May Day and zero-hour contracts

May Day approaches.

It is the Labour Day most of the world celebrates, including France, where your faithful scribe finds himself today. In France, the first day of May is one of the few days of the year when all workers must have the day off, or legislated compensation, save those in essential services. Many businesses here in Paris will be closed and parades will occur throughout the city. At least that's what they tell me.

In Britain, a nation going to the polls in another week or so, it's a different story. There is talk there about the insidious policy granting businesses the power to hand out what are called "zero-hour contracts." Since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, the program has expanded four-fold and over 1.5 million workers now have zero-hour contracts. These employees are often young and female, many with dependent family members relying on their income.

Simply put, these contracts aren't really contracts at all. They do not guarantee a minimum number of hours of work, nor do they provide for a standard working week; a person could in fact be asked to come in to work at 7:00 in the morning as little as five hours before. Or after finishing a full week of nighttime hours.These people are on-call in every sense of the word. By signing a zero-hour contract, the worker grants full power to her employer.

It is, in the words of the Labour Party leader and Opposition Leader, Ed Milibrand, "An epidemic undermining hard work, undermining living standards, and undermining family life. Because if you don't know from one day to the next how many hours you're going to be doing, how can you have any security for you and your family?" He has pledged to give employees the right to a regular contract after 12 weeks of working regular hours. The problem here, from my perspective, might be the as yet, undefined "regular hours" Milibrand is talking about, though I suppose it will all come out in the campaign, and then be watered down after election, though that might be too cynical on my part.

For many of these workers in the UK, they receive the minimum pay of about $12 per hour. The "living wage" in London is considered $17 an hour, and that seems bizarrely low.

Business leaders in Britain like the zero-hour contracts and they credit the scheme with providing a "flexible labour market," and that is good for business.

From the vantage of Paris, what is happening across the Channel is bothersome indeed. Yet, it is exactly the same sort of thing that has been happening, in Canada for years. The drive by Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark to promote the slogan: "BC is open for business," and to create more flexible working arrangements that benefit employers under the promise of "creating jobs for British Columbians," provides the same sort of zero-hour contracts for our workers. People can work on-call for years, without being granted regularized employment. It happens in the private sector and within unionized environments too. It is simply wrong.

This May Day we should take time to remember the benefits we all enjoy, largely thanks to the labour movement and progressive political parties. With every concession we make, under the guise of  some slogan, that decreases our commonwealth as a social community and not just as a consumer society, it becomes ever more difficult for any government, even a progressive government, to bring them back. May Day is a day to reflect and remember, and to act.

Copyright 2015 by Jim Murray.

Le Brio for coffee in Paris

We are on sojourn in Paris, of all places, and the quest for our daily grind continues.

There are probably ten different cafés within easy walking distance of our place in the 18ieme and Le Brio is just around the corner. It's a restaurant-bar in the traditional French sense; early to open and late to close, with coffee, beer, wine and spirits, plus a full kitchen throughout much of the day. Le Brio is a busy place, especially at noon and again around the dinner hour, which tends to be later than what might be expected in Canada.






Le Brio is very much a neighbourhood  café . There are lots of locals and the regulars are greeted by name. The service is friendly and personable, if at times a bit like Fawlty Towers. Becoming regular faces after just a few days we too are greeted amiably by the manager and staff. In fact, we no longer have to order as our waiter prepares our coffees as soon as she sees us come in the door. That does present a minor problem when one of us wants to try something different, but it's a minor quibble.








The decor is eclectic to say the least and kitschy doesn't tell the whole story. A poster of the Virgin Mary appears beside a calendar of Caribbean women in various states of undress. Cowboy hats and a license plate from Texas collide with art books and a matte cup from Argentina. There's a video screen of course, not tuned to a sports channel, but rather to arte, the international European arts and culture network. Several mornings in a row, the channel featured a program on gorillas and I became involved in a discussion at the bar about these creatures. I fear my French language skills approached gorilla-like standards, yet my comrades were patient and forgiving.
















The coffees at Le Brio are highly acceptable. Beans are ground with each order and the crema is usually rich. In Paris, when one ordersun café, an espresso drink will arrive. It might be slightly more bitter tasting than what you are used to having in Canada. A lump of sugar is provided, but never milk or cream.



Un café filtré, also known as a café américain, is as we might expect. an espresso with added hot water.

