Tim Hortons

The various media outlets are all abuzz with the news that Tim Hortons and its now parent company, Burger King, are laying off a significant percentage of its head office employees. The actual number is not clear. While corporate headquarters have announced that they will be letting go 350 staff go (Globe and Mail), at least one employee suggested that up to 40% of the staff would lose their jobs. I would suspect that the final count will never be known in part because some of the positions will be lost through attrition.  The layoffs appear to be a surprise only to the employees. Economists predicted within days of the announced buyout that layoffs would happen (Huff Post). It was the Canadian government, when they approved the sale of the Tim Hortons to a large multinational, who set the percentage of jobs that would be.

It is not that Tim Hortons are broke or even close to bankruptcy. Out of every ten coffees sold in Canada, Tim Hortons sells eight. A year ago the corporation reported that both their revenue and the return on their shares had increase (Huff Post). Staff lost their jobs because 3G Capital, the Brazilian investment firm that owns roughly 70 per cent of the merged company strips their new acquisitions of everything they can to maximizes its profits (Globe and Mail).

But Tim Hortons are not the only profitable company in Canada that have announce layoffs. CIBC have announced that they will "selectively reduce a number of positions," (CBC). CIBC in 2013 made the most money it has ever made in a single year (CBC). In May of last year, the most dominant store in North America, Wal-Mart announced that it was going to lay off 750 head office employees (CBC).

These three companies are not unique. They, like so many of the companies that we appear to rely on, have one thing in common with each other. They are multinational organizations with obligations to their shareholders; obligations that far supersede any sense of loyalty to their employees. These shareholders have created a new definition of the phrase "record year". They demand that every year the company have a record year. That is, every year they must make more money than the year before. If their profits are not up, then the company's share prices will go down and someone will demand the head of the CEO. A record year should mean that the company has had an exceptional year. It should be accepted that not every year can be exceptional; that some years the company will make less profit.  Clearly the three above companies amongst thousands of others have bought into the concept that profits must increase. I suspect that the large institutional investors including insurance companies mutual funds and teacher's pension funds (whose members demand a high return) are part of the problem.

While many, as they line up for their morning coffee, will rightly complain about the 3G Capital's shoddy treatment of Tim Horton's head office staff, nothing will change. People will still demand coffee at the lowest possible price from either Tim Hortons, Starbucks or MacDonald's. How those multinationals achieve those low prices will not concern very many people in those lines for very long. Except of course for those who are now unemployed.

All of the people in that line up for their morning fix of caffeine and who have money invested in mutual funds or have a pension fund should feel just a little but responsible.

Canada's Criminal Justice Sytem #1

Earlier this week, in the tablet edition of the Globe and Mail there were two separate stories on Canada's attempt to change (or in one case not change) our laws and practices in terms of our correctional system. While the Globe did not connect the two stories, I think they are very closely connected. Both stories should encourage Canadians to once again visit the larger debate as to the purpose of incarceration.

One story was about the Canadian government's rules on solitary confinement in federal prisons  being constitutionally challenged by a second group of concerned citizens (Globe & Mail). The second story was about the government's plan to propose legislation that would ensure that criminals who are found guilty of first degree murder can be incarcerated for their entire lives with no possibility of parole (Globe & Mail).

While the issue of if we should, or how long we should, isolate prisoners has been revitalized since the tragic and unnecessary death of Ashley Smith and the resultant Ontario coroner's inquest, and the more recent death of 24-year-old Edward Snowshoe, it is not a new debate. Solitary confinement was, at least in North America originally created in the early 1800s to allow prisoners time for solitude, so that they could reflect, read the Bible and repent of their devious ways (NPT; Mother Jones). From the very beginning of this experiment it was noted that instead of people changing in a positive way, their mental health became worse (NPT; Scientific American). More recently there have been numerous  studies all suggesting that depriving individuals from contact with other individuals will negatively affect their mental health and therefore their behaviour (Haney; Hresko; Rhodes). It is very clear that solitary confinement does nothing to either rehabilitate the individual or to prepare them to live in society (Scientific American). Its only value is to punish people in a way that cruel and ineffective. It would be perhaps more useful to look at reasons why solitary confinement is now being used and what would be more an effective alternative to managing that behaviour. 

This focus on prisons being a place of long term punishment is not new. In the past few years the Conservative government has established mandatory sentencing, the new "Truth in Sentencing" law and allowed that both sentences (for multiply murders) and parole ineligibility can be now be applied consecutively. The fact that the Canadian Government has refused to deal with the larger systemic problems of our correctionalsystem confirms that for the Conservatives, prison is about harsh punishment not rehabilitation. 

