Why so many leaders come from Quebec

[QUOTE BY= Marcarc] I wasn't referring to unions but I will now. Standards of living have always gone up where there have been vibrant unions, that's pretty much a given, you can look at the statistics yourself. That workers have more powers now is a fiction, it isn't even remotely true (unless we're going back to the depression). For one thing Canada has been copying the US's anti-union culture for some time now. The eighties were literally a war on unions, while in canada it wasn't until the late eighties, early nineties. Most unions in canada are notoriously business friendly by world standards. In New Brunswick you just saw a union vote overwhelmingly to support a mill purchase which would sack their pensions, fire a quarter of workers and scale back wages. And just because one or two unions are very powerful, doesn't mean WORKERS are. In fact, the larger the union, the less power workers have, just like voters in our society. And what canada has been seeing, especially in the public sector, has been the amalgamation of unions. So for example, look at the post office: until the eighties there were two unions, one for carriers and one for administration, dispatch, and sorters. The letter carriers union was far more effective, there had only ever been one strike in their history and they were very good at settling issues by other means other than strikes. During the amalgamation vote 12,000 votes 'mysteriously' vanished and the union joined the larger, more strike prone administrative union. The larger union obviously wanted more union dues. The above posted argument by perturbed also omits a very important aspect of unionism, which is the government's legislattion which has increasingly dismantled tools of equal arbitration. This has meant that workers and unions have really had NO CHOICE but to strike, because every other recourse has been denied them. So garbage collectors 'make life miserable' because they have no other way to protect themselves from privatization and loss of income. This is a defense of 'trade unionism', and not a defense of specific unions. They run the gamut, and ask any union member and they will have as many complaints about their union as they will about the organization they work for. But it's similar to the states that have citizen's initiatives- many have complaints about how they are implemented and the rules governing them, but nobody within them will ever vote to get rid of them because they know the alternative is worse and they know that just their existence in part helps keep their company, or their government, more responsive. [/QUOTE] I agree with almost everything you said. The worse union in the world is the janitors who clean Toronto schools....to be fair, Mike Harris gutted education funding and cut janitorial services by two-thirds, but un my past experices, school support staff were some of the laziest people on earth. I realie unions are better than the alternative, but back in my school days we were talking about parts of schools getting cleaned like twice a year--and these were full time workers. The teachers union is rich with a MASSIVE pension fund but has been co-opted at times, as well as withold shcool, extracurriculars from kids several times, which often accimplished little or nothing. Teachers I feel little sympathy for in many cases as they get paid way more than average in Ontario--I do think extracurriculars should be open to outside instructors who specialize, as they do in America....