Technically café crème and café latte are different drinks (hot cream or milk) though many cafés will have difficulty differentiating between the two. Cappuccinos usually feature whipped cream on top and are rarely ordered by any sane Parisian, though some cafés will accommodate tourists and therefore charge accordingly.



A coffee drink to consider is a café noisette, or simply: noisette. This is an espresso with a spot of cream added. Its name comes from the French word for hazelnut and because of its colour. There won't be any flavouring added to this coffee.

It is less expensive to sit or stand at the bar for a coffee or a quick drink. Taking up space at a table, especially an outside table, will bring a higher price. At Le Brio, un café  served to your table on the sidewalk will be 2 euros. At the bar, standing or sitting if a chair is available, the same coffee will be only 1 euro. Sometimes it is nice to sit outside. Sitting inside at the bar however, can be fun and provide an opportunity to practise your French. And talk about gorillas.

Photos by Jim Murray. Copyright 2015. First published on www.sojourninparis.com

Neil Macdonald and why he's scared of the police in the US

Neil Macdonald is senior correspondent for CBC News in Washington DC. This analysis piece appeared on the CBC today and is presented here. 

I recall a very similar story to Macdonald's about growing up and learning the lesson of respecting the police and the job they do, and I too have come to have reservations. Not only about police in the US, but in my own country too. The record is fairly clear when it comes to the handling of people with mental issues, or with staplers in their hands. 

The first time I heard my father say it, I was trailing along behind him, licking an ice cream on a warm summer night in a Glengarry County town not far from our farm.

"Good evening, officer," he said, as we passed a uniformed patrolman. "Lovely evening tonight."

The cop smiled back and said something kind and reassuring, and the lesson was complete.

The rule in our house was clear: the police protect us and deserve our respect. The heavens would fall on any of us overheard calling them "pigs," the word the hippies were using where the counterculture was flourishing, in places far from Glengarry.

Another popular phrase back then was "police brutality," words my father also regarded with suspicion and hostility. (Remember, there were no iPhone videos back then, just he-said, she-said newspaper stories.)

Just recently, I was walking from the White House to the CBC bureau a few blocks away, and as I passed a uniformed Secret Service officer, the old reflex kicked in: "Good afternoon, officer."

This cop, though, stared straight ahead through his sunglasses, wordless, barely acknowledging the greeting. Clearly, if he was going to speak, it would be to issue some sort of order. Everything in his stance said I am authority. Move along. Or at least that's how it seemed to me. 

I don't mind saying it: America's police now frighten me. Their power and their impunity frighten me. And I'm a white, 58-year-old middle-class man. I can't imagine what I'd be feeling if I were a black or Latino kid in Baltimore.

Baltimore crackled with violence and rage this week. The governor declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard after rioting erupted following the funeral of Freddie Gray, yet another black man who died in police custody. The times really haven't changed so much. Gordon Lightfoot once wrote a famous song about another governor who did the same thing 48 years ago in Detroit. 

The public conversation isn't much different, either. Liberals are worrying about what triggered the rioting ("...And they really know the reason, and it wasn't just the temperature and it wasn't just the season ..."). Conservatives are pointing out the shameful looting and the rocks and fire, telling us we should be grateful we have brave police to stand between us and anarchy.

But the reality the modern surveillance society is providing us is impossible to ignore. Just as the authorities use technology to collect unprecedented data on the citizenry, the citizenry is constantly crowdsourcing video evidence about the authorities, and it's ugly.
It used to be the cop's word against the perp's. Now it's the cop's word against clear video evidence, and the cop still usually prevails. In Baltimore, as is most often the case these days, bystanders recorded Freddie Gray's takedown by police on their smartphones. Sometime afterward, his spine was nearly severed. He perished in hospital. But it's improbable that anyone will answer for the killing — that's what it was, after all — in a court of law.

A recent investigation by the Washington Post and Bowling Green State University stated that of the "thousands of people" shot dead by police in America during the last decade, only 54 officers have been charged. And most of those who were charged were acquitted.

The series examined cases ignored by the national media: a lot of them unarmed people shot at point-blank range. The officers involved always claimed they feared for their lives; juries almost always took their word, even when the victim was shot from behind, execution-style.

