A Gatineau couple finally noticed that for several weeks, they had received no mail delivery at their home. The family missuz walked down to the nearest postal station and asked if there had been some error about their address. The counter person they spoke to checked and said, nope, no error. He told them that because their entire driveway was covered over with a “Tempo” – a temporary plastic car shelter built on a tubular aluminum frame – the letter carrier refused to walk through it to their mailbox.
(PHOTO: CBC Ottawa) Now to be a little fair to Canada Post, in 2007 a local woman had made the Wile E Coyote-like decision to remove a huge build-up of snow from her Tempo – by standing inside it and trying to force the roof upwards to cause the snow to slide off. Sadly, she succeeded only in bursting the plastic, instantly weakening the entire structure. She died when it collapsed on her.
But that’s where fairness to Canada Post ends with this story. As the reporter demonstrated, this particular Tempo was actually on one half of a driveway shared with a neighbour and by the simple expedient of walking up the neighbour’s side, the reporter arrived midway between both homes’ doorways – with both mailboxes equally reachable.
Canada Post, however, stood their policy ground and the couple with the Tempo decided it wasn’t worth a fight. So they added a sidewall board at the front end of its frame and simply bolted their mailbox to the board. Mail delivery problem solved.
The “too funny to be true” part of this story comes from two add-ons. First, the neighbour with whom they shared the driveway just happened to be a Canada Post letter carrier and he said he’d never heard of the policy barring his unionized brothers and sisters from walking through a Tempo to get to a mailbox – a policy that the reporter said Canada Post was vigorously citing in this case. Then, probably realizing he was about to be quoted contravening something his employer was saying, he backpedalled a bit and said, “Maybe it's different because I work on the Ontario side, but that's new to me.”
Uh huh – different provincial delivery policies for a national corporation’s letter carriers? I don’t think so.
But my amusement turned into hilarity when the husband told the reporter that his wife asked the counter person just when Canada Post was planning to tell them that their residential mail delivery had been stopped. With a weary look of stupefied resignation, the husband looked at the reporter, “And do you know what he said to her? He said, ‘We did tell you. Didn’t you get our letter?’”
= = =
Wanna know why public servants are depressed?
The Ottawa Citizen recently ran an article documenting a soaring number of cases of clinical depression and prolonged stress-related sick leaves in the federal public service. In the wake of the January 19th cabinet shuffle that saw Lisa Raitt given a new portfolio – Labour Minister – news watchers were told by almost everyone that the appointment was, for her, a huge step backwards.
Just imagine yourself as a public servant toiling away in the bowels of Phase II, Place du Portage, Gatineau, Quebec (where the Labour Department’s bureaucracy resides), and here’s what you read about the importance of your Department in the federal hierarchy:
“Shuffle demotes high-flyer who catapulted right into cabinet in 2008” (Canadian Press headline, January 19)
And this, in the following day’s Toronto Star: “Did one goof too many cost Lisa Raitt senior post?”
“Prime Minister Stephen Harper pushed the pause button on Lisa Raitt's once-soaring political career after the rookie GTA politician proved a magnet for controversy as natural resources minister... In Tuesday's cabinet shuffle, Raitt was moved out of natural resources – a post she got just weeks after winning a seat in Halton in October 2008 – and handed the low-profile job of labour minister. Harper denied Raitt was being demoted and suggested the cabinet move was not a fatal career blow – just a timeout. ‘Lisa Raitt is a minister who has shown a remarkable grasp of complex files,’ Harper said. ‘I think she has a great future. I think this move will give her a little more varied experience in government.’”
In other words, the generally-expressed analysis has your brand new Minister being given this job essentially because she needed to be consigned to a stool in the corner of the classroom with a dunce cap on. At least for a while. (Harper, by the way, was pretty much the only person around who had anything positive to say about Ms Raitt’s new job. Of course, he had to. He gave it to her!)
But as a Labour bureaucrat, how would you feel about even bothering to get up and going to work the next morning? Good luck whipping up any enthusiasm when you’ve just been told that you’re working in the Government of Canada’s version of Botany Bay in the 18th century – a penal colony as far removed from “civilization” as you could possibly find yourself at the time without actually leaving the planet. Good bye to any desire to do your job well. Why even bother when the government doesn’t give a flying fig about what you’re doing? Good bye to loyalty. Why hitch yourself to a leader who’s had her life jacket taken away and replaced with an anchor?
If it were up to me, I would sack a Minister whom I deemed no longer worthy of holding an important profile. You’d like to think that a Prime Minister’s responsibility is not to cheapen the work of any sphere of responsibility sufficiently important to be a Ministry. But not this Prime Minister. And I would bring in someone new – even try to cajole someone to cross the floor. (It’s not like that hasn’t happened before and I’m looking at you, Belinda Stronach.)
