Olivia Chow's awful debate performance makes it clear she's the candidate of Toronto's civic unions and not the taxpayers

In the days leading up to Olivia Chow declaring her candidacy for mayor, I'd had a few conversations in which I warned some of her supporters, "...you know, I bet 99% of the people who think Olivia Chow would be such a great candidate have never met her or heard her speak in public."

Now Chow also shows that when it comes to running a civic economy, she's completely in over her head. 

I'd say I hate to say "I told ya so," but I don't hate to say it at all...




The funniest part of this was that Chow's scripted "We're not on the gold course, I don't need to take any lessons from you" she threw at John Tory, which was supposed to be her big zinger, was delivered at such an inappropriate moment, it backfired on her and she was booed.

UPDATE: As will come as a surprise to no one, The Toronto Star has already gone into meltdown mode.  I'm willing to place bets right now that before the end of October, The Star tries to push for all candidates except Tory to drop from the race to try to prevent a Ford re-election.

Olivia Chow wants to take back Toronto for the NDP

Sue-Ann Levy:

...[Olivia Chow] was forced to resign from the police services board for her lack of judgement.

The woman who purports to be a good role model for children also endorsed a move by OCAP in 2005 to urge the poor to flout welfare rules and seek a special $250-a-month diet benefit, to which most were not entitled.

Last Thursday, she claimed that as mayor she’d know how to make every penny count and has the “strength to say no to spending” that isn’t smart or responsible. .. 

..Tory MPP Doug Holyday, who served on city council with Chow, said she was part of a group who never saw a tax dollar they didn’t want to spend...

...According to media reports from back then, Layton and Chow — purported champions of the homeless and the poor — were living in an $800-month three-bedroom apartment in a heavily subsidized co-op, while making jointly $120,000 a year (one-third of which was tax-free).

The city would have given away land for free to build the co-op and about 30% of the units would have been offered to low-income people with subsidies.

While Layton and Chow were not in one of those units, it was only in the final few months before they moved out — largely due to public pressure — that Layton coughed up an extra $325 a month to try to bring their rent up closer to the true market value of their unit.

In her book, My Journey, Chow explained that they actually had two apartments in the same building. When they married in 1988, Chow moved into Layton’s two-bedroom, leaving her mom in the one-bedroom downstairs, she wrote.

She also said Layton paid $1,200 in monthly market rent for his 10th-floor apartment and that a “self-appointed lynch mob” sought to destroy their safe haven.

In September of 1998, then-municipal affairs minister Al Leach told an estimates committee, during questions on the Layton/Chow co-op affair, that the cost to operate each unit was $1,200 per month and anyone claiming $900 was market value still received a “subsidy from Ontario taxpayers"...

More HERE

A new blog to check out: "Karl Marx is Dead"

The Communists lost The Cold War. they murdered tens of millions and subjugated more than a billion people over the course of decades, all in the name of their failed totalitarian ideology.

You'd think anyone with half a brain would, at this point in time, recognize Communism for the evil that it is.

But there are plenty of imbeciles, motivated by resentment of the success of others and their own stupidity, that cling on to Marx's outdated and demonstrably failed vision, one that invariably leads to dictatorship and repression. These people dominate Public Service and Students Unions across the country, and the blog Karl Marx is Dead is reporting on what they're up to.

Amid corruption allegations, union members want to know how dues money is spent

 

OTTAWA - Union funds used to rebuild a biker strip club, false expense claims sometimes totalling $4,000 in a day for a single executive and plenty of connections between top union officials and organized crime. These are just some of the shocking revelations to come out of Quebec's Charbonneau Commission into corruption in that province.

The allegations might also explain why union bosses have fought so hard against disclosure laws that their members support in droves.

More HERE 

Toronto Sun's Sue-Ann Levy makes the communist pinheads at rabble.ca explode

You know you're doing a good job when you've written something that makes the communist pinheads at rabble.ca become apoplectic:

"Sue-Ann Levy, the perpetually grotesque enemy of working people that the Toronto Sun pays good money to run down those who actually work for a living, penned an opinion piece recently spouting the Canadian Taxpayers Federation line that Ontario government employees are somehow abusing the system by calling in sick more than do their private sector counterparts.

She spouts a bunch of statistics that, hopefully correctly, show that workers who are able to, do in fact call in sick, though she frames this, of course, as workers somehow "shirking" work because the government or unions "let them"."

and here's Sue Ann's article in THE TORONTO SUN 

rabble.ca is almost completely paid for by the big public service unions. Not quite the "independent" media they claim to be.