The system doesn't really want to document police crime; governments are for obvious reasons reluctant to keep statistics on such shootings ("not necessarily considered an offence") and police close ranks. It won't be easy reining in America's chokehold police. In about a fifth of the cases where charges were laid, prosecutors accused police of planting or destroying evidence.

One needs only consult the iPhone video of the South Carolina cop shooting the fleeing man in the back a few weeks ago, then appearing to plant a Taser on his corpse, to see how it happens. That officer was charged with murder, but only after the video emerged. A conviction will be another matter entirely.

"To charge an officer in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way," said Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green who participated in the Washington Post investigation. And even then, juries tend to give the police officer the benefit of the doubt.

Stinson, a former officer himself, suggested that many of these police shootings are really crimes of passion. "They are used to giving commands and people obeying. They don't like it when people don't listen to them, and things can quickly become violent when people don't follow their orders." 

Today, though, even the conservative voices that have for so long defended law enforcement are wavering. Take some time and browse the libertarian Cato Institute's online National Police Misconduct Reporting Project. It's a scholarly work, and evidence gathered is weighed carefully; in fact, the last full year for which they have issued a definitive report is 2010. That report identified 4,861 formal incidents of police misconduct involving 6,613 law enforcement officers and 247 civilian fatalities for that year alone.

If just a fraction of those fatalities were criminal, then the inescapable conclusion is that more people have been murdered by police in America in the last 10 years than by terrorists. Of course, we are told, we don't know how many terrorists have been thwarted by vigilant behind-the-scenes enforcement. Well, true. But given the minuscule number of prosecutions, let alone convictions, neither do we know how many of the people who are supposed to be guarding us have gotten away with murder.

By Neil Macdonald. CBC News. 29 April 2015. 

The myth of affordable housing through higher density in Vancouver

Stephen Quinn, host of Vancouver's number one afternoon drive radio program, except possibly when the Canucks are playing, writes in today's Globe and Mail and provides a commentary on the affordability created by higher density in the hedge city that is Vancouver. 

Stephen Quinn remembers, and so do I. His column is reprinted below.




Remember EcoDensity™? I do.

It was June, 2006, when Vancouver mayor – now (seldom seen) B.C. Liberal MLA – Sam Sullivan introduced the brand to Vancouver and the entire planet as the city played host to the World Urban Forum.

Despite the gloss of the hot-off-the-press brochure, critics accused him of rebranding an idea already in practice: Increasing density would reduce the city’s environmental footprint with the secondary benefit of making housing more affordable.

At the time, I questioned Mr. Sullivan on the second point. Density in the downtown core had virtually doubled over the previous two decades and condos were not getting any cheaper. In fact, each new development represented a significant jump in price.

“Don’t you know anything about economics?” I recall him asking me rhetorically.

“Supply and demand, m’boy, supply and demand. We build more supply and the prices come down,” he said, stretching out his suspenders with his thumbs and chomping on a cigar. Okay, there were no suspenders or cigar, but his answer did conjure up grainy black-and-white images of W.C. Fields, sans top hat. Also, I’m pretty sure he didn’t call me “m’boy.”

The point is that selling density as a means to affordability in this city is nothing new.

But it’s a myth, and an especially cruel one to wave in front of well-educated young people hopeful that one day they’ll be able to afford the sort of housing in which they might be able to raise a family in Vancouver.

And yet, it persists.

This week, council approved the third phase of the Cambie Corridor Planning Program.

This phase will see the city rezone the areas between the new developments currently under construction and the lower-density single-family homes in the neighbourhood – think townhouses and row houses in a sort of transition zone between the buildings on main arteries and single-family homes.

Once again, the foggy mirage of affordability appears in the latest report: “Phase 3 provides an opportunity to increase housing options and improve affordability by broadening the range of housing choices that will help young families put down roots and stay in Vancouver.”

Susan Haid, the city’s assistant director of housing for Vancouver South, also talked about affordability when I spoke with her about the plan this week. “Affordability is something that we’re really going to explore; a range of options through the planning process,” she said.

That’s where the townhouses and row houses and other options come in.

Yes, there are opportunities for “lock off suites” that would allow an owner to rent a portion of their townhouse, and opportunities for low and mid-rise apartments.

But as for the definition of affordable, Ms. Haid conceded the city was talking about what she called “relative affordability.”

“Affordable compared to a single family house in the area may be a desirable option for some families,” she said.

