The Garbage Strike Conspiracy - Launching The Ladner Offensive

LookAtMe!Me!Me!
NotSammyVille


Yesterday city councillor Peter Ladner penned a hard-hitting, some might suggest viscious, offensive against striking municipal workers on the Op-Ed page of the Vancouver Sun.

There are all kinds of assertions in there and PicketBoy, who has been thinking while walking the line, challenges almost everyone of them with reason, reasonableness and an ability to look at core issues with eyes wide open and an open mind.

However, in addition to Picket Boy's reasonableness, which get to the real heart of the matter, there are a couple of points about Mr. Ladners' missive that I find interesting purely from a 'mechanics of the whirlitzer' point of view.

First, why did Mr. Ladner choose to quote from city manager Judy Rogers' vituperative letter to the Union of Aug 31, which included statements such as the following:

"During this round of bargaining the union rejected the city's offer of private mediation, opted out of mediation at the Labour Relations Board, initiated a strike, rejected eight employer offers, and twice walked away from critical settlement opportunities to stage media events...."

Now there is a whole lot of very careful weasel wordsmithing in there (ie. 'private' mediation and settlement 'opportunities') which at the very least blurs reality and at worst is outright misinformation, either of which might suggest to a reasonable person that the crafting of such a letter could have been assisted by the fine folks over at the Group W bench. Even more to the point, this letter was delivered to the Union a full week before the City's next offensive that the Union successfully pushed back against by demanding real negotiations rather than coffee-clatch opportunities of non-settlement.

The second thing about Mr. Ladner's Op-Ed that I find interesting is the timing of the thing itself; it was published on the Monday after the Friday when the City finally agreed, apparently, to start negotiating for real.

So what's up?

Did Mr. Ladner and the most helpful oompa-loompas with the double-U's stamped on their foreheads have the thing all cued up late last week and then not bother to pull it when the Coffee-Klatch Crusade failed?

Or, was this a last minute attempt to lower expectations of the coming negotiations by once again painting the Union as impossibly way far gone unreasonable for reasonable negotiations (see PicketBoy's reasonableness rebuttal above)?

Or, is Mr. Ladner initiating this offensive on his own, off the Mad Mad Mad Mad World's reservation, because he figures that the time has come to seize the moral high-horse ground from his old rival, the increasingly ineffective, ineffectual and invisible Sam Sullivan?

We're not really sure if it it's one, none, or all of the above. However, before you dismiss the last possibility out of hand it might be worth recalling the fact that members of the governing NPA party-party have, indeed, turned on currently sitting mayors in the not-so distant past.


OK?

____
Update: Now this is interesting - apparently PicketBoy has heard back from Mr. Ladner with the oddest of odd refusals to respond to anything reasonable.
Double-Secret Probation Update: Possibility #4 - Perhaps Mr. Ladner was trying to get one last shot in before the curtain came down on what City manager turned spokesmodel Jerry Dobrovolny is calling a 'media blackout'.

.