Ontario's Elementary School Teachers Union wants more children to be like the "genderless baby"

Don't you feel lucky to be living in Ontario, where the radical Elementary Teachers Federation published an article by the father of the notorious "genderless baby" advocating for more of the same in public schools?

"I work at City View Alternative Senior School in Toronto’s west end, a grade 7 and 8 school where the provincial curriculum is taught through the lens of social justice. Race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, power, and oppression are all integrated as the content material in many of the classes, along with an emphasis on activism and the need to do something to change the world rather than simply discuss it.

So it’s probably not surprising that one or more of our students began mucking with the signs on our washroom doors. A sketch of a pair of pants was taped on top of the skirt. A slip of paper that read “Not all girls wear dresses” appeared. And on the boys’ door: “Some boys wear skirts.”  "

SOCIALIST STUDIES has more

Kathleen Wynne's $500 Million payoff to the teachers' unions

TORONTO - Premier Kathleen Wynne may have spent more than $500 million this past spring to buy labour peace with Ontario’s teachers’ unions, the Toronto Sun has learned. 

According to figures provided to the Sun by an education sector source, Wynne’s new deal with the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF) this past April bumped up costs by at least $114 million.

The contract she signed in June with the 76,000 members of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) added another $112 million...

h/t Marvin W.

Radical Labor Day

More about what the unions are up to HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE, 

Communist Union Boss promises new Canadian mega-union "Unifor" will be militant

"The Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and the Communication, Energy and Paperworkers (CEP) are merging to create Unifor, the largest primarily private sector union in Canada with about 300,000 members."

Gary Engler, who wrote that description quoted above from the neo-Marxist website rabble.ca,  is the vice-president of the Local 2000 of the later of those unions soon to merge into the mega-union.

He is also the co-author of something called the New Commune-ist Manifesto which is essentially an argument for communism to dominate labor and politics in our society. In other words, he's another idiot who has learned nothing from the lessons of North Korea, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and the 100 million murders and totalitarian misery that communism has inflicted on humanity since the Russian Revolution.

Canada's Parliament recently voted for union accountability in the form of Bill C-377, which was quashed by the Senate, adding to the many reasons to abolish that anachronistic, useless body of unelected patronage appointees.

Engler's description of his vision for the new Mega-Union is one that does not focus on workplace issues but one that infests the workplace with political and activist issues. That is precisely the cause of the backlash against unions that led to the House of Commons passing Bill C-377. But
someone who is still a communist in the year 2013 is not likely to be someone with the ability to process a great deal of information.

Unfortunately, Engler is far from alone in the way that union bosses think. They are, as a group, narcissists who want to dominate political thinking and shape it to their despicable manifestations of activism. That activism materializes in many reprehensible ways, be they the racist "Occupy Movement,"  the violent, mentally unbalanced cretins of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, or the terrorist-enablers of The Sea Hitler. among countless examples.

Engler wrote: "The promise of Unifor is in a rebirth of militant union activism."  The bad news is that in the short-term, militant radicalism from union fanatics may increase with the birth of "Unifor.`The good news is that if Unifor bosses behave as Engler hopes, and with the government promising to reintroduce Bill C-377,  it could be the final straw that breaks the backs of politicized unions in Canada.

The need for massive reform in the role of Unions

The rationale that led to the creation of unions hasn't gone away.

For those of us who have been employees, at one point or another, we've been in a job where the boss was an absolute piece of shit. One of those wretches who is not only stupid and unreasonable, but compounds the misery of having to answer to them by demonstrating the pleasure they take in exercising authority over other people.

There is nothing more soul-crushing than being a parent with a family to feed and enduring the feeling of being trapped in such conditions.

Situations like that are among the reasons why unions emerged and why they continue to play a valid, valuable role in the workplace.

Under the watchful eyes of the sadistic totalitarian
Che Guevara, CUPE shows solidarity with
Communist dictators
(photo from CUPE annual report 2005/6)

If protecting the rights of workers what what unions did, then there would be little reason to argue against them. But in 2013,the people who run the unions, the union bosses, have ventured into areas which make them more reprehensible than anything the most sadistic employer and vile corporation would dream of.

Bringing to life caricatures of the pig Napoleon from Orwell's Animal Farm, reveling in their puffed-up pomposity, union bosses are bolstered by control over cash culled from workers' paychecks that they use to promote their own petty tyrannies.

