Averaging Disagreement

 What does the word "omnibus" mean to you? Maybe nothing. You might be lucky enough to have never heard it. To me it represents the evil at the heart of politics that makes me sick as a dog, both literally and figuratively, when I think of them. Canada has a long history of omnibus bills being part of politics that dates back to the year after confederation - 1868. Did you know that? Do you know what these things are? Not really? Well of course not really - we're not really supposed to know.

Think of the last time your pet was sick. I'll use a dog for my example because, as Groucho Marx says, "Outside of a dog, books are man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read." He was a brilliant man but even his brilliance was not enough to illuminate the inside of the dog - presumably a St. Bernard or Newfoundlander or one of the roomier species - where he tested his theory. But I digress.

Maybe we should read more as Groucho's pithy little saying would imply. Inside or outside of any animal, if you read more, you might learn things like the thing I'm about to teach today. What politicians do is analogous to giving medicine to a sick dog. We wrap it in bacon or squash it into a piece of pizza or just jam it into the dog's kibble and say, "Mmmmm... yummy! Who's a good dog? YOU'RE a good dog! Here's a nice healthy piece of bacon/pizza/food to reward you for being so 'good.'" I enclose the word "good" in the single quote marks (or whatever they're called) because in this case the words "dumb" or "gullible" or "stupidly trusting" might convey a more accurate meaning. But let's not be so hard on our best friends. At least the dog isn't as dumb as us. At least it's getting something that will make it better and not something that will make it sicker.

You see folks, when a politician draws up an omnibus bill and says to the Canadian people, "Mmmmm... yummy! Who's a good consumer? YOU'RE a good consumer! Yes you are! And here's a nice french-fry wrapped in Canadian bacon, smothered in gravy, and sprinkled with maple syrup. You've EARNED it by being so 'good.'" I enclose the... etc., etc. We're MORE gullible than the dog and after 159 years of falling for this same old trick I can safely say we're more stupidly trusting as well and you know what makes that literally and figuratively sickening? The fact that what our politicians have concealed in our favourite foods is not medicine to make us better, it's something that will make us, as a people, sicker. 

Before you get swept up in a love affair with Doug Ford for opposing Trump like the WWF wrastler he resembles, and with about the same amount of veracity, let me give you one specific example from just about 7 years ago. If you carefully read the linked article you will notice the typical Fordian support of Canadian BUSINESSES not Canadian workers. This is something awfully Trumpian and, indeed, the gist of the example I will now describe. And rest assured, this is a microcosm of Canadian political work. It's what our politicians do.

Anyone ever heard of Bill 66, the "Restoring Ontario's Competitiveness Act" of 2019? It was an omnibus bill in that it covered a wide variety of diverse and unrelated topics sold to GOOD GOOD Ontarian girls and boys as a YUMMY way to cut corporate "red tape" to lower the cost of doing business and stimulate job creation. Now I've talked about Canadian politicians taking one 30-dollar-an-hour job, dividing it into 3 10-dollar-an-hour jobs and calling it "job creation" before. The aspect of Bill 66 I'd like to focus on today is much like that.

Have you ever heard of an averaging agreement? I think I probably should have enclosed the word "agreement" in single quotes (or whatever they're called) because the words "demand" or "imposition" or "hoop-job" would convey a more accurate meaning. It's an "agreement" to which no worker has ever willingly agreed. It's a do this or you lose your job type of "agreement." I think you know what I'm driving at here. It's something that has recently become common in security work and, despite the reported membership in the United Steelworkers union (which I have yet to confirm) my current job includes. You will understand my skepticism about union membership after I explain what an averaging agreement is. It is the very apotheosis of what unions were designed to fight. Any union that would allow one cannot rightfully call itself a union. It is, and has consistently been ruled on in labour arbitration in Canada, businesses stealing money from their workers. 

