Airbus and the Ghost of Brian Mulroney

A blast from the past. A German-Canadian huckster. A former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister. A dodgy prime minister. A European aircraft giant with a reputation for handing out easy money.  Karl Heinz Schreiber, Elmer MacKay, Brian Mulroney and Airbus.

Schreiber went into a German jail cell. Elmer, late father of Peter, took his secrets to the grave. Brian went to a coffee shop to collect envelopes stuffed with cash. And Airbus - well it's still at it.

Airbus, Europe’s largest aerospace multinational, is to pay a record £3bn in penalties after admitting it had paid huge bribes on an “endemic” basis to land contracts in 20 countries. 

Anti-corruption investigators hailed the result as the largest ever corporate fine for bribery in the world after judges declared that the corruption was “grave, pervasive and pernicious”. 

The planemaker agreed to pay the penalties on Friday after reaching settlements with investigators in the UK, France and the US to end inquiries that started four years ago.

Like that horrible TV show where they're constantly trying to recover pirate treasure from Nova Scotia's Oak Island, the 'commission' Airbus admits it paid to cinch the Air Canada deal but never divulged to whom remains a deeply buried secret.

Harper's War on Universal Human Rights Continues

It's Air Canada again.  This time it's the 6,800 flight attendants who have voted down an offer from the airline and will be in a legal strike position on Thursday.

It wasn't long after the flight attendants' Sunday vote that a spokesperson for LabourMin Lisa Raitt began sending out e-mails warning the Harper government won't tolerate a lengthy work stoppage.

"We will be clear that a work stoppage is unacceptable in this time of fragile economy," said Ashley Kelehear in the email.


About 65 per cent of employees who cast a ballot voted against the contract.

Raitt made it clear during the negotiation process that she was ready and willing to introduce back-to-work legislation if the two sides were unable to make a deal by the deadline.

She even had the legislation prepared ahead of time, though it was never used because the negotiators managed to settle on an agreement just hours before the deadline was reached.

Now that members have rejected that deal, Raitt will likely bring back the legislation if employees walk off the job.

That is Harper's notion of collective bargaining.   Before negotiations even conclude the government loads a "back to work" round in the chamber.  And it's all done on the flimsy claim that a strike by flight attendants would cripple the fragile Canadian economy.   Couldn't they at least have said the cabin crews were concealing WMDs?  But that's what happens when you have authoritarian rule.  They don't even try to lie convincingly.

And there's a clear pattern here.  Harper will not abide strike action in sectors falling under federal jurisdiction.  And by repeatedly and consistently siding on behalf of employers against labour, Harper is flagrantly violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights under which Canada, as a signatory, guarantees the right to collective bargaining.   Apparently being a human rights violator doesn't cut much ice with lardass Steve.

Collective Bargaining Has No Place in Harperland

Our Furious Leader has served notice that strikes will not be permitted in his country, Harperland.   Finance minister and dutiful leprechaun Flaherty has announced his master's government is preparing legislation to order 4,000 Air Canada customer service and sales agents back to work.

Flaherty revealed how pathetically disingenuous his government is when he claimed the strike is already damaging the economy of the nation.

"It affects tourists, of course, but it affects business, it affects the delivery of cargo in Canada and from Canada abroad. So this is a matter of significant economic consequence."

Really, Jimbo?  Air Canada says it experienced "some" flight delays on Tuesday but it hasn't canceled even one flight because of the strike.   So what exactly is the "significant economic consequence" except the standard Tory bullshit?

For This, Heads Should Roll

That a young Chinese man masquerading as an old Caucasian man managed to board an Air Canada flight certainly raises a few questions.    That three Air Canada cabin crew ignored a passenger who warned them about the disguised man - while the plane was still on the ground in Hong Kong - rings alarm bells.

35-year old clothing retail production manager, [Nuray Kurtur-Balas],  says she told the flight attendants the passenger’s heavily wrinkled face looked like plastic and didn’t match his young looking hands.
 
She says one flight attendant complimented her on her observation, another said he’d look into it, and the third said the man might have a medical condition—but no action was taken.

It was only after the flight took off and the man removed his mask that the air crew alerted authorities to meet the plane when it landed in Vancouver.

This is utter nonsense.  That cabin crew should have informed their captain immediately about the passenger's observations and that aircraft ought to have remained safely on the ground until the issue was cleared up.   Heads should roll for this.

