Serendipity?

Breaks in my career.

The intervention of four men in my career changed everything for the better.

When my ADM's wife died, I sent him a sympathy card.  That's how I was reared; it felt normal and expected.  Apparently, it was a shocker for him.  His wife was a tad crazy, but whenever we met at an office reception, I always chatted with her when others shunned her.  

"Do you think I am beautiful?" she asked me one evening.  How weird, but of course I said, "Yes, certainly."

When a director's job opened up, this ADM was playing golf with the DM and the former suggested I be appointed.  Did he remember the sympathy card?  I think he probably did.

When that same DM's sister died, I went to the funeral parlour to pay my respects.  He was shocked, but must have remembered because he appointed me to two key positions with the GST Task Force and the Canada/US Free Trade Task Force.  I loved the work!

This elevated me to the senior management category (SM) and when it was collapsed into the EX category, I was made an executive level one (EX 01).  The DM gave me that job too.

As my career petered out near retirement, I was appointed to a manager's job two levels below my pay grade.  Someone in human resources tried to slot me officially into the position, but as the paperwork crossed the desk of a pay clerk, I got a call.

"Nancy, you can't take that job.  You'll lose your EX 01 pay."  Really??!!  No one had told me that, but thank G-d Dale called me because I refused the position and remained in the job, but at my EX 01 salary.

While in that job, I took on the two assignments no one ever wants:  Floor warden and safety and health representative.  Picture me, torch in hand, safety helmet on head, striding around in high heels directing staff to safety down the emergency stairs.

That was me.

As health and safety co-chair of the committee, I was on a par with another ADM around that table.  

When one of my managers (naturally a woman) questioned a $12 expense on a printing job and refused to sign it off, I simply emailed this ADM, telling him my manager would not sign off (c.c.'d her in this chess move), who told me to put it on his expense code.

She looked like the ninny she was.  Refusing a $12 print expense for the health and safety committee?!!  An idiot on a power trip.

I pay tribute to the male superiors I had the good fortune to report to over my long career.  They enabled me to retire on a very good pension.

So a HUGE thank you to my Mother, who taught me about sympathy cards and funeral parlours, and to Dick, Louis, Dale and Guy!  As to the women to whom I reported?  All I can say is, never underestimate envy in the workplace.   

 

Insanity

Read this and weep..........from the BBC. A sure-fire formula to further bankrupt Canadians:

Canada's Human Rights Tribunal has approved a landmark C$23.4bn ($17.7bn; £13.8bn) settlement for indigenous children and families harmed (Harmed? Many went on to be very successful -- including every spokesperson for the Indigenous, like Cindy Blackstock) by the child welfare system. 

It is said to be the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history. The agreement also includes a request for an apology from the Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau. 

Around 300,000 people are expected to be compensated, including babies and children currently in care.  The settlement, approved on Wednesday, comes after the tribunal ruled in 2016 that Canada had underfunded on-reserve First Nations children's services compared to those for non-indigenous children. 

This resulted in indigenous children being removed from their families unnecessarily and denied basic services, the ruling said.  Cindy Blackstock, the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society who has helped negotiate the settlement, said the funds will go to Indigenous people who were impacted by the child welfare system from 1991 to 2022. 

Many children love school.

These children seem to be enjoying school. The claim that they were forced to attend is not unique. All Canadian children had to attend school. That's why we had truant officers.

"There are babies who are eligible for compensation," Ms. Blackstock told BBC News. "A large number of these children in care are actually still children." Cindy with Perry Bellegarde:

Cindy Blackstock, her hand is always out.

A federal court will review the settlement in October. If approved, those who are eligible could begin to receive the amount they are owed as early as summer 2024. 

It is part of a long-running legal battle that began in 2007, when the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society filed a complaint alleging the child welfare system was discriminatory. (Lawyers at work again.) 

Nine years later, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) ruled against the federal government and ordered that it offer compensation payments worth C$40,000 plus interest for each indigenous child forced to leave their home to access services.  (Let's remember, children are removed as a last report; this is not done lightly because it's very expensive. There must have been good and valid reasons.)

That amount is the maximum allowed under Canada's Human Rights Act. 

Others, like caregivers and parents, as well as the children's estates, are also entitled to compensation. (OMG, please no!)

 

At one point, the Canadian government challenged the findings, arguing that the tribunal was wrong to award the pay-outs. At the time, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that his cabinet wanted to "make sure we're getting compensation right". 