I guess I should explain how it works. Okay, if I work three 12-hour shifts one week, that's 36 hours. If I work 4 12-hour shifts in the following week of the pay period, that's 48 hours and in Ontario where a worker gets 1.5 times his/her normal wage for any hours after 44 in a week, that worker is due 4 hours of overtime pay. What the averaging agreement does is exchange reality for fraud that benefits the company. Instead of recording the hours as they were worked, the company and the worker "agree" to pretend that those 4 extra hours worked in the second week were actually worked in the first week. They WEREN'T but let's go to the land of Make Believe for the benefit of the companies. These are often companies paying their workers minimum wage or very little more. RICH companies that need this overtime money FAR less than their struggling employees. So now that we have averaged out the hours, our worker has worked 40 hours in week 1 and 44 hours in week 2 and the company gets to avoid the "red-tape" of paying overtime wages that makes the cost of doing business higher.

Doesn't sound as good when you find out what the words of the politician actually mean, does it? And when I said that arbitration had repeatedly ruled on averaging agreements as stealing money from workers, I wasn't kidding. Before Bill 66, any company in Ontario who wanted to sodomize its workers with one of these "agreements" had to justify it through an application to the government Director of Employment Standards. This was the arbitrator, the regulator, the overseer of business in these matters. The DES had to evaluate whether there existed a legitimate business need or a mutual benefit for employer and employee to the averaging agreement. Aaaaand the number of times that was ruled to be the case? Zero. It's just stealing money from your workers. Despite the creative explanations I'm sure the companies devised to try to convince the DES that they were NOT just breaking overtime pay laws, the employers never won. So the obvious solution from the business standpoint was to get rid of this arbitrator. Well when Doug Ford's government introduced Bill 66, under the guise of making Ontario's businesses more "competitive," they eliminated this whole procedure. By the way, when you hear a politician using the word "competitive" to describe business, he/she means tilting the competition even more in favour of the business and screwing the worker and the consumer. Doug Ford is in favour of rich companies stealing money from their employees. So he may not be as different from Trump as he's trying to appear.

But where did this rule of getting paid overtime after 44 hours come from? Where did the rule of 8 hours off between shifts come from? Or the 11 consecutive hours of free time every 24 hour period? These are all established labour laws in Ontario and these laws were brought to us by that generation we call the Greatest Generation. They weren't just great because they fought in wars. They were great because they also fought for our rights. I get really angry when I see Canadian politicians and lawmakers, at the behest of big business who control them, chipping away the rights and freedoms that our forefathers fought and died for. We ALL should get angry when we see this! But that's the tricky part about these omnibus bills. They hide this. Bill 66 allowed businesses to open faster. It increased childcare options and flexibility for parents. It mandated filters on school computers blocking things kids shouldn't see. This is the bacon, poutine, and maple syrup of the omnibus bill and even though it attacks Canadian workers and endangers nature, some people are like Quickdraw McGraw's dog Snuffles begging for that dog bis cue it. Sigh... I'm old.

The other day my employer called me up at 2 PM for a shift from 6 that night to 6 the following morning. I have been hired on a "casual" basis. "On call" is another term they use. What this means is that I will be judged on whether I accept or decline shifts. The idea that they are offering me a shift and I have the option to take it or not is much like the "agreement" of the averaging agreement. My employer pressures me into granting their unreasonable requests by granting or withholding future work to/from me. This is the sort of stuff that unions USED to fight. Now it's becoming more and more common because our labour rights are being eroded in the exact same way we in Ontario got averaging agreements reinstated. I had been up since about 6 that morning. If I took that shift I would have been up for 24 hours straight. What would I do the next day? Sleep? Try to stay up? Besides, I am moving. I had things I needed to do. During daylight hours. I would have had to stay awake even longer to do them. So I turned down the shift.

I don't think employers should have the right to compromise the health of their employees like that. This is the reasoning behind the 8-hour break between shifts and the 11 hours of free time every 24 hours. But we just don't have the type of people we had in the days of the Greatest Generation, or the unions, that would fight for things like these. Because of this we will continue to get omnibussed right back to the days when kids worked 18-hour shifts in the factories for room and board. And because of this, I will probably get fewer shifts at my job. Leastaways, that's what I reckon.