Canadian public service unions, including CUPE, CUPW (Postal Workers) and OPSEU have poured money into causes like the racist Occupy protests, degenerate support for the terrorist government in Gaza, and support missions to show Communist solidarity with the totalitarian dictator Fidel Castro.Other unions, like the United Steelworkers and The Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, have used dues paid by their members to subsidize the website rabble.ca which is the media voice of the anti-Semitic, so-called "Israel Apartheid Week" and has produced depraved videos comparing Canada's Prime Minister to Adolf Hitler.

Very few union members want their funds diverted away from workplace issues to promote the deplorable ideological tyrannies of the union bosses. Most don't even know their funds are used for such purposes, because the union bosses don't tell the workers how their dues money is spent.

A few months ago. some rouge Senators derailed Bill C-377, which would have forced the unions to tell the workers how the use their dues. Perhaps the unelected patronage appointees of the Canadian Senate felt solidarity with sleazy union bosses as the two share a resistance towards being held accountable for their inflated, self-serving expenditures.

Members of Parliament have said they will reintroduce the union accountability Bill in the future.  The Senate should take care if it hopes to sabotage the Bill again, since their obstructionism highlights the corruption in both institutions.

Liberal Liar? Public Service Union's $20,000 payoff to Justin Trudeau

Justin Trudeau claimed he never took a penny while speaking as an MP. Any reasonable person could conclude he lied.

U of Toronto Communist Student Union Boss wants the proletariat to control the means of education

Matthew Lau's latest REPORT FROM THE KREMLIN

Ryerson University students forced to pay almost $2 Million to student union and get nothing useful for their money

Undercover Kitty has managed to get a copy of the Ryerson Student Union budget

I haven't looked up the line item that shows how much Ryerson students were made to fork over to support a Marxism festival on their campus that features a collection of odious characters.

Fearful of a Conservative victory in Ontario, unions urge NDP to rally behind Great Leader Wynne

Art by BlazingCatFur

Coles warned of the possibility of a harshly right-wing Conservative government, if the budget was defeated and a premature election is called.  “Tim Hudak’s vision for Ontario is divisive and destructive, and he is even challenging the right of unions to exist.  We must not give Tim Hudak the chance he is looking for.”

Related: Nearly half of Ontario's citizens think Wynne's government is corrupt

Other media accounts make it appear The Toronto Star is lying about Rob Ford (again)

An investigation by the Globe and Mail flatly contradicts the Toronto Star's accounts of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's allegedly intoxicated behavior last month at The Garrison Ball charity dinner.

According to the Globe:

The Globe spoke to more than a dozen people who attended the gala and contacted everyone on its organizing committee, though only a handful returned telephone calls. Six members of the Garrison Ball’s 13-person organizing committee released a statement Tuesday, saying none of them asked the mayor to leave.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who was at the gala, said he chatted with Mayor Ford briefly. “He looked fine to me,” Mr. MacKay wrote in an e-mail.

Former budget chair Mike Del Grande, who in that post was one of Mayor Ford’s most loyal supporters, characterized Mr. Ainslie’s comments as “sour grapes” because Mr. Ainslie did not receive the budget chair position he had coveted earlier this year.

A CBC report confirmed that no member of the Gala's organizing committee asked Ford to leave the event and denies that Councillor Ainslie told anyone to remove Ford:

..the Garrison Ball's volunteer organizing committee said in an email statement to CBC News on Tuesday that they did not ask Ford to leave the Feb. 23 event. 

"No member of the event’s organizing committee, including Councillor Paul Ainslie, directed the mayor to leave the event that night," the email said.

The Toronto Star has lied about Rob Ford in the past. I was interviewing Ford during his 2010 mayoral campaign on the day a Toronto Star story was published alleging that Ford had assaulted a high school football player he was coaching. Ford had to interrupt the interview a number of times to take calls from staff and supporters who were trying to locate the player so he could set the record straight. Either Ford was telling the truth, or he is the best actor I've ever met, and I've worked on movies where the lead actors were nominated for and/or won an Academy Award.

In the end, the player, who disliked Ford, refuted the Star's account, though the left-wing newspaper stubbornly refused to apologize for its lies.

The Star has fanatically opposed Ford before and since his election victory. It did so to the point where more than one Star columnist not only insinuated, but outright declared that Torontonians must be "nuts" because they supported the cost-cutting municipal politician.