Air Canada Punked

He looked just like an old white guy when he boarded an Air Canada flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver on October 29.   Once the plane was safely airborn, that old white guy went to the bathroom only to emerge as a 29-year old Chinese guy.

Apparently the man swapped boarding passes with a 55-year old American and used a frequent flier card as ID at the boarding gate.

Air Canada crew recovered the 'old man' mask the man discarded.   I wonder who got to wear that for Halloween?

CTV - "Canada Losing Water at 'Troublesome' Rate"

The Oil Heads and Tar Sanders of Parliament Hill should finally listen up - the impacts of climate change are hitting Canada and they're hitting hard.  Even the Conservative Television Network gets it:

A Statistics Canada study of southern Canada's water yield – the amount of water that falls as rain, melts from snow and ice packs and flows through rivers and streams – found that it has declined an average of 8.5 per cent since 1971.



The Statistics Canada study looked at water yields between 1971 and 2004 across southern Canada, where 98 per cent of Canadians live.


Heather Dewar, an analyst for the agency, said water yield does not include large existing bodies of water like the Great Lakes.


"It's all the water that flows into the system," she said in an interview with CTV.ca.


Gary Sprules, a biology professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in the ecology of lakes, said that decline represents a serious shortfall in our water supply.


"I think that's a significant loss," he said. "That's close to 10 per cent in a generation and a half and that's troublesome."


He said much of the loss is likely due to the global warming trend, which has changed spring runoff patterns across the continent. "Global climate change has led to changes in rainfall patterns in our part of the world and the amount and time of ice cover on our lakes and rivers."

Hey Iggy, now do you get it?   Climate change, anthropogenic global warming, the earth-changing phenomenon being driven by fossil fuels which, I'm just guessing here, probably includes the world's filthiest fossil fuel - the Athabasca Tar Sands.

Now, personally, I happen to live in the coastal rainforest zone.  In fact our Rain Festival is probably going to start in just a couple of weeks and carry on until, say, May or June.   So don't worry about us.  We're okay for water so long as it stays cold enough to build a healthy snowpack on the local mountains.   But as for you mainlanders I guess it's a different story.  Oh well, you can't say you weren't warned.   Then again your friends to the south are really parched and they figure you've got it good - maybe a bit too good.

Just Plane Screwy

The Federal Court of Canada has ruled that flight attendants can refuse to fly with a pilot they deem suicidally depressed.

Fair enough.

In August, 2008, four Air Canada cabin crew refused to fly to Paris with a pilot who, on the previous trip, had talked about flying his aircraft into the Atlantic. Air Canada was so concerned that it rounded up replacements and the flight proceeded from Toronto to Paris.

Wait a minute.

Shouldn't Air Canada have handled this just a bit differently? Shouldn't the airline have also found a replacement pilot at least until the situation could be looked into? Maybe the captain was just fine but, when four crew members are willing to risk their jobs over it, shouldn't Air Canada have done just a little more for the passengers and changed pilots?

Just sayin.

Risky Business - Harper Turns Cdn Government into World's Biggest Subprime Lender

As the rest of the world was being slammed by the fiscal sledgehammer of securitized subprime mortgages, the subpar economist who calls himself prime minister was throwing the Canadian government headlong down that same well.

Writing in this weeks's Tyee, Murray Dobbin reveals how Harper has transformed your government and mine into the world's largest subprime lender and argues that we're in for our own meltdown when the current, made-in-Ottawa housing boom goes bust.

...what few Canadians realize is that the housing market has avoided collapse (prices are down 32 per cent in the U.S.) because the Harper Conservatives directed the CMHC to change the mortgage rules to effectively make the Canadian government the biggest sub-prime lender in the world.

...The facts are that over 90 per cent of existing mortgages in Canada are "securitized." That is the practice of pooling mortgages (or other assets) and then issuing new securities backed by the pool -- MBSs, or Mortgage Backed Securities.

... So long as borrowing requirements were tight, the percentage of loans that were securitized remained modest. But in 2007 the Harper government allowed the CMHC to dramatically change its rules: it dropped the down payment requirement to zero per cent and extended the amortization period to 40 years. In light of the mortgage meltdown in the U.S., Finance Minister Flaherty moderated those rules in August 2008 (it's now five per cent down and 35 years). But these are still relatively very loose requirements and securitization has taken off.