Give Me A Little Credit Won't You?

 I can't say I'm surprised at being refused an apartment due to my bad credit score. As established in the previous post, that's just the way things are done 90% of the time now in Canada even though it don't make no kind of sense. But then a whole helluva lotta things we do in Canada, banking is high in the running for best example, don't make no kind of sense. 

During my research for my last post I learned that there are two places - two private, for profit businesses (not government agencies, boards, or commissions) that compile debtor data and establish credit scores. These scores have somehow become cherished and protected bits of bogus information that we all protect like they are pets or children. Anybody remember teachers back in the day who, faced with the realization that the student was not being intimidated by them any more and would continue to misbehave would say, "That will go on your permanent record!"? The gasps and exclamations of terror from anyone within earshot represented the sum total of the power of the mystical permanent record in that it existed only in the minds of the dumb schmucks who fell for the con and the grifters and scammers who were perpetuating the myth. Our permanent records were nothing but carefully manufactured records used by people in authority to scare us into behaving like obedient students. 

Folks, I am starting to believe that credit scores are not a whole lot different. They're just carefully manufactured scores compiled by entities who want to scare us into behaving like obedient consumers. We're trained to believe that they reward honesty and punish delinquency and cheating but in my experience I have found evidence that they are exactly the opposite. Because the institutions that compile and calculate the scores are private businesses they operate under the same auspices as other companies that not only don't punish unethical behaviour from their workers and customers (creditors) but can actually reward it. 

I explained my situation in the last post in which Telus made it impossible for me to cancel. Recently there have been efforts by the CRTC to force the big three telecom providers to allow people to cancel more easily but those efforts are no damn good to me now are they? They're about three or four years too late, as it were. I have a bad credit score and a $550 debt because Telus took advantage of impotent laws that were not being enforced that WERE on the books saying a company has to make cancellation as easy as signing up. We've always had these laws across Canada but this is the kind of law you can get away with breaking if you are a monopoly. Telus broke the law, made it impossible for me to cancel, actually sent me fraudulent bills even after my account with them was zeroed out, sent those fraudulent charges into collection, and caused my bad credit score and $550 debt. Those are the facts and they are not disputed. 

But in my last post I speculated that calling the credit dispute lines that Equifax and TransUnion have would most likely be an exercise in futility. Since I'm off today and just doing laundry I figured I'd put my theory to the test. I called 1 800 871 3250 and after the requisite phone gymnastics I was shocked to receive an option to press 2 and speak to a representative. It wasn't more than 5 minutes on hold either until I got my phone call answered by a human being. He didn't even have an Indian or Filipino accent! Was I wrong? Was I underestimating Equifax? This was intriguing...

So I got the usual introduction: My name is flabbetyfuckfuck and I will be assisting you. Nobody enunciates their names when their job is working for a helpline the purpose of which is to offer anything but help. So right there I lost a bit of the flash of hope I received when a human answered. I said, "What did you say your name is, Raoul?" He paused for a long time and said, "Yes." So it WASN'T Raoul but the name he was working under today was something that sounded like Raoul. Although, he had a French accent so maybe it was. It doesn't matter. You see, I don't care that much about the identity of the person on the other end of the phone when I am trying to do something about a fraudulently acquired debt and credit score. Unfortunately, Raoul took a familiar tack, one I've experienced with a few Canadian government organizations and consumer help lines I managed to reach humans on: the old we cannot help you if we can't verify who you are ploy. 

I gave Ben a few pieces of information and he was able to get my credit score and tell me how much I am on record as owing. I gave Raoul so many different pieces of information about myself over the next 25 minutes that there is nobody else on the planet it could have been, but without a utility bill or a piece of ID with my current address on it, Raoul was not satisfied that he knew who he was talking to. 

