Armed Forces would not exist, guns would magically be transformed into long-stemmed roses and fighter planes would become fluffy white doves.

But because we are grounded in reality on this side of the page, we recognize that utopia will never be achieved and that a sovereign nation needs an army, an air force and, if it’s a coastal nation, a navy.

Of course, my colleague over yonder isn’t really suggesting Canada should rid itself of its armed forces. He’s merely saying that our air force should be burdened with obsolete equipment, specifically its outdated fighter planes.

He justifies this position on the grounds be believes Canada should concentrate its armed forces on peacekeeping missions. And anyway, spending billions of dollars on the Joint Strike Fighter, also known as the F-35, makes Canada too much like the United States (the Great Satan).

There are multiple problems with his line of thinking. For starters, it’s abundantly clear there’s precious little peacekeeping to do anymore in this topsy-turvy world. On the other hand, as the recent deployment of NATO air power against Muammar Qaddafi ’s forces in Libya has shown, there’s plenty of important peace-making to be done.

You can keep the peace with well-trained, lightly armed, blue-helmeted peacekeepers. But you need real armed forces to make the peace.

It’s also important to note that many of our allies — including Britain, Australia, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey and Norway — will be flying the F-35s. Does my colleague really want to see Canada asking Turkey or Holland for air cover the next time we have to send our troops into a danger zone?

Or maybe the F-35 opponents would prefer that Canada always assume the morally ambiguous, perpetually fence-sitting, pseudo-pacifist “honest broker” position that it adopted in the last half of the 20th century.

But just as you don’t make bargains with the devil, no freedom-loving, democratic country should put itself in a position of constant appeasement and apology. When you encounter an alleged genocidal murderer like Ratko Mladic, you arrest him and put him on trial. You don’t sit down over a cup of coffee and attempt to work out a compromise between him and Lady Justice.

An award-winning journalist, a writer with Edmonton’s Report Magazine and Toronto’s Catholic Insight magazine, and co-host of RoadKillRadio.com, Face to Face columnist Terry O’Neill is a long-time Coquitlam resident who sits on the board of the Coquitlam Foundation and chairs the finance committee of St. Joseph’s Catholic parish.

Get over it and vote for HST

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Jun 072011
 

By Terry O’Neill –
Published by The Tri-City News: June 03, 2011

FACE TO FACE: Which way will they vote in B.C.’s HST referendum?

There comes a time in some lovers’ quarrels when the aggrieved party’s feelings are so hurt that he or she simply refuses to hear another word, even if that word is an apology, a promise from the offender to make things better or actual evidence of action to set things right.

Welcome to the Great HST Debate.

Understandably, many British Columbians were angered and insulted not only by the manner in which the BC Liberal government introduced the tax but also by the nature of the harmonized sales tax itself.

But many of my fellow taxpayers now seem to be incapable of reversing their opposition to this revenue-generating measure, even though the government has admitted it made many errors in introducing the tax and has taken steps to make things better.

Count my colleague as one of the many provincial taxpayers who is never going to forgive, never going to forget and never going to vote in favour of the HST in this month’s referendum. I suspect his deep-rooted aversion to centrist or centre-right political parties has more than a little to do with his stubbornness.

On the other hand, while I am disinclined to support measures that put the government’s hand deeper into my pocket, I’ve long considered the HST to represent solid fiscal policy and I still believe (as do most economists) that its implementation will lead to more job- and wealth-creation in the province — and that’s good for everyone, consumers and businesses alike.

Now that Finance Minister Kevin Falcon has addressed the tax-paying public’s major concerns about the HST — by promising to phase in a reduction of the tax to 10% from the current 12% and by increasing the corporate income tax rate by 2% — the HST seems to be even more of a win-win.

What’s especially significant is that, under the changes, average British Columbians will enjoy both a short-term benefit (no $350 tax shift) and a long-term one (increased GDP attributable to the efficiencies associated with the HST).

And so I will be voting to preserve the HST.

But if you still have a need to fight against a stupid and destructive revenue-generating measure, take aim at the carbon tax. It deserves to die, sooner rather than later.

An award-winning journalist, a writer with Edmonton’s Report Magazine and Toronto’s Catholic Insight magazine, and co-host of RoadKillRadio.com, Face to Face columnist Terry O’Neill is a long-time Coquitlam resident who sits on the board of the Coquitlam Foundation and chairs the finance committee of St. Joseph’s Catholic parish.