By the end of 2007 there were $138 billion in NHA securitized pools outstanding and guaranteed by CMHC --17.8 per cent of all outstanding mortgages. By June 30, 2009, that figure was $290 billion, a figure [National Bank Financial advisor David] Lepoidevin says, "exceeds the total value of mortgages offered by CMHC in its 57 years of existence!" CMHC's stated goal was to guarantee $340 billion by the end of this year and is on track to reach $500 billion by the end of 2010. Total mortgage credit in Canada will grow by 12-14 per cent of GDP in 2009.

In an effort to prop up the real estate market in 2008 (when affordability nosedived), the Harper government directed the CMHC to approve as many high-risk borrowers as possible and to keep credit flowing. CMHC described these risky loans as "high ratio homeowner units approved to address less-served markets and/or to serve specific government priorities." The approval rate for these risky loans went from 33 per cent in 2007 to 42 per cent in 2008. By mid-2007, average equity as a share of home value was down to six per cent -- from 48 per cent in 2003. At the peak of the U.S. housing bubble, just before it burst, house prices were five times the average American income; in Canada today that ratio is 7.4:1 -- almost 50 per cent higher.

...This is the ticking time bomb Prime Minister Stephen Harper has tossed at the Canadian taxpayer. Why? So that he can maintain the fiction that he is a good economic manager and win a majority in the next election.

Dobbin accuses the opposition of sitting on this scandal out of rank cowardice and political opportunism. No one wants to be seen as the one who set collapse in motion by pointing out that the Tory Emperor is running about without his pants on.

This affects each and every one of us. It affects our kids and their future. It whipsaws the housing market, inflating it for temporary political gain with astonishingly arrogant indifference to the price all Canadians will pay for it at the end. Look at it this way. Harper has pledged your good credit and mine to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. He has set up countless droves of young, hopeful Canadian first-time home buyers for an awful fall and he's undermined the stability of house values for the rest of us in the bargain. And he's done it all for the greater glorification and political opportunism of Stephen Joseph Harper.

The Canadian people have been betrayed by Harper, the Conservative Party and also by every opposition politician who has sat mute while the PMO perpetrated this scam on us. It's time these opposition leaders accepted that their duty is to protect us, not themselves. Too bad Harper is their puppeteer.

Air Canada Crashing Again?

It couldn't happen to a more deserving airline. Air Canada is said to be on the verge of seeking bankruptcy protection for the second time in six years.

The problem this time is the usual - recession, falling bookings, pension deficits and, of course, being trounced at the hands of our very own, Western airline - WestJet.

Take a WestJet flight some time and you'll find it filled with travellers who've written off Air Canada long ago. What once was known as the People's Airline has alienated a lot of its customer base over the past decade.

In my former practice I wound up acting for a lot of pilots, some from Air Canada and many others from names now just memories - WardAir, Canadian Pacific Airlines, Pacific Western Airlines, Canadian Airlines International. Through a host of bad planning and management, they were all swallowed up, in turn, until what remained was incorporated into the latter day Air Canada, itself a shabby vestige of what it had once been.

To my thinking, the hapless thing we know as today's Air Canada is simply the end result of Mulroney's disastrous plan to privatize Air Canada and deregulate Canada's airlines. Prior to Mulroney Canada's two flag carriers were well regulated. Each was given priority on specific regions and high-profit routes. In exchange for that, each was also obligated to provide service to less-profitable, secondary airports which did a lot to open up this country from the 50's through the 70's.

Once Mulroney deregulated the airlines, Canadian Pacific and Air Canada went after the high-profit routes like two dogs after the same steak. For example, both airlines were operating densely packed schedules of nearly-empty airplanes between Vancouver and Toronto every day. Each wanted domination over the other on that route and each was prepared to bleed itself in the process. Seat-mile revenues plummeted, leaving both airlines mortally weak to the inevitable fluctuations in our economy.

At the end, Canadian Pacific (now renamed Canadian Airlines International) was the closest to financial death when it made a bid to save itself by attempting to take over Air Canada. After a lot of vicious maneuvering, Canadian Airlines International was itself taken over by Air Canada but what emerged was not the Air Canada of the 70's. It never really recovered.

In the years since it first resorted to bankruptcy protection, Air Canada has tried - and failed - to compete with the newcomer, WestJet. Now it appears to be back on the ropes, again.