He told me I needed to write to National Consumer Relation Box. That was confusing. What the hell is a consumer relation box? I said, "Do you mean organization or agency or something like that?" "No, box." "Okay whatever. Continue the address." "190 Montreal, Quebec.H1S 2Z2. So it was National Consumer Relations Box 190... you greasy Frenchman. I wish I'd said that but didn't. 

He said I need to send them the front and back of my health card and passport (which don't have my address), a bank statement with an address on it and a letter stating that I want to update my address. Include Social Insurance Number, date of birth, phone number, and address. And here I said, "And then tell them what I just told you about Telus and how they cheated me and that's how I have bad credit?" He says no, just ask them to update your address so they can verify who you are. 

I said at almost the 30-minute mark, "Okay stop right there Raoul. IF you were able to verify who I am, or IF the people at the Consumer Relation Box were able to verify who I am, would I get any help? For instance would anyone be able to contact Telus and ask them to verify my account there and see if what I am saying is true?" "No, we were unable to verify your identity so I would suggest you contact the collection agency or contact Telus and make the payment or get a statement from them stating that you do not owe them. We have received this information that you owe from creditors." I said, "Yeah, who lied. And you believe them. So there's nothing you CAN do is there? Except get me to pay Telus who I don't owe anything. What I want to know is can you make this right, not can you make me pay. It's not right for me to pay. I don't owe Telus anything. Can you believe me instead of believing Telus?" Raoul says, "We would require letters, okay?" I respond with, "Well as I've been telling you I can't contact Telus. The only time I was successful they told me I don't owe them anything, yet here we are." "In that case sir I'm very sorry to inform you that this is the best that I can do for you at this point in time." 

So then I gave up trying to be nice. I said, "Well that's about what I expected. You're not really legitimate, are you? You believe the corporations and not the people they're screwing." He then says, "You can get in touch with the legal department..." Right! I can't even get in touch with the BILLING department who fucked up my bill! The person I got in touch with and told me I owe Telus zero asked me for the email of the assholes who kept sending me bills and even SHE was throwing around the word "fraud" when referring to them. She said she'd report them to the Telus fraud department and get things straightened out, but I guess she never did. I continued, "This is fraud, I hope you know this. Your organization is supporting fraud." He then says to me, "You can contact the legal authorities for this, okay?" I said, "I guess that's all I can do isn't it?" He then asked if there was anything else he could do at this point and I said, "No. There's nothing you can do. You did your job." And I hung up.

So it's pretty much exactly what I expected. At "Equifax" there is no equality and they don't deal with facts. The Creditors are never doubted and the debtors are guilty until proven innocent. In order to clear my credit I need to get a letter from Telus saying "Yeah, we sure did break the law and block you from discontinuing your service. Hell, we also fraudulently charged you for two extra months after your internet was switched off. And that ain't all, we charged you a shit ton of interest on the charges we fabricated! We screwed you good boy!" 

These collection agencies are just corporate shills helping businesses keep Joe consumer in line and their help does NOT confine itself to the legal limits of Canada. Which begs the question, why the fucking fuck are people falling all over themselves to take these things seriously? Why have we allowed them to become so invasive? I need to find a place to live. Do I have to go out and get a fucking credit card so I can do that? How is this system any different from this shit:

I'm almost proud to have a bad credit score. Maybe I'm a bad Canadian citizen. The way this country is going, maybe I should be proud of THAT too.

Give Me a Little Credit Will You?

 I'm going to start off this post the way I have started some others because some of the things I blog about come up from time to time, not to say rear their ugly heads, so I sometimes refer to previous posts. If you are a frequent reader you will know to whom (or what) I am referring when I say the Unholy Triumvirate. We have lots of telecom providers in Canada, but Canadians prefer either Bell, Rogers, or Telus. Roughly 86-90% of telecom revenue is sucked in by these three totally corrupt corporations. There ARE dozens of other providers, but they lease lines from the big three so, yes Virginia, that IS a monopoly. They cheat, lie, and steal like a monopoly and we allow them to. They are massive contributors to what I call "the cult of inconvenience" and in the post bearing that title I mention Korean telecom providers who are horrible, but MUCH better than the Unholy Triumvirate. 

