I’m sure you’ll get it. Then you could win the prize, which is… an end to the bus strike!!!

Don’t send your entries to me. Send them to Mayor Larry O’Brien, c/o city hall, and to André Cornellier, c/o Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 279. Mention that you want the goddamn strike over with, and you want it over with now.

Good luck!

It’s a snowboard in the window at Tommy & Lefebvre on Bank St.

The transit strike

I still don’t think the right of older drivers to pick their own schedules and rack up overtime is worth striking over. I predict that the rank and file will see it my way and vote to accept the latest offer.

I think the fact that union president André “No!” Cornellier doesn’t want union members to be allowed to vote on this offer is a very good reason to ask them to vote on it.

Cornellier says allowing a vote will split the union, because only a few hundred drivers are actually affected by the scheduling issue. (There are 2300 drivers.)

I say, “Hmmm.”

It’s mortifying for me to find myself in agreement with Mayor Larry and Rona Ambrose, but nobody can be wrong about everything. Not even Larry and Rona.

Come on, get it done. We’re sick of it.

For a reasonably neutral account of what’s going on, see http://www.cfrb.com/node/851282.

I like this picture quite a bit, even though there aren’t any people in it or anything. I like how it’s simple and dramatic. It should be a poster for a movie called ‘Love and Death in the Snow’.

I took it on the east side of Bank Street, just after leaving the Queensway underpass walking north. Before you get to Catherine St.

The transit strike

My position is that the union is too strong. No way those guys should be dictating scheduling, which is obviously a management responsibility. But they’ve been doing it for a long time and they think it’s their right.

How do you rein in a union that has become too strong? There’s no reset button on unions.

I’d walked pretty far taking pictures and my feet hurt, so I went to get on a bus with some pink tickets I had in my wallet. As I was dropping my tickets in the fare box the driver tried to stop me.

“Sir!” he said, but he was too late. I’d already dropped them in.

“Sir! Those tickets have expired,” he said. “They’re no good!”

“Expired!” I said. “How could that be? Why would they expire?”

“They have expired,” he explained, “and they are no good.”

Did I mention that he was a south Asian guy? Well, he was.

Then I started insulting him. “You’re crazy,” I said. “How could tickets expire?”

“So are you,” he said. “And they have expired.”

“You’re an idiot,” I said. “I paid good money for them. Why would they expire?”

“And you are too,” he replied. “They have expired.”

I could see that I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I looked in my wallet and found some orange tickets. I put them in the box.

“There!” I yelled. “Are you happy now?”

“Thank you sir,” the south Asian driver said. I think he even smiled.

“grumblegrumblegrumble,” I said.

I still don’t think tickets should expire, and it bothers me that I threw away two tickets that I paid good money for. It’s some stupid thing that those morons at OC Transpo thought up: Cancel the old tickets, make them buy new ones, make them walk. But it’s not the fault of the driver. (Although I also think he didn’t have to notice the difference between pink and orange. In that light? With all those people? With all that traffic?)

But the moral of my story is that driving a bus isn’t exactly an unskilled job. They have to deal with people like me. That’s why they’re paid as well as they are.

Even so, it doesn’t mean they should be handling their own scheduling.

Let me get this straight. They’re striking for the right of long-time drivers to pick which shifts they want to work?

Oh, brother.

But I’m not sure that their desire to have a perk is a compelling reason to strike. The job is bus driver. It pays pretty well for unskilled work. Who says they’re going to get perks too?

Citizen columnist Randall Denley argues that management needs to have the right to manage driver schedules, especially because uncontrolled scheduling has been identified as a major money-loser by the auditor general. I agree with Denley: management has to be able to manage.

I think this strike is doomed and the city should win it.

For a lot more strike talk, including arguments from drivers, visit the OC Transpo Community blog.