We’ve seen block after block of townhouses and row houses spring up along Oak Street and Granville Street in the past few years as a result of rezoning along those busy roads. A quick scan of listings shows a 1,300-square-foot, three-bedroom townhouse in the 6,100 block of Oak going for $870,000. That’s not in a quieter “transition zone” – it’s on six lanes of rush-hour traffic. Two blocks up the street is a similar but slightly larger two-bedroom row house listed for $1.18-million.

From there the prices only go up. (And don’t forget the strata fees.)

As for low-rise apartments, I found a lovely, 1,100-square-foot two-bedroom suite in a new building on Cambie going for $780,000.

By whose definition are those affordable to a young family putting down roots?

Before you venture an answer, remember that we’re talking about “relative affordability.”

So with the law of supply and demand apparently suspended, and with so many market drivers beyond the city’s control, let’s just admit that the myth of affordable housing in the Cambie corridor is exactly that – a myth. We can talk about “providing opportunities” and “broadening the range of housing choices,” but in the end, the real estate market in Vancouver is what it is.

Let’s stop pretending the city can do anything to make housing more affordable for anyone. And let’s not bite when reports to council dangle vague references to affordability in front of us.

Here’s what it has done to us: when I told a young colleague this week about the 1,100-square-foot apartment on Cambie listed for $780,000, her response said it all.

“$780,000? For a two-bedroom?” she said. “That’s a deal!”

Relatively speaking, I guess it is.

Yes, Stephen, in this city, it is. But that doesn't make it right.

Published online April 17, 2015 by the Globe and Mail. Published in the paper on April 18, 2015.

The most likely coalition? It's already Harper and Trudeau.

The recent headlines about the Liberal leader considering a coalition with the NDP, but not while Tom Mulcair is the New Democratic Party leader, was interesting in what it says about the inexperienced politician that is Justin Trudeau. Or about the fact that his Liberal Pary has precious little in common with the NDP.

Many of us, including John Ibbitson, writing in the Globe and Mail, wondered why in the world Trudeau would even consider a coalition with the NDP. Historically the Liberals have always found more common ground with the Tories, than they ever did with the social democratic party, and certainly, as Ibbitson points out in Wednesday's column, they seem to be in lock step with Harper on the current issues of the day. Indeed, it's difficult to tell the two parties apart.

The Liberals support Bill C-51, the crazed Conservative anti-terrorism legislation that the NDP opposes.

The Liberals are behind the Canadian military training mission to Ukraine. The NDP says the mission must first be approved by the House of Commons. You would have thought they might agree on that one.


Taxes? Surely the Liberals and New Democrats must agree on increasing taxes to the rich? Then again... The Liberals would retain virtually all the Conservative tax measures, save for a small income-splitting tax cut. Only the NDP would actually raise corporate taxes. Canada is notoriously generous to its corporations when compared to other industrial economies.

When it comes to environmental concerns, Mr Trudeau is happy to let the provinces take on climate change and global warming, as does Mr Harper. Mr Mulcair is committed to compulsory Canadian standards to reduce carbon emissions. But wait, there's even more: Mr Trudeau backs the Keystone XL pipeline and supports the further development of the oil sands, which sounds just like the current Prime Minister. Tom Mulcair opposes Keystone and speaks honestly about a "Dutch disease" of oil dependency in our country.

On Quebec, both the Conservatives and the Liberals find common cause in backing the Clarity Act, while New Democrats endorse the Sherbrooke Declaration, which makes it easier for Quebec to separate, if ever that comes up again.

The NDP has proposed a national child care program. The Conservatives would rather provide direct payments to parents. The Liberals, not surprisingly perhaps, given their record on the issue, are completely silent.

Ideologically, a minority Conservative government might work with the Liberals on a day to day basis. Perhaps the same might be true for a minority Liberal government.

For his part, and in trying to appeal to the 60 percent of Canadians who oppose the present government, Mr Mulcair repeats that he is willing to do whatever it takes to defeat the Conservatives, including forming some sort of coalition with the Liberals, but Mr Trudeau refuses.

Increasingly, as the election approaches, Mr Harper will warn Canadians that anything less than a Conservative majority will lead to a coalition of the NDP and Liberals. The reality could be a much different thing entirely.

Copyright 2015 by Jim Murray.