Here's a blogpost from Feb. of 2024 called "How is Telus Like The Hotel California?." Please read it. It won't take long. One of my shorter ones. The answer is that you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Note in this post that I wrote, "I really do not have a credit rating." To give you some context I was living in Calgary back then working part time at the Centre for Newcomers, living with Rob and Terri, and doing my 10th course in my master's degree (still believing it was legit). I had been told by a landlord in Trail where I lived the summer before, that I had no credit rating. He was a banker and did credit checks all the time and in 2023 when I got hooked up with Telus and moved into my own place in Trail, I had no credit rating. I signed up for Telus internet so that I could do my 8th or 9th course of my master's' degree. I forget which one. This was while working as a security guard for Teck. 

When I moved out and tried to cancel my Telus and was blocked from doing so, I started getting emails that I could not answer and bills that I could not pay from Telus for the ensuing months after I had moved out of my apartment AND given back the internet box. Here's a blogpost from that time explaining this experience in more detail. Some time after that I guess Telus wanted to appear like they had done their due diligence in getting me to pay what I did not owe them for service they did not give me and they gave my account to a collector who threatened to mess up my credit rating.

So today I got a text from a guy who is taking care of renting an apartment for a Chinese lady here in Sarnia. It's a cheap basement apartment that's right between the two sites where I work security and right beside the school where I volunteer. It would be perfect for me! But Ben, the guy representing the landlady, said he had done a credit check on me. I told him I didn't think I had a credit score but I also mentioned there had been some trouble with Telus so that might give me one. He said I have a very low credit score. He also said that I owe something like $550.

Now... The 550 dollars has to be mostly interest on the one or two months of cable I didn't get and didn't pay for. I can't remember what I paid back then but I don't think it was even 100 bucks a month. I had nothing but internet, no TV and no phone. That amount happens to be the exact monthly rent on the apartment I'm trying to get. So, after 59 years of life I owe 550 bucks. That shouldn't result in a bad credit score really. And I don't really owe that much. 

The landlady will be getting first and last month's rent - if I don't pay and take off, she's lost nothing. Unless I trash the place and I dunno, there might be a damage deposit too. Also, during my interview with Ben I told him that I have over 20 years of teaching experience and 10 years of security work. People trust me with their kids. I have to get regular criminal record and vulnerable sector checks for the teaching. I also had heightened security clearance for some of my security work. Shouldn't that have more weight than a bad credit score or a 550 buck debt? He told me that they've had a lot of people contact them about the room and I have two things going for me that the others didn't: I'm employed and I'm not a whackjob. I also explained that I had tried to pay Telus but couldn't. If they don't give me the apartment because of this, that would be insane.

But let's look at this closer because it falls into the category I've been pursuing in these pages lately. We just follow stupid rules without thinking. Let's examine a Canadian credit check and see if it's a good indicator of honesty and/or something that would indicate whether a person would be a good tenant or not. First of all who does it? You might think they're done by some government agency but they are not. In Canada either Equifax or TransUnion does your credit check and they are private, for profit businesses. These two credit reporting agencies gather data reported by lenders like banks, credit card companies, auto loan providers, and utility companies. All are paragons of virtue and stellar examples of institutions that would NEVER report anything fraudulent EVER! And if they DID provide what's known in the business world as IKYABWAI credit reports (I know you are but what am I) in which THEY cheat the customer but claim the customer has cheated them, SURELY Equifax and TransUnion would check it out, no? Absolutely not! The citizen has to do that through their online dispute portal or mail-in or call-in services. But we can't/won't do that until we know our credit has been fucked up and by then it might be too late. And let's face it, those dispute services are probably designed with the very same dedication to the cult of inconvenience as the Telus cancellation services that don't fucking exist.