Terry O’Neill’s Evil Commentary

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Mar 182011
 

Does anyone other than a dwindling minority of Procrustean traditionalists recognize evil anymore—personal evil, that is? Oh, sure, there’s plenty of the geopolitical variety to go around these days, especially in North Africa. And there’s more than enough being identified on the national stage by perpetually outraged critics within this country too, most notably by those on the political left, who eagerly attach the E word to everything from corporate profits and free trade to the oil sands and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s piano playing.

But we rarely hear about individual Canadians doing “bad” things, exhibiting sinister behavior, acting wickedly, or carrying on immorally, let alone sinning.

Instead, there’s always some sort of exculpating explanation for bad behaviour. Shoplifters suffer from kleptomania; corrupt officials have succumbed to stress or have manifested a previously undiagnosed psychiatric disorder; prostitutes are victims of the patriarchy, poverty or both; juvenile delinquents are the recipients of inadequate parenting; inner-city gangsters are victims of racial discrimination; and thieves are impoverished or addicted, and, if the latter, are surely not responsible for the burden of the illness under which they are labouring. You get the picture.

Look at the website promoting the recent Pink Shirt Day/anti-bullying campaign—a cause that should easily give rise to descriptions of bullies acting wickedly, etc.—and you’ll see therapeutic twaddle aplenty along with much vigorous exhortation to get to the root of the problem, etc., but nothing about the plain and simple fact bullies are acting immorally.

Which brings me to Exhibit A, otherwise known as the spark that gave life to this particular column. You might have heard of a horrible hit-and-run accident in Coquitlam, B.C., two weeks ago which left two young women dead. In covering the aftermath of the crash, which included the laying of several charges against a suspect, including two counts of impaired driving causing death, a local newspaper turned to a clinical psychologist from Simon Fraser University for some “insight” into “what might lead someone to flee the scene” of a serious accident without giving help.

Dr. Joti Samra is quoted thusly: “Assuming that it’s a true accident, the reality is… even from the perspective of the person that caused the accident, it can be quite traumatic and cause an acute stress reaction.” Got that? Acute stress reaction.

The good doctor goes on to explain that the brain could be flooded with information and emotion that would cause a person to act unusually. “The fight or flight response is something we’re exposed to when we are faced with extreme traumatic events,” Dr. Samra concludes. “Our body kind of goes into a shock, it doesn’t know what to do.”

Notice the focus on the culprit’s body and not his mind? I suppose it’s true that this human-as-hormonal-machine answer is what you’d expect from a clinical psychologist, whose business, of course, is to produce exactly this sort of pseudo-scientific analysis. But there’s no excuse for the news media to limit their probing into human behaviour to “experts” such as Dr. Samra. Why not someone with some grasp of the profundity of human existence, someone like a novelist, a moral philosopher or a religious leader– someone who recognizes we’re more than just pre-programmed biological machines?

To my mind, it would be a welcome relief—and far more enlightening—to hear some real insights into moral character, the dark origins of personal cowardice, or the nature of evil in circumstances such as these. And so, for example, when asked why a driver might flee the scene of an accident in which he had struck two innocent people, a priest might comment that such a person had become alienated from God, had too easily succumbed to temptation, and had become a sinner in need of redemption.

This would be really useful information as far as I’m concerned, and might also help many readers reflect more deeply on their responsibility—indeed, their duty—to act in a moral fashion.

But, of course, in this secular, humanistic era of ours, we see very little serious discussion about evil in the public square. Perversely, one is more likely to find scintillatingly descriptive words, purring about the concept of evil, in advertisements attempting to induce a consumer to indulge in some sort of deliciously sinful wickedness for an affordable price. Moral inversion to sell chocolate pudding.

A recent full-page newspaper advertisement for Volvo is a perfect example of this lamentable trend. Emblazoned above an image of a shiny red S60 model, the ad copy informs us, “There’s more to life than a Volvo. Like raising a little hell with 300 horses, spanking corners with your all-new sport-tuned chassis. And feeling a little dangerous in a car tricked out with safety technology. That’s why you drive the all-new naughty Volvo S60.” (Emphasis added.)

A 16th-Century proverb holds, “Evil doers are evil dreaders.” Today, however, evil doers are either the next patient for the couch or a target market.