Solidarity for a few weeks
So, yesterday was the one-year anniversary of our closing date (it will never be hard to remember, since our mortgage payments always come out on the 13th) and our leap into homeownership as Windsorites. I have to say that although Windsor has every amenity one might reasonably want, it's not exactly home (any of our friends from Montreal want to move here, please?). Right now the biggest annoyance in Windsor is the ongoing CUPE strike which means that all sorts of public services have been shut down for a couple of months, including, park maintenance and, most importantly, garbage collection. So right now our garage (which is really too small for our cars anyway, even the Matrix) is holding three big bags of regular trash and eight big bags of recyclables. And all the local parks have wonderful wildflowers, but aren't much good for kids to run around in. I have to admit that I have some sympathy for the striking workers even though virtually everyone else in this otherwise union-friendly town seems to have lost their goodwill. Seems like the city has decided to use the economic downturn as an opportunity to slash costs in the long term by removing some benefits for all newly hired employees. But short-term economic woes don't justify long-term consequences like that, particularly ones that will make it very difficult for the city to attract good workers in the future. And right now the workers are prepared to go to binding arbitration but the city isn't - that tells me something too. The problem is that the city stinks (or so I'm told) and is an eyesore, right in the middle of the big tourism season, and people are understandably less inclined to be generous than they were in April. And at a time when the auto workers are losing their jobs left and right, they aren't too sympathetic to people who haven't even been hired yet losing some benefits, and are sympathetic to the city when it threatens a tax hike to pay for these things (in a city with a declining tax base already). You have to give the city credit for cunning, knowing when they have their workers at the greatest disadvantage, and for having the good fortune to be doing contract negotiations when they have the greatest leverage to extract concessions. Fortunately we compost most of the smelliest of our food waste. There are also a couple of ad-hoc door-to-door services that will take garbage away for people (of unknown legality). Things are all getting pretty tense here, which is probably the biggest annoyance, and weren't helped much by the fact that the Wings lost the Stanley Cup. But I mean, seriously - are we now to believe that the guy who mows the lawn at the park is an essential service? Ah well, it will get straightened around soon enough.