Western Standard - November 09, 2022


Cory talks about how school choice can break union dominance

Topics
school choice
Mentioned
Ralph Klein Doug Ford Schools Molson
Sask First Act takes back control of fertilizer regulation from Trudeau The Pipeline： Smith wins by-election

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

200.47

Word count

1,099

Sentence count

68


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the end of the monopolies and monopolies, and the rise of independent liquor stores and breweries. I also talk about how the Canadian Union of Public Employees overplayed their hand when they held Ontario parents hostage with their demands for a raise for public workers.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You know, once upon a time, the government and the public service unions,
00:00:03.140 let's start with a story, you know, some Alberta history,
00:00:05.700 they controlled every aspect of beer production and sales in Alberta.
00:00:09.720 Unionized government-run liquor stores offered only a handful of brands of warm beer,
00:00:13.840 and sales were only available during banking hours.
00:00:15.880 Those of us old enough to remember, remember it poorly.
00:00:18.800 Breweries were unionized as were the trucking companies delivering the beer to the stores,
00:00:22.200 which were unionized as well.
00:00:23.320 That meant that pretty much every summer, one of those unions would go on strike,
00:00:27.180 and there'd be a beer shortage in the province.
00:00:29.160 I remember the massive lineups outside liquor stores
00:00:31.200 as people would clean them out in anticipation of strikes.
00:00:33.920 Now, back then, Big Rock Brewery was a small brewery.
00:00:36.260 They formed in Calgary in the 80s,
00:00:37.620 and they were having a hard time establishing themselves
00:00:39.280 because, of course, they had unionized government liquor stores
00:00:41.300 fighting against carrying their beers,
00:00:42.920 and they sold from a small outlet out in southeast Calgary.
00:00:45.380 I think they were in Dover, if I recall, and sold directly to bars.
00:00:48.640 So they had their little niche, but they were having a hard time.
00:00:50.900 Then the unions finally overplayed their hand.
00:00:53.840 During a big brewery strike in 1984, something changed.
00:00:58.200 It was one of those regular strikes, but Albertans this time had somewhere to go,
00:01:01.540 so they flocked to Big Rock, and they bought their beer as fast as the brewery could produce it.
00:01:05.180 People discovered there were beers besides Labatt's and Molson,
00:01:08.120 and many of them never went back.
00:01:09.420 It was the beginning of the end of the monopolies.
00:01:11.180 Albertans had found choice, and they liked it, and they wanted it.
00:01:14.740 Now, Ralph Klein certainly loved his beer,
00:01:16.400 and one of his first acts when he became Alberta's premier was to privatize liquor stores.
00:01:20.500 Suddenly, consumers could choose from dozens of beers,
00:01:22.840 sold, chilled, and at all sorts of hours.
00:01:25.100 There was no going back.
00:01:26.600 With a solid base of independent liquor stores that they could sell to,
00:01:29.680 small breweries and now distilleries are starting to form and flourish.
00:01:32.940 There's hundreds of beers to choose from.
00:01:34.380 The quality's higher, and there's never shortages or strikes.
00:01:37.520 Citizens won.
00:01:39.140 Now, getting more domestic, or I should say contemporary,
00:01:42.260 the Canadian Union of Public Employees overplayed their hand
00:01:45.160 when they held Ontario parents hostage
00:01:47.020 with outrageous demands for a double-digit raise for education workers
00:01:50.480 as the nation's creeping towards a recession.
00:01:52.780 Entired citizens and parents whose children had already had their education
00:01:55.680 disrupted by two years of pandemic lockdowns
00:01:57.800 called on Premier Doug Ford to intervene.
00:02:00.440 Ford, unfortunately, responded with a hammer and overplayed his hand
00:02:03.180 by preemptively invoking the notwithstanding clause
00:02:06.060 so he could violate the charter
00:02:07.240 and try and force the education workers back to their jobs.
00:02:10.560 CUPE went on an illegal strike,
00:02:11.980 and within days, Ford blinked and backed off.
00:02:14.660 So who won in all these games?
00:02:16.000 No, that's hard to say.
00:02:17.700 But the clear losers, though, are the students.
