Bad Ottawans! No buses for you!

Ottawa transit strike drags on over scheduling issue

If the City and the ATU are soooo sorry about the "inconvenience" (oh sorry, I was thinking "extreme hardships") this lengthy process is causing, where is the urgency?? If they were really that concerned, wouldn't they be in negotiations every day trying to hammer this out? And are they allergic to binding arbitration, or is it just against their religion? (Update: I stand corrected - but what's with the preconditions?) How can we introduce some actual urgency to this? Oh hey, I know! We'll make O'Brien, Council, and the ATU drink 2 litres of pop each, lock them in a room together, and nobody gets a bathroom break until this thing is resolved. Hey, it's cheaper than arbitration and twice as fast.

This strikes me as a personal vendetta gone bad, a Mexican standoff between two pigheaded sides, where the poor, sick, elderly, and disadvantaged pay the price. People are getting canned because they can't get to work, failing classes because they can't write their exams, getting sicker because they can't get to their surgeries or doctor's appointments, getting poorer because they are having to pay for taxi cabs or artificially inflated parking fees, getting depressed because they can't get out to visit friends or go to community events, losing their businesses because customers can't get to them, missing time with their families and losing sleep because they have no option but to walk everywhere, and suffering stress overload from struggling so hard every day for nearly six weeks to get through the snow, ice, bitter cold, and traffic since the ATU decided doing this in December would screw us up the worst. Estimates as of 13 Jan peg the cost to our local economy at $280M and up, $8M per day. All this on top of the global economic crisis and being in a recession, where people are already worried about losing their jobs, homes, and life savings. Oh and how many Ottawan children have had their Christmas ruined by all this is anyone's guess.

Unless the Canada Industrial Relations Board determines that there is "immediate and serious danger to safety or health" under an excessively narrow definition, only Parliament can force the bus drivers back to work while an agreement is hammered out. But oops.... Parliament has prorogued until 26 January because our PM is busy dodging a confidence vote.

Thank you ATU, for your selfishness in deliberately targeting innocent people who can least afford the hardship, and holding them hostage for the sake of internal matters of seniority and scheduling.

Thank you Mayor O'Brien and City Councillors, for injecting unnecessary bravado and grandstanding, and turning this into a public showdown and referendum on union-busting rather than solving the problem at hand. Many more thanks for refusing to have transit declared an essential service.

Thank you all 3 of the above, for exercising an exceptional level of urgent urgency usually reserved for things like cleaning out the mystery box at the back of the garage or sorting the sock drawer.

Thank you Labour Board, for making your criteria for hardship excessively difficult to meet. Hardship doesn't really count unless someone's on the brink of death.

And last but not least, thank you once again Harper, for throwing everybody else under the bus in order to look out for your own job. In Ottawa you've done it figuratively and literally.

Please can somebody at least pretend to care more than a two-second "sorry for the inconvenience" and blaming someone else? Grow a spine and a conscience and solve this! And act like your nana's heart transplant depends on it.