From the start the fix was in

Anyone who believes that there was ever a chance of the Toronto Transit Commission’s employees going on strike is in serious need of therapy. From the day that contract negotiations began the outcome was never in doubt as the clever social engineers at Toronto City Hall had choreographed each and every step.

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It’s a way to capitulate to unreasonable union demands without seeming to capitulate. You see, if you can create a looming crisis and then avert it, you save the day and come off looking the hero. I do not believe it’s a coincidence Mayor David Miller was in China during much of the bargaining that was taking place between the union and TTC management. In fact, according to Bob Kinnear, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, the negotiations started to take on an air of improvement as new orders came down from city hall on Saturday night. Coincidentally, that’s also the time that the mayor was making his way back from a junket schmoozing with the Chinese Communists. So the mayor was faced with the dilemma of how to give the transit workers a raise that amounted to double the inflation rate without appearing to cave in. The result is a textbook example of fear mongering, as the media happily made David Miller’s dreams come true by reporting on how seriously the looming disaster of a transit strike would affect everyone in and around Toronto. The Ontario provincial Police helped out by estimating that traffic on the 400 series highways would increase by over 20% if a strike was called and making sure to let drivers know that they would be paying particular attention to drivers in High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes. Of course, the union, who wished to portray themselves as “second class employees” of Toronto because some transit workers in the 905 Region were getting paid more, came out of this looking like a reasonable and responsible organization by holding off striking for nearly three weeks after the old contract expired. I was particularly impressed by the union’s lack of bellicosity when making public statements. It was a major clue that there was never going to be a strike. Mayor Miller and his fellow travelers at City Hall have managed to pull off a coup of stunning proportions by fooling city taxpayers once again into believing that they saved the day, while giving away the store. It is a feat on par with any political machine in any large American city. New York’s Tammany Hall and Chicago’s Daley Machine have nothing on David Miller’s Toronto when it comes to bamboozling the electorate. Last July, in a council vote that took all of about 60 seconds, the City of Toronto approved a contract that gave Toronto fire fighters a 9% increase in salary over three years, roughly the same that the TTC union managed to eke out. This was done on the Q-T without a public announcement or a public discussion of any kind. To be sure Toronto’s fire fighters weren’t underpaid before the raise. Yet all the while that Miller and his cronies were dishing out largesse to their union buddies they were crying poor to Toronto taxpayers, telling them that a cut in services was necessary and imposing a whopping new round of taxes. When it comes to complex social engineering and a communications apparatus of Orwellian proportions, David Miller is about as slick as they come. Having said that I am also reminded by Abraham Lincoln’s maxim that one can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. Sooner or later Torontonians are bound to catch on.