Rob Ford's success is alarming to the Star for a variety of reasons. They include that Ford is an opponent of the Star's special interest allies. Ford's popularity is like a slap in the face to the Star's editorial board, serving as a daily reminder that they are irrelevant to political opinion in the city in any substantive way.

Something The Star's propagandists should realize by now is that when it comes to his electability, no one cares what they say about Ford. It doesn't matter if he is drunk, grabbed the rear-end of an attention-seeking social climber, gave the finger to an obnoxious driver or whatever.

The people who support Ford do so because, unlike the politicians the Star favors, he doesn't spend other people's money like a drunken sailor. He has kept taxes and spending down and fought the predatory public unions to the point where they have accepted contracts the city can afford.

The Star's vendetta of hysteria, smears, lies, insults and mudslinging only solidifies support for the beleaguered mayor. At this point, Toronto's largest circulation daily's credibility about the city's mayor is no better than Pravda's reports about America were during the Soviet era or Iran's Press TV reports are about its enemies Canada and Israel.

So bring it on al Starzeera. Every time you pick a battle with Ford, he gets stronger and you look more desperate and ridiculous.


-----

(in the video below, at an event yesterday held at City Hall to honor legendary Canadian boxer George Chuvalo, the Toronto Star reporter acts like a no-class jerk, harassing not only Ford, but Chuvalo with questions about Ford's "drinking")

UPDATE: Chrisie Blatchford's column on the Toronto Star acting like despicable high school bullies who think they're in a 'cool clique'

‘Beyond its mandate’: Canada’s ‘radical’ postal workers’ union helps fund litany of controversial causes

Earlier this month, The Rose, a women’s newsletter issued by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, declared that through its support of Israel, Canada is complicit in “war crimes.”

Alongside claims that “patriarchy was introduced into First Nations cultures through European colonization,” the publication asserts that Canada “is allowing Israel to terrorize occupied people, breach international law, normalize home demolitions … and steal resources.”

Almost immediately, Jewish groups issued condemnations of the three-page document as “a racist propaganda tool filled with half-truths,” according to the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

Representatives from all three major parties joined the chorus, with the most colourful coming from Liberal leader Bob Rae: “I continue to be astonished by the extent to which ideas which should be on the ‘loony tunes’ margins of politics have now been adopted by a union which represents thousands of its members.”

Read the rest at The National Post

h/t BCF

Canadian Union of Postal Workers reiterates need for 'Right to Work' legislation

Idiotic CUPW leadership supports terrorists

Ontario's 3 Union Boss Stooges

The anarchists have taken the traditional labour role taken by the Mafia and biker gangs in the past- they’re simply criminal muscle to do the dirty work the rank and file don’t have the resolution to do themselves. The only real difference between what happens now and the tactics of the past is that the optics are different. In an increasingly transparent deception, anarchists use phrases like ‘social justice’ or ‘anti-fascist’ to cover their dark aspirations.

Many unions hide behind a the same veil of cognitive dissonance . It’s not the rank & file- most of them would be seriously shocked and angered if they knew what’s happening with their money. It’s the Trotskyite and other pro-violence executives who are behind the problem- they all too often use union resources to promote their partisan political activities. In January Sid Ryan, who’s closely tied with the NDP, openly admitted this- saying that the labour movement will no longer have peace with Ontario Liberals.

At Thursday’s Rally Sid Ryan, Tony DePaulo of the Steelworker’s Union, and Ken Lewenza of the Canadian Auto Workers all made very passionate speeches, and all three yelled out complaints that the cops were doing their jobs- Ryan, in particular, has a history of angry tirades towards the police. But then, only moments later, Ryan and Lewenza  start getting into a pushing match with the police- screaming at them while trying to block a privately owned road.

Read the whole article at GenuineWitty 

We Must Sacrifice For Great Leader Kim Dong Wynne

Bloated public sector salaries, perks unsustainable

Also.. more documents about the Ontario Liberals' dodgy, vote-buying cancellation of two gas plants emerge while the Great Leader continues to prevent an inquiry. 

The liars and bullies behind last week's Ontario Liberal convention protest

Last Saturday was the “Rally For Rights And Democracy” in Toronto. It was organized by the Ontario Federation of Labour- Sid Ryan was the major star of the day. The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) had a major presence, as did the Steelworkers, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), teacher’s unions, and the notorious Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP).

Most of the people were decent folk, union members who flocked together to defend their (enviable) privilege.

Read the rest of this great report by Greg at GenuineWitty