00:02:19.940 Students across Canada are going to continue to lose
00:02:22.900 due to a lack of choice in schools.
00:02:25.320 And I mean, sure, there's some private schools out there,
00:02:27.400 charter schools, but for the most part,
00:02:28.640 the government has a monopoly on providing education,
00:02:30.540 and it's all unionized.
00:02:32.420 When there's a lack of choice,
00:02:33.820 and when consumers can't vote with their feet or wallets,
00:02:35.740 the consumers will always lose.
00:02:37.740 And quality and stability of product will suffer.
00:02:40.300 Education is a product, and students are the consumers.
00:02:42.820 It's time to move to models that best serve those consumers,
00:02:46.200 and those models involve more school choice.
00:02:49.060 The dollars need to truly follow the students,
00:02:51.360 and the schools, both public and private,
00:02:52.920 should be able to compete for those dollars.
00:02:54.820 Students should be treated as assets to be drawn in,
00:02:56.740 and schools need to be incentivized to attract them.
00:02:59.560 Union-based pay scales protect teachers who are mailing it in
00:03:02.440 while pursuing a pension,
00:03:03.900 while underpaying some of the exceptional teachers
00:03:05.960 who give it all they have.
00:03:07.520 Schools should be competing for the better teachers as well,
00:03:10.100 as the students.
00:03:11.020 Merit-based pay systems improve quality,
00:03:13.540 but the union hold has to be broken.
00:03:15.960 The strikes, standoffs, and instability won't end
00:03:18.380 until the system changes.
00:03:19.860 Unionization can't be banned.
00:03:21.020 Hey, it's a right for collective bargaining,
00:03:24.060 but their monopoly on education can be broken.
00:03:26.460 Let the unions compete for the teachers as well.
00:03:28.280 If they're that good,
00:03:28.880 they shouldn't have problems getting them,
00:03:30.300 and the education support workers.
00:03:32.260 Monopolies and near-monopolies stunt innovation and quality.
00:03:35.240 It doesn't matter if the monopoly is government-run or private.
00:03:37.240 The end users of the product are going to be the ones who lose in the end.
00:03:40.760 The unions may have won the day in Ontario,
00:03:42.500 but they could lose the battle.
00:03:43.500 Parents won't forget being put over a barrel like that.
00:03:46.160 If we want to see some of the best educational and healthcare outcomes on Earth,
00:03:49.080 we need to break the union-dominated monopolies.
00:03:52.040 We're already spending more than just about anybody else on Earth,
00:03:54.160 and we're not getting the outcome.
00:03:55.180 So spending more on these systems as they are
00:03:56.940 is just throwing good money after bad.
00:03:59.200 It's time to give people choice.
00:04:01.100 The current Lethbridge feed cream prices are as follows.
00:04:06.820 Cash broadies at $4.53,
00:04:08.760 feed wheat's at $4.70,
00:04:10.480 and corn's also sitting at $4.70 per metric ton.
00:04:13.380 In the milling wheat markets,
00:04:14.860 December Minneapolis futures lost 5 cents at $9.45,
00:04:18.740 with local hard red spring bids for December movement
00:04:21.140 at $12 per bushel delivered.
00:04:23.440 In the oil seeds,
00:04:24.540 nearby canola futures increased $6.50
00:04:27.020 at $8.90.70 per ton,
00:04:29.860 with delivered bids for December trading at $19.97 per bushel.
00:04:34.280 In the pulse markets,
00:04:35.520 nearby red lentils are trading at $0.32.5 a pound,
00:04:39.560 and yellow peas remain at $13 per bushel.
00:04:42.380 In the cattle markets,
00:04:43.660 December live cattle lost $0.92 at $1.52.12 per 100 weight.
00:04:48.480 For information on grain marketing,
00:04:50.100 call me at 403-394-1711.
00:04:54.100 I'm Sean Smith of Marketplace Commodities,
00:04:55.780 accurate real-time marketing information,
00:04:57.860 and pricing options.
00:04:58.900 Canadian Shooting Sports Association,
00:05:00.860 without the CSSA,
00:05:02.100 our gun rights would have been taken long, long ago.
00:05:05.420 These guys are on the front lines,
00:05:07.160 helping to draft smart and intelligent firearms regulations
00:05:11.120 and legislation in Canada,
00:05:12.940 and more importantly,
00:05:14.180 educating the public about how we keep guns out of the hands
00:05:17.240 of the wrong people.
00:05:18.420 We've become a member.
00:05:19.320 It's absolutely worth every penny.
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