Eddie Going To BC Too

I regret to announce that I may have to stop writing this BLOG for medical reasons. My doctor has warned me that my blood pressure has risen dramatically since I have started writing on the Internet, especially over the last few weeks.

I thought he was kidding me until I reacted late last night to the online version of the Windsor Star and read the story about the airport and the jobs to be created there. If that was not bad enough, I woke up this morning to a story in the published Star about a hundred employers from British Columbia holding a job fair here. I went apoplectic!

I thought that this line in the Star story about the airport summed up everything about Eddie Francis as Mayor

• "Windsor's potential to become a "perishable centre."

It is absolutely accurate. Under his lack of leadership, this City is perishing, very quickly. While other cities prosper, our businesses close. While employers in other areas are begging people to come there because they lack manpower, our citizens are moving out. As house prices rise in other jurisdictions, our homes are being foreclosed. I told you the other day about the absurdity of the comment that a depression could be good for Windsor.

Look at the B.C. story

• "750 people who poured into a British Columbia employer job fair at the downtown campus of St. Clair College...More than 100 B.C. employers were at the fair to recruit mostly young Windsor residents."

Don't you get it... our future is being encouraged to move out of this City. The young people who are just starting their careers are looking elsewhere....machine operators, automation technicians, shipping and receiving clerks, nurses and lab technicians, cooks and landscaper, electrical engineers, designers, technicians and support staff. They see no hope here and can you blame them. Heck, employers even want some of our "seasoned," grey hair types too.

Ahhh, you say, you're not being fair to the Mayor. After all look at all the jobs, jobs, jobs that will be created at the airport exporting onions. Wait a minute here. I thought foreign goods were to be shipped to Windsor to be re-distributed to the United States not the other way around as is being described now. All the high-paying jobs are going to be created in Germany not here.

I get it. The jobs that will be created in Windsor are warehouse type functions offloading products from trucks and putting them into airplanes. More minimum wage ones to go along with the call centre ones and the ones serving retired, rich Torontonians. Those should be terrific opportunities for newly educated University and St. Clair graduates.

But here's the hooker and what makes me absolutely sick to my stomach:

• "But Michael cautioned that the success of such a venture won't come overnight. A realistic estimate, by Michael's reckoning, would see the first flight landing in the renovated airport in three years.
  
  Nazzani said it could take 12 to 18 months just to have a commitment from all parties involved."

Three years!!! For hopefully 50 jobs!!! If this was not a G-rated BLOG I would be writing a whole bunch of expletives deleted. Eddie Francis and Federica Nazzani spent all of this taxpayer money for what! So that Eddie can tell us about some ridiculous opportunity and then say:

• "You're going to hear more exciting announcements taking place at the airport," Francis said. "This is just one initiative. We have a couple of others that are in the hopper."

I beg you Mayor, please save us from this excitement.

I sit here in disbelief. The growers in the region are not going to make the money on the sale of onions in Germany. It is the distributors and retailers in that country that will make the cash. We are nothing more than the new, low-cost producers that they can exploit. If there was such a great opportunity, it would have been carried out already by our agricultural community. They are not fools but sophisticated business people. By the way, I hope that no one told our German friends that those onions that they saw advertised came from Mexico or Chile anyway and that they were not locally grown.

This reminds me, have you ever had a grapefruit in Florida or tried to buy one when you are on a visit? They look pretty awful don't they. The reason is obvious: all the good ones are for the export market. So much for onions in my cooking.

I will let you look up information about Michael and Thomas yourself. Go to http://www.freshline.aero/

Their latest press release by the way is dated in September, 2006. Their startup of operations is some time in 2008. They do not appear to be a very experienced operator in this business from their website and yet our Mayor seems to want to depend on them for our future. I expect that the reason why nothing can be done for three years is "4 aircraft in operation by late 2009." If you look at their routes, North America was not even on their radar screen.

This is nothing more than a sick joke by a desperate politician who left town so Dwight Duncan would not confront him. I am sorry to be so harsh. We have a Mayor who is so out of touch with reality that he thinks that this plan of his will make people happy. He is blocking 15,000 jobs. FIFTEEN THOUSAND. For what? I wish I knew the answer.

By the way, if you want to save the Windsor Library System, I know how to do it. Eliminate the Economic Development Commission. They do nothing...the Mayor is doing everything. Who needs new brochures printed now!