Daley Dispatch reports on active files

Big brother watches, Office Depot waits, pesticides get bombed

By: Pat Daley

  June 8/00 - With a summer hiatus just around the corner for Straight Goods, it's a good time to look back on some of the stories of the last few months.
  Staff at the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) office in Mississauga should be halfway through the 16 weeks they were supposed to be wearing electronic monitors. Readers will remember that the individual worker had to enter a code for the activity in which he or she was engaged when the palm-sized gadget beeped - randomly six times a minute.
  The monitoring was part of a reworking of Ontario's social assistance system by the multinational Andersen Consulting, under a lucrative contract from the Ministry of Community and Social Services.
  But, the monitors are gone.
  "They found out quickly that people are working full out," says Bob Eaton, Ontario Public Service Employees Union member and chair of the ministry's employer-employee council. "There's no malingering."
  There is still a policy grievance in the works. Eaton says that the ministry won't guarantee the monitoring devices won't be used again some time in the future. However, ODSP workers did win some changes in the way their work is organized.
  One of the problems with the new program was a change from the traditional individual case manager system to a team concept. Rather than handling the whole caseload, teams are now on more of an assembly-line model. Eaton says one team handles intake, another administration, and yet another case management.
  Unfortunately, there's still no identifiable case manager a client can ask for when information is needed.
  "This government's attitude toward the disabled population is paternalistic and patronizing," says Eaton, noting that there has yet to be any action on the promised Ontarians with Disabilities Act. "They can't even get their income support program working properly."

***************

  One of the most interesting and, at first glance, unbelievable stories we came across this year had to do with Office Depot. The company wouldn't provide its free, next-day delivery service to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 47 in California because, apparently, it didn't want its own drivers to have contact with a union office.
  The IBEW and the California Labor Federation filed an anti-discrimination suit. There are developments in the case, but union lawyer Glenn Rothner can't release the details just yet. If they haven't appeared here by Friday, keep your eyes on Straight Goods bulletins over the summer to get an update.

***************

  Not long after Halifax municipal council agreed to ask staff to draft a by-law phasing out the cosmetic use of pesticides, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development released its report on pesticides.
  Expecting that the government will soon introduce changes to the Pest Control Products Act, the committee recommended what amounts to a five-year phase-out of pesticides for cosmetic use. Unsure "whether the Canadian public would accept a country-wide ban at this time," the committee said there should be a moratorium on both registering new products and renewals of existing products.
  That was welcome news to this household of committed organic gardeners, who thought they saw a trend in the making.
  Then, yesterday morning, we looked out to see a huge red spray truck crawling up the shoulder of the road, relieving itself anywhere the grasses hadn't been mowed - including one section of marsh cornering our property that is home to frogs, rabbits, feral cats and who knows what else.
  It's the first spraying we've seen in almost five years here. We're still waiting to hear back from Simcoe County about what they're spraying and why.

***************

  It's the same county that refuses to withdraw its application to put a garbage dump on a piece of prime agricultural land not far from here - an application first made almost 12 years ago.
  When the public response period to the Ministry of Environment's review of the environmental assessment ends in a couple of weeks, the minister will make a final decision. The land proposed for the dump won its cultivators first prize in the Forage Masters class at the 1998 Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. Creeks running through it feed into the Nottawasaga River and, eventually, Georgian Bay.
  Straight Goods readers in the south central Ontario region are invited to visit Adjala-Tosorontio Township the morning of June 17 when residents will gather once again to say "no" to a dump here or anywhere else in Simcoe County. The road party is at the proposed dump site on the 5th Concession, running south off Highway 89 and just west of Highway 50.
  See you there!

Other articles from the Daley dispatches

[ Front Page ]