How things work

I was rooting around on the Googlator today and accidentally discovered that Strombo got himself a honorary doctorate degree from the U of Calgary way back in ’07!

Strombo? An honorary degree? Get the f@ck outta here! Strombo’s got a pretty thin resume today, and it must have been even thinner eleven years ago. An honorary degree?…

Then again, maybe he was tight with some Very Influential Person types. That might explain it.

Speaking of VIP types, I see where former hash dealer and current preem Dougie Ford held a presser at Leland Industries to unveil his “Ontario is Open for Business so Screw the Working Poor Act.” That’s where he officially undid the only worthwhile stuff the Liberals ever did in their interminable reign of error.

Not that there’s anything wrong with hash dealers – used to peddle a few of the brown bricks myself from time to time, but unlike Doug, it never occurred to me that this qualified me to be Premier of Ontario.

From what I can glean on the internet, Leland is one of those operations who’s business model is predicated on the availability of a labour pool willing to work for poverty wages. They pay their folks $14 something an hour in a city where the average house sells for well over a million bucks. Those are the kind of job creators Dougie is stepping up to the plate for.

That Globe piece references a couple of other job creators. Surati Sweet Mart is another outfit that talks up an entrepreneurial storm while paying starvation wages. Then there’s Pete Gossmann, a perennial favourite in anti-worker stories, who claims that the brazenly communistic Wynne labour reforms cost his company thirty thousand bucks because all forty of his employees took their two paid sick days in the first three months of the year, most of them around the Super Bowl, because that’s what conniving lazy-ass working people do when you give them a chance.

But let’s back up and do a little math here. Forty workers each take two paid sick days. That’s 80 sick days at a cost of 30k. That suggests Gossmann’s workers are making $375 a day, or close to fifty bucks an hour!

The fact of the matter is Gossmann’s Plasticap has got a handful of trades guys making a half decent wage, although nobody’s anywhere near fifty bucks an hour, and the vast majority of his forty workers are just a hop and a skip above min wage. For this Gossman is regularly trotted out as an expert on the economics of running a business.

Things are not always what they seem.

Strombo’s honorary doctorate may have had more to do with his “network” than with his achievements. A guy on the periphery of my (very small) social circle surprised me one day by announcing that he had to cut out early from our beer-drinking session because he had to go to a party in Toronto. His sister was getting an honorary doctorate from York University! As near as I can tell, her “journalism” has attracted more lawsuits than journalism awards.

But that’s OK. She cultivated some Very Influential People along the way…

That’s how things work.