The transit strike is over - but don't fall asleep!

At long last, thank God, the transit strike is over.

There - was that so hard, you jerks?

It disgusts me that they could only agree to such a simple solution - that is, binding arbitration without preconditions - when they finally knew they were backed into a corner by the feds and going to have to do it anyway. The feds in question being Rona Ambrose and John Baird, who weren't going to do anything either but were publicly shamed and backed into a corner by Premier Dalton McGuinty. The feds who would have been positioned to do something in Parliament sooner had it not been for their leader, who put everybody on a time-out after being backed into a corner himself for not taking proper action on the economy, among other things.

Is anybody else as thoroughly disgusted as I am?

And does anyone notice that at every step in this process it was the Conservatives that needed to be cornered like a rat and forced to take proper action? From Conservative Mayor O'Brien to Conservative MP's Rona Ambrose and John Baird, to Conservative PM Stephen Harper - how such people get voted in is beyond me.

In any case, the end result of the labour board's decision that transit is not an essential service, according to its ridiculously narrow definition, is that the ATU will be able to strike again in the future. Baird has said (after the aforementioned cornering) that this definition can be reviewed. But if we are going to be smart about this, we cannot allow all of this to fade into the background now that the buses will be back on the road. As long as transit is not an "essential service," we know the possibility of a strike always looms at the end of every contract.

We must keep the pressure on Baird to pursue this and we must pressure the Mayor and Councillors to get some decent alternative transportation in place.

There is no way our entire city should be brought to a grinding halt, and our most vulnerable citizens victimized, every time the ATU decides it doesn't like something. The light rail nightmare O'Brien helped create needs to be sorted out and fixed. We need to get that thing going. We need to look into the feasibility of a driverless system like Vancouver's Skytrain. We need to press for more bike lanes. I've said it before and I'll say it again... we can live with this hanging over our heads for decades to come, or we can start mitigating the situation now so this never happens again. But if this situation has shown us anything, it's that we cannot rely on our public officials to take the initiative. We must call them and write letters to them, especially our Mayor and Councillors, demanding continued action. If we do not, we will only have ourselves to blame the next time we are left in the lurch for transportation.