All of these policies were designed to lengthen the amount of time prisoners spend in prison. Clearly these laws pander to the Conservative's base who are of the belief that crime is rampant and that the only way to deal with crime is to incarcerate people who deviate from the norm in the harshest manner, for the longest period of time. I agree.

Or rather I would agree if there was one shred of proof that (1) Canada's crime rate is spiralling out of control or (2) that harsher punishment stops people from committing crime. Neither of those assumptions are true.  Less than a year ago it was reported that Canada's crime rate is at its lowest point in forty years both in terms of numbers of offenses and the severity of those offenses (Star). Secondly, while there are indications that if a potential criminal is certain that he is likely to get caught (e.g. there are more police with radar guns on the highway during a long weekend), they are less likely to commit an offense (less likely to speed), the actual severity of the consequence is not relevant (Chen,Sapario; Wright) when they are deciding to commit the crime.

The Conservatives are quite right. There is a problem within the Canadian justice system. Incarcerating people for longer times will, once again, only deal with the symptoms of those problems and ignore the real issues.

What else is new?

Who Decides

An eleven year old girl died last week. She died of a stroke. Even in the USA with a population ten times as large as Canada, such cause of death would be unusual (EurekAlert!). However, the cause of her death was not why it was national story.

Makayla Sault was a member of the New Credit First Nation. She first reached national attention when she, after 11 weeks of treatment for her leukemia, asked to be taken off of the invasive procedures. Her parents supported her wishes and the local CAS decided not to pursue the matter further. Ms. Sault's form of cancer, according to doctors, had an 80% survivable rate with treatment (National Post). The family decided to use an alternative form of therapy that included an expensive stay at a Florida clinic and a treatment regime of using "lasers, colon hydrotherapy and a strict diet of raw food and wheat grass" (National Post). The family defended their choice of treatment modalities as being " indigenous remedies".

While I am somewhat cynical about these particular forms of indigenous remedies (given that none of the remedies are indigenous to south western Ontario or any other area, and that the person who runs the Florida clinic sounds like a snake oil salesman), I am fully prepared to believe that there is more than one way to cure a disease. Given how intrusive, disruptive and sometimes unsuccessful the current "cures" are, I understand why people would look for alternatives. We need to have people who have the courage and wisdom to explore alternatives. In spite of the fact that Ms. Sault died, this may have been the right treatment for her. It may be that the mother is right is stating that her daughter died because her system was weakened due to the previous chemotherapy treatments (CBC). We will never know. What I am concerned about is the double standard the medical and child protection agencies are perpetuating.

If Ms. Sault's parents had been members of the Jehovah's Witnesses and had therefore refused to have their daughter be given a potential life saving blood transfusion, the local agencies and the courts would have quickly taken away all parental rights in terms of medical choices. The Supreme Court two decades ago made it clear that a child's medical needs supersede the parent's religious values, and that the medical profession were the appropriate bodies to decide what a child's medical needs (National Post). Five years ago, a court case in Manitoba confirmed the State's right to ignore the wishes of a 14 year old girl who wanted to refuse a transfusion because of her faith (CBC) . So the question that begs to be asked is - why did the medical and child protection system in Ontario not assume control over Ms. Sault's medical treatment? The obvious answer is that because Ms. Sault was a member of a First Nation. A child from any other culture or National group would have remained, rightly or wrongly, in chemotherapy.

In a post modernist society where many citizens accept that the medical profession may not have all (any?) of the answers; in a culture where new, not-scientific medicines flourish just at the boundary between mainstream and alternative life styles, and in a country where we are rightly consumed by the sins of our fathers and are apparently unable to address the consequences of their actions, it is not surprising that we as a collective are inconsistent in our decisions around how to interact or relate to those who are First Nations. It is perhaps equally unsurprising that we are incapable of even acknowledging that our inability to discuss the problem, is in itself, a significant problem.

I do not know what the correct course of treatment should have been for Ms. Sault. I am not sure that an eleven year old girl is fully emotionally competent to make life affecting decisions or that the average Canadian, I am also not sure, no matter how caring they are, that parents are intellectually capable of deciding what the best treatment is, and I am certainly not sure how the courts or the child protection system can possible decide when either the child or the parent should or should not have the control. But regardless of how we decide to make those decisions - we need to ensure that a child's ethnic, cultural or national status does not give them special status or place limits on them.

Oh..... I forgot...that is what is already happening for First Nation children in terms of access to medical attention, education, jobs, housing or support. Maybe we should fix that too.