Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Finally, mail! (click to view)
Date: June 27, 2011
When you're in the political cartooning biz, it can sometimes be a bit of a chore to follow each and every political happening that the media tells you is important — especially when all available evidence seems to suggest otherwise. This is very much how I feel about Canada's recent postal strike, which "crippled" the nation for a couple of weeks this month, before finally concluding yesterday.
Canada is one of the increasingly few major industrialized nation that has not yet privatized its postal delivery, meaning that all mail in the country is still delivered via Canada Post, a 19th Century Crown corporation run by the state. All Canadian posties are similarly unionized government employees, and as unionized government employees are want to be, they generally exist in a perpetual state of snippy anger over their already very generous pay, hours, and benefits. Contract negotiations were up, and the Canada Post managers wanted to lower pay for new employees; the union wanted a raise. So the union voted to take job action, and on June 3 began one-city-at-a-time rotating strikes o'er the land. CP responded by locking them out, and then Prime Minister Harper announced his plans to break the strike by tabling so-called "back to work legislation" in parliament, that would unilaterally impose a new employment contract, bypassing all the usual song-and-dance.
Harper's legislation imposed harsher terms than the CP management's own bargaining position, which is to say basically the pre-strike status quo coupled with a very small raise. Jack Layton, who is now leader of the opposition for some reason, responded by launching an NDP-led filibuster in the House of Commons for several days, to let the world know what an outrage this all was. But the Conservative majority was eventually able to push the thing through anyway, and the Governor General signed the law Sunday night, and now mail can resume. Hurrah.
The whole brouhaha was awash in much pageantry and theater, and certainly the NDP filibuster, which went on for almost 60 unbroken hours, was given much breathless coverage in all the newspapers. But really, who cares?
Physical mail delivery has obviously been an industry in decline for quite some time, with overall Canadian mailing having dropped by almost 20% in the last five years alone. Email, coupled with newer and fancier telephones, have made snail mail a useless anachronism for large segments of the population, particularly younger Canadians who have never known anything else. Corporate mail isn't really picking up the slack either; Canada Post has generally awful international shipping rates, and since so many big Canadian businesses do so much trade with the US, a lot of nominally "Canadian" mail is actually outsourced to American companies directly, or other private couriers who specialize in that sort of thing. Who remains the post office's "base" constituency for the future remains very uncertain, but no one, certainly not the striking deliverymen, seem to be much bothered by the thought.
So it was a weird issue for the NDP to go on the cross over, unless they are, in fact, exactly the party they've long been accused of being, namely a hyper-reactionary puppet of organized labor. Of course, the Conservatives don't exactly emerge shining from all this either. Though Harper seemed perfectly content to play the role of (he imagines) right-wing bully facing down Big Union, his position displayed no real sense of foresight either. For all his supposed furor for the free market, the PM has never expressed any desire to begin chipping away at this increasingly questionable public sector monopoly, and seems content to merely have it do his bidding with minimal complaint.
If these last few weeks are any indication, the "polarization" of Canadian politics in the NDP-Conservative era may well turn out to be less about ideology and principle, and more about narrow, interest-group driven conflict. The NDP has cast itself as a party that will always take the side of organized labor, regardless of how sane or logical their demands. The Conservatives, in turn, have defined themselves as the party of the managerial class, guardians of status quo, and prickly defenders of the dignity of government.
Labor unions are not, by definition, always on the sides of the workers. Nor is government always engaged in a practice worth defending, no matter how hysterical its critics. In the wake of the great 2011 postal crisis that wasn't, both parties would do well to remind themselves of these simple facts.
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