We’ll Soon Learn Two Things

We’re about to learn two things about the Canadian government. The Public Service Alliance of Canada, which represents nearly a quarter million government employees, have gone on strike for…DEI claptrap like mandatory “unconscious bias” training; an intrinsically racist $1,500 bonus that’s only for Cree, Inuktitut, Dene, or any other Canada Indigenous language speakers; more racism in the form of special time off just for Indigenous employees; government-paid, which is to say Canadian taxpayer-paid, time off for union “training;” a union-administered “Social Justice Fund,” which PSAC carefully declines to say is its purpose—just give the union the money—and on and on.

One of the things we’re going to learn is how much courage Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his government have in standing up to this union’s strike, an action (not unique to PSAC) that is, essentially, extortion in that a striking union is saying it’s not going to allow the struck entity to operate until the entity pays the union’s demanded vig. In particular, will the Trudeau government show the same “courage” against this employee strike that it showed against a recent trucker protest, and will it use similarly heavy-handed tactics, which included freezing/seizing bank accounts, to break up the union strike?

The other thing we’ll learn is how much, or how little, these workers are missed as Canada’s government continues to function without them.

The PSAC 224-page program of demands can be read here.

Another Reason to Not Take Federal Dollars

Aside from the fact that those dollars aren’t actually Federal government dollars; they’re OPM, the tax remittances of us ordinary Americans from all over our nation that then get transferred to other jurisdictions than the ones we live in.

Here’s the latest reason.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is proposing a rule that would require towns that receive federal money to create “equity plans” for fair housing and take action to end racially unbalanced neighborhoods.

In other words, as the Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it,

the Biden bureaucracy wants to socially engineer suburban neighborhoods to its racial and ethnic liking.

Not to the liking of us citizens.

Never mind that such plans are intrinsically racist, handing out funds as they do based on race, no matter the high-minded pretenses of the politician pushers. And never mind that “racially unbalanced neighborhoods” would balance out on their own—to some extent—in an unfettered free market. “Some” because in that free market, buyers and sellers would make their own decisions on where to live and among whom, and many free Americans would choose freely to live in the company of others like themselves.

In the end, the way to be free of Government strings attached to Government funds transfers is to stop taking Government funds. Breaking the addiction to OPM, as with any other addiction, will be deucedly hard. But hard means possible.