According to CLRCS Executive-Director Jennifer Lavallee, there’s no money to provide raises for her striking workers.  

So that got me thinking.  Maybe it’s time to take stock of how much this labour dispute has cost us, the taxpayers, in dollars and cents.

Although the strike has now reached its twelve week mark, I’ve arbitrarily selected a ten-week period to make a comparison between wages earned by replacement workers over that ten-week period and the earnings an OPSEU Local 472 member would have earned had they worked those same hours.

Documentation is important.  Recently, I feel I got some, albeit indirectly.  Nevertheless, it was Important.

An email from Executive-Director Jennifer Lavallee landed in the inboxes of clients and client families, people connected to Community Living Renfrew County South through active participation in agency activities and supports.  In other words, their children are the direct clients of the agency and its mandate.

The email was very sure of itself, and I don’t mean that as a criticism.  It was definitely addressing union talking points, and assertively countered those talking points in what struck me as a confident manner.  So the tone of the message sounded less defensive, at least that’s what I feel I noticed.

But what made things different for me was her attachment of a document that claims to be a Letter of Understanding between CLRCS and OPSEU Local 472 as to the remedy required after the repeal of Bill 124.

Ottawa Senators fans are mad at Brady Tkachuk and they have every right to be.  But not for a second should they bemoan his “loss.”

Tkachuk is a good hockey player, and I’d be happy to have him on my team, that is if he wasn’t such an asshole.

And that assholiness went full volume back during the Four Nations series a couple of years back where the rivalry between the Canada and United States hockey programs clashed twice, in the round-robin stage and in the tournament final.

His brother Matthew, an equally gifted asshole, decided he needed to fight Brandon Hagel right off the opening face-off in the round-robin match-up between the two nations.  Now make no mistake, Hagel was all for it, probably given that he’s a member of the Tampa Bay Lightning, a team that absolutely hates their state rivals, Matthew’s Florida Panthers.

Say what you want, but from where I’m standing, it sure looks like that Jennifer Lavallee person has herself a great gig.

Jennifer, of course, is the Executive-Director of Community Living Renfrew County South, and she’s currently in the midst of a magic carpet ride.

Her empire continues to hum along, albeit with reduced or compromised services, but that’s no real impediment, so long as the money keeps flowing in.

She doesn’t have the hassle of dealing with a troublesome union always nagging at her about their supposed rights, whatever those are.  Inconveniences to running a tight ship, I guess.

She even has her own security force, of at least two guys anyways, but that’s two guys more than she had before, right?  So that’s pretty cool.  The money’s there for that too, I guess.

Professionally speaking, Jennifer appears to be living the dream.

Altruism is a wonderful thing and if not for its presence, a lot of what good happens in the world might not happen at all, or at the very least might not happen as much.

Unfortunately, in such an indifferent and sometimes cruel world, any help we can get from any quarter making the lives of disadvantaged adults better is considered to be a good thing.

To give of yourself for the betterment of others, even if by doing so, you put yourself in some degree of personal disadvantage.  That’s what altruism is.

It’s what lay behind the decision of most people to do volunteer work, sometimes even at their own personal expense.

To see a need, and to move forward with purpose and in a good-faith, attempting to address that need, and to make things better, or easier, for anyone struggling to meet those needs on their own.

But I’m going to put forth what some may consider to be a contentious argument.

Today, I yield this space to my brother, John Hanson.

I just read an open letter of his, and it’s the best representation of everything that has to do with the labour mess between CLRCS and OPSEU Local 472.

And he does so in a polite tone that I could perhaps learn from.

As to that labour dispute between CLRCS and OPSEU 472, getting answers and seeking accountability is a difficult thing, solely and exclusively because of the unwillingness, reticence, and perhaps even disingenuousness of three different camps, all of them nestled on the management side of this.

I’m not here to label anyone as being a liar because, well, it’s not good form.  Plus different people have different views on what lying is, especially in this day and age where concepts involving different versions of truth get tossed around, where my truth might not match up with your truth.  So the moral repugnancy around lying that once was the social norm has been replaced with the idea that competing truths can exist, that there is no one universal truth surrounding anything, but rather oppositional truths which, upon analysis, are really just another way of deflection from the real truth, whatever that is.

Doug Ford and Billy Denault are on holidays, but they’re not really.

I mean, yes, the legislature isn’t sitting at the moment, nor will it until October 27, meaning that they, and all MPPs will be away from their day jobs of sitting through their version of Question Period in the legislative chamber.  If it’s a holiday, it’s a fabulous one, running some 21 weeks from early June to late October.  And it’s a paid holiday as well.

It’s good work if you can find it.

To say that John Hanson is an interesting guy is to do a serious disservice to John Hanson.

He can talk with the best of them, and when he points that ladle at you to emphasis a point he’s making, you stand up and take note because you’re not entirely sure if he’s gonna smack you with it, and who the hell wants a ladle mark seared on their forehead going into the weekend?

John is a lot, and he’s a lot of things, but he showed up in Renfrew as the OPSEU Chair of Provincial Retirees and OPSEU Vice-Chair Provincial Retired Members Division 4.  He came to town to back up OPSEU Local 472 in their dispute with CLRCS, something now entering its tenth week with absolutely no movement from the other side.

I’d like to loosely discuss the Board of Directors of Community Living Renfrew County South.  And I should be able to do that without eliciting a wave of hysteria form anyone over on the management side of this labour dispute.

My goal is not to disparage or discredit anyone.  I’ve already made clear my opinion that the members of this Board are all exemplary human beings, at least so far as I’m ever going to know.  But I’m a critical thinker, just the way we were all taught to be, so you can’t get all bent out of shape when that critical thinking is directed your way.

Critical thinking isn’t employed to embarrass or ridicule anyone here, but rather it’s an attempt to simply not accept everything in front of me as established and unalterable fact.  And so this process involves asking some questions.

And there are people around who don’t like that.