Later, the government said it would pay C$40bn - with C$20bn going to children and their families, and the other half going to child welfare reform.  (Giving buckets of money to the Indigenous over decades has not helped them. In fact, it has disenfranchised them completely. They have no incentive to join mainstream society because they just get money. Wrong.)

That proposal was rejected by the CHRT in late 2022 because of fears that some children would be left out or not compensated enough. 

Canada and the Assembly of First Nations then agreed to increase the settlement amount to C$23.3bn in April.  Marc Miller, the minister responsible for crown-indigenous relations at the time, has said the agreement is "an important part of Canada's accountability towards First Nations children". 

• 
  

The class-action settlement is one of the largest in North America, surpassed only by a $20bn pay-out from BP in 2010 to cover environmental damage caused by an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and a $206bn lawsuit against tobacco companies in 1998 to recover healthcare costs for tobacco-related illnesses. 

Italics mine.

Racism

Disguised as a workshop on "inclusion" in the Toronto District School Board, racism emerged victorious.  Sadly, it culminated in the suicide of Richard Bilkszto, an esteemed principal with 24 years' experience.

The late Richard Bilkszto.

Bilkszto, white, was vilified by a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) trainer named Kike Ojo-Thompson:

The woman who led him to kill himself.

She presented a lecture to senior Toronto public-school administrators, instructing them on the virulent racism that (Ojo-Thompson believes) afflicts Canadian society. "Canada," she said, "Is a bastion of white supremacy and colonialism, in which the horrors unleashed by capitalism and sexism regularly lay waste to the lives of non-white and female Canadians."

OMG!

Anyone who lives in Canada knows this to be a preposterous claim. But in the wake of the George Floyd protests, which opportunistic DEI entrepreneurs in Canada treated as a gold rush, such lies have been treated as unfalsifiable. The same is true of the (equally preposterous) claim that Canada’s experience with anti-black racism directly mirrors that of the United States. And so it was expected that Ojo-Thompson’s audience would simply nod politely and keep their mouths shut until her jeremiad had concluded. 

But one audience member refused to submit: Richard Bilkszto, a long-time principal at the Toronto District School Board who’d also once taught at an inner-city school in upstate New York. Having worked on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, he told Ojo-Thompson that her generalizations about the two countries seemed misguided and that denouncing Canada in such a vicious manner would do “an incredible disservice to our learners.”

Bilkszto’s descriptions of Ojo-Thompson’s presentation (a recording of which was verified by at least one Canadian journalist) suggest that she is indeed quite ignorant of both American and Canadian history. Her claim that Canada’s monarchist tradition marks it as more racist than the United States is particularly absurd, given that the British outlawed slavery decades before both Canada’s creation and the U.S. Civil War.

Ojo-Thompson is described to have reacted with vitriol: ‘We are here to talk about anti-Black racism, but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for Black people?’

Bilkszto replied that racism is very real and that there’s plenty of room for improvement—but that the facts still show Canada is a fairer place. Another KOJO training facilitator jumped in, telling Bilkszto that "If you want to be an apologist for the U.S. or Canada, this is really not the forum for that." Ojo-Thompson concluded the exchange by telling the class that ‘your job in this work as white people is to believe’—not to question—claims of racism.

She continues to be feted by numerous Canadian organizations and media outlets. In 2022, she served on the board of directors of Parents of Black Children, a Toronto-area lobby group that’s made a name for itself largely by urging school boards to implement the same anti-racism instructional modules that constitute Ojo-Thompson’s own stock-in-trade.

(Her partner Rohan served until recently as Workplace Equity Manager with the Peel District School Board, and the two would appear together on stage to talk about “the Impact of Systemic Racism on K-12 Workplace Well-Being.”) The market for the sort of militant anti-racist diatribes that Ojo-Thompson peddles seems inexhaustible within Canada’s corner offices.

This has got to stop. Wokeism is destroying civilized society. I'm sick of it. Bilkszto never recovered from the pain caused by the damage to his reputation and his soul. On July 13, he ended his life.

DEI -- while raking in hundreds of thousands -- does not achieve its stated goals of inclusion. Instead of making space for all voices, Bilkszto was shut down by Ojo-Thompson because of his race. Purely because of his race.

Instead of focusing on teaching, Canadian schools are focusing on berating staff. Telling a principal that his whiteness is the problem does not help a single Black kid graduate. What it does do is divide, bully and shame.

And sometimes worse.

_____________________________

Marsha Lederman had a column on this in 'The Globe and Mail'. Not as good as mine, in my view. Hers was too politically-correct for a piece on racism.