Posted on 04/28/2008 12:35:00 PM PDT by forkinsocket
Can Canada’s mail carriers be trusted to deliver the mail to Israel’s embassy in Ottawa, its consulate in Toronto, or any other location affiliated with the Jewish state?
It’s a valid question: At its national convention earlier this month, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers passed a resolution that included the following provision: “CUPW will … support the international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions until Israel recognizes the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.”
I’m no labour expert. But doesn’t this mean that a mailman who, say, slips the new Eddie Bauer catalog through the mail slot at 180 Bloor Street West here in Toronto would be violating union rules?
Of course, Western labour unions pass “boycott” resolutions against Israel all the time, and nothing ever comes of them. Our cell phones, computers and supermarkets are full of gizmos developed in Israeli science labs. Your average Canadian Union of Public Employees hothead may enjoy the symbolic thrill of bashing Israel at a union convention, but no one seriously expects him to go home and throw out his Xbox in solidarity with Hamas.
But — by the nature of their jobs — letter carriers are to be taken a little but more seriously: Once the mail goes into their satchels, it’s hard to track. If some of it winds up down a sewer grate instead of through the mail slot, who’s to know?
Should anyone wonder why unions are becoming irrelevant? CUPW purports to represent 54,000 workers in an industry beleaguered by competition from the Internet and privately run courier services. Does it serve the interests of CUPW’s members to announce an official policy of discrimination against a particular country — a country that, aside from being a democratic Canadian ally also happens to be an active Canadian trade partner and a member of the Universal Postal Union? If you have something to send to Tel Aviv, would this new information make you more or less likely to use Canada Post?
Click around www.cupw.ca, and you’ll find the nonsense isn’t confined to the Israel file: Two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, the site reads like a catalog of communist clichés and Trudeau-era anti-capitalist paranoia.
Of particular interest is a 30-page committee report on the union’s “International Solidarity Work” — prepared especially for this month’s national convention — which comprises a lengthy rant against “neo-globalization” in all its evil variants. Interspered among the agitprop are reports of CUPW junkets to South American sun spots, where committee members went to “forge solidarity links” with their local “brothers” (yes, they actually use that term). The (presumably well-tanned) authors rail against free trade in general, and especially the North American Security and Prosperity Partnership (a plot led by the continent’s “most powerful neo-liberal corporate elite”).
Along with a ritual denunciation of Israel’s “Apartheid wall,” the document calls “for an immediate end” to the war in Afghanistan: “The so-called ‘war on terror,’” the authors write, “has become nothing less than a war on human rights.” There is also a reiteration of Linda McQuaig’s bizarre 2001-era conspiracy theory that the war in Afghanistan “is deeply connected to a privatization and energy resource agenda.”
Even as the authors purport to champion “human rights,” they have nothing but obsequious words for the policies of Hugo Chavez, the left-wing dictator who is destroying Venezuela — or as CUPW refers to the nation, “the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.” There is similarly loving talk of CUPW’s counterparts in Raul Castro’s prison state: “CUPW sees its relationship with Cuban workers as one which opposes the attempts … to re-impose the capitalist economic system and colonial subjugation so decisively rejected by the Cuban revolution.” (Recall, please, that Cuba is a country where anyone attempting to form a genuinely independent CUPW-style union would get thrown into jail.)
What makes all of this claptrap especially revolting is that it serves to discredit the very people who pay for all these CUPW junkets out of their union dues: rank-and-file postal workers. The letter carriers I’ve met are perfectly decent, hard-working chaps. But from reading the CUPW web site, one would think they were all campus revolutionaries who sat around smoking cigarillos and plotting the glorious revolución. If the world’s “most powerful neo-liberal corporate elite” had conspired to make the union movement look obsolete and self-defeating, they would have been hard-pressed to come up with a better tactic.
CUPW is anti semetic.
” Once the mail goes into their satchels, it’s hard to track. If some of it winds up down a sewer grate instead of through the mail slot, who’s to know?”
Maybe the Isreali embassy should mail themselves a few of these mail loggers.
http://www.memestreams.net/users/worthersee/blogid10327137
This just in: The Canadian Union of Postal Workers "has no plans to block mail to and from Israel as of yet." That's a direct quote (with my emphasis added) from the union's national president. The line appears in a letter sent to the National Post today in response to my column about CUPW's loopy foreign-policy pronouncements. The letter, which will appear in tomorrow's print edition of the National Post appears in whole below.
p.s. In regard to Mr. Lemelin's line "Why does [Kay] direct questions about the internal workings of CUPW to everyone except the union itself?" I should say that I did call CUPW's media-inquiries line prior to the publication of my article. I left a message and never got a call-back.
Re: Jonathan Kay asks: Now that CUPW is boycotting Israel, will Canada Post deliver mail to the Israeli embassy? April 28.
If Jonathan Kay admits “I’m no labour expert”, why does he direct questions about the internal workings of CUPW to everyone except the union itself? If he had bothered to ask us, we would have supplied a pretty simple answer: Unlike the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinian mail, CUPW has no plans to block mail to and from Israel as of yet. Our concern is that the policies of the Government of Israel are unjust and violate international law; therefore we will be encouraging our members to boycott Israeli made products. We are taking this position because over 170 Palestinian political parties, unions and other organizations have called for a global campaign similar to the one applied to South Africa in their apartheid era. These measures will continue until the Israeli government recognizes the right of Palestinian people to self-determination, puts an end to military assaults, hydrocide and other acts of violence that take the lives of innocent people, and until Israel fully complies with international law, including a raft of UN resolutions. It’s time to push for a fair and just settlement so that both Palestinians and Israelis can live in peace.
Sincerely,
Denis Lemelin
National President, CUPW
They need to do their jobs and shut up.
Will the CUPW march on May 1st like all good communists do?
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