Equifax and TransUnion do not verify the data they receive from lenders or creditors, they just rely on these notoriously unreliable entities to report everything honestly. Errors and mismatched scores occur frequently as you might expect. But having said all of this, it's still a valuable source of information for landlords because they receive information about delinquent renters, right? Wrong. They only lower renters' credit scores if they are reported as delinquent by third-party rent reporting services such as FrontLobby, Zenbase, or TenantPay. For most of us, Equifax and TransUnion have none of our rent history data at all. Yet 82-90% of landlords nowadays do credit checks on prospective tenants. Why? Cuz it's just a rule. It's what we do.

I'm not going to get too deep into the Blue Jay game the other night in which the STUPIDEST thing I have seen in sport happened. Here's a pretty factual (but not even close to GOOD) explanation of it. The game was delayed for what seemed longer than 15 minutes. Fans and players were upset. We STILL don't have a valid rule or explanation. The fact that he ran home on a fly ball without tagging up is a rule that supersedes this fake rule that everybody is trying to claim exists. I dunno if the umpire Guccioni is the son and heir of the Penthouse Bob Guccioni fortune, or maybe has ties to the mob but you can't go home on a fly ball without tagging up. Most people in the ball park know that rule. It seems that even when we know we've done something stupid the go-to move is to double down on the stupidity and everybody is just far too inclined to go with it. Change the rule. Or eliminate it. If the ball had been caught, both runners tagged, and the guy on first got tagged out, not forced out, trying to advance to second AFTER the guy on third had made it home, THEN it would be a timing play and the run would count. 

Anyway, what do you think the odds would be of getting my credit rating restored if I managed to find someone at Equifax or TransUnion who gave half a hunk of shit and explained my whole story? They would KNOW FOR A FACT that I was right and they are wrong but what do you want to bet they'd be mealy mouthing and making themselves look stupid defending the established but stupid rule of believing the company and not the customer? 

Before I go, I want to add to this that I had been on the phone, after trying so many different ways to reach someone to help me cancel my Telus internet, I got a girl on the phone who said she was at a Telus office and said she could help me. I told her that I was trying to cancel and I couldn't and I kept getting email saying I owed for internet I wasn't getting. She said she'd open up my account on her computer. So I gave my name and account number and she assured me that I had a zero balance. That is, my internet was cancelled and I owed Telus no more money. But I kept receiving emails and messages that I couldn't respond to even after that! Do you suppose Equifax or TransUnion would even believe that? And what do you want to bet I end up having to pay that $550 someday when it has ballooned even more. And can somebody please tell me why they are allowed to charge interest? If I really DID get a month of service without paying then I owe them that much forever. Maybe indexed for inflation but interest? This is just something we allow because they are a monopoly and we can't stop them!

So anyway, I want to move into this apartment but I might lose it for having a bad credit score that was generated by dishonesty that was in no part my own. It may be believed by Ben or the landlady because we believe for-profit businesses before honest people nowadays and for some reason we evaluate prospective tenants based in part on a credit score that in all likelihood bears exactly no connection to past tenant performance on the part of the renter. But that is the world in which we live. Those are the rules. It is what it is. Right?

Addendum: Today I got a text message from Ben. I have been refused as a tenant. Even though he said I'd be a dream renter I guess the landlady got nervous about my outstanding debt with Telus. What does Telus (and Bell and Rogers) do anyway? Their infrastructure is predominantly to BLOCK Canadian airspace and stop people from broadcasting or receiving broadcasts for free. What we pay for from them is for them to UNblock what they've blocked for us. How many times have you heard people say that soon there'll be a company hoarding the air of the world and selling it to us. We already have these companies. Telus is one. And even though I had told my story to Ben and even though I HAD done everything I could to pay Telus, and even though I actually HAD connected with them and been told my account was zeroed out with them before it continued to increase and was eventually sent to a collection agency and interest accrued and resulted in the bad credit score and debt I'm in now... the landlady STILL trusted Telus over me. 

Today I applied to rent a place above a Chinese restaurant in town here. The rent is similar and the place looks even better but there WILL be a credit check. It's being handled by one of those middlemen companies called Mutual Property. We'll see if my story has any effect on them. Not holding my breath.