When you’ve effectively hamstrung a cabinet minister as “damaged goods”, it’s a slap in the face to any department’s bureaucracy to shunt that minister into any other such job for what the whole Canadian political world says is a “time out”.
= = =
Haiti.
(PHOTO: ABC-TV, Australia) As I write this, the earthquake is nine days ago; and the most heavily damaged areas of the country are beginning to suffer isolated but fierce outbreaks of the anarchy of the desperate. If you’ve seen the Cecil B DeMille movie, “The Greatest Show on Earth”, you might recall that one of its most famous scenes is the catastrophic train wreck that happens when one circus train rams into the back of another, which had stopped unexpectedly on the same track.
The collision is awesome in its staging and seems almost to be occurring in slow motion as rail cars are ploughed off the track and driven into an adjoining field, enormous steel beams spear through a passenger compartment and the wildlife cages are exploded into kindling, freeing many of the animals, including the big cats. The unstoppable momentum of the following locomotive reduces much of the circus’s material structure to rubble, badly injuring many of its performers in the process. (If your computer's video card lets you play You Tube clips, it's here. But I digress.)
I have thought of that collision often in the past few days as the coverage of the earthquake’s aftermath gets harder and harder to watch. Yesterday’s CBC-TV coverage, for example, included a report from Paul Hunter in Port-au-Prince and Mr Hunter was clearly on the verge of being emotionally overwhelmed by what was happening around him. He focused on an emergency hospital that was simply out of supplies, yet crowded with badly injured victims who had received no treatment whatsoever in eight days. “There are people dying in front of me!” he cried. He pointed out that this field hospital was no more than 200 metres from an airport jammed with planeloads of relief supplies and interjected a demand into his own report to the authorities to please get the aid flowing.
Much of Haiti’s western region today is like De Mille’s ruined circus trains. But that’s where fiction and reality part ways. De Mille’s plucky troupe of wounded performers manage to cobble together a show, and parade into town with makeshift animal cages, patched up costumes and, in some cases, performers, and-oh-by-gosh-golly they put on a show!
(PHOTO: Not Haiti. Following The Greatest Show on Earth’s train wreck, as injured circus boss Charlton Heston is being treated amidst the rubble of two wrecked trains, he and several of the troupe’s performers agree that the three-rings’ sawdust coursing through their veins demands that the show must go on.)
Sadly, Haiti’s wounds are not Hollywood staging; and its desolate victims are not driven by any such “show must go on” mentality. They are driven – and driven more desperately with each passing day – by the most basic of instincts: simply to stay alive. And in more and more cases, the foreign aid delivery system is ramping up too slowly – so many injured or starving Haitians are no longer capable of managing even that. Today’s news finally tells us that the port in Port-au-Prince has been sufficiently cleared to allow ships to dock, so aid is beginning to arrive by the shipload in addition to the 130 or so daily flights the airport is capable of handling. But getting it off the docks and out to the population is happening too slowly. Too slowly. Too slow.
I don’t have a solution. But there are good and well-intentioned people in-country as I write this. Agencies like the Red Cross are doing what agencies like the Red Cross do best – providing basic emergency shelter, first-aid, water and food needs to as many people as they can reach. Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders has teams that are operating literally under canvas in the street – a fictitious M*A*S*H episode recreated in the fearsome reality of a world crumbled into ruin. Amputations of crushed limbs, the news reports grimly tell us, are far and away the most frequently repeated procedures.
Pick your cause, but please pick a cause. I mentioned the two above because it’s my blog and those are two to whom have I sent money. There are many other good agencies out there. I would ignore the Billy Graham Crusade and other like-minded churches who see the quake as an opportunity to flood the country with missionaries. You can’t eat bibles and despite the power of that book’s message (at least in the right hands), bibles make lousy building materials.
Oh, and send money. Not shoes or clothing you’re done with. Not canned food that’s been sitting in your pantry for a few weeks. The most effective help right now is people with specific emergency skills, and the equipment and supplies they need to do their jobs. Getting them there is expensive but collectively, they are what Haiti needs at the moment. So send money to one or two. Every little bit helps and some agencies have already collected an astonishingly large number of “little bits”. It’s not such a big planet and one of our neighbours is hurting badly.
Thanks a bunch.
À la next time.
PS... I just did a quick roll back through the most recent entries and saw that in the post before I said good bye to my father-in-law, I promised some notes about a long weekend spent in Chicago. That’s what I’ll do next time.
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