It appears that Bob Kinnear, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 and union vice-president Kevin Morton can’t play nicely together. Kevin Morton and his supporters, the militant maintenance workers, clearly didn’t give a hoot about the 1.5 million Torontonians who use the TTC daily when they voting against the deal that Kinnear negotiated and supported in an attempt to force Kinnear out. And I thought that coups only happened in third world countries, but it happened right here in the GTA.

This behaviour is unconscionable and not acceptable in a civilized society. It is exactly this behaviour that makes the general public so anti-union that many are now calling for the TTC to be declared an essential service or to privatize it altogether. It seems that these 2 options are the only way that we will be liberated permanently for union bully tactics and a complete disregard for the people of Toronto. The maintenance workers are nothing more than cowards. The drivers are on the front line every day facing the public. The maintenance workers get to wreak havoc in the city and hide safely away from the angry residents of the city.

Stranding people with no warning so that you can try and overthrow your union boss should be a punishable offense. The pathetic part of all of this is that if the TTC had accepted the contract offer it would have put them near the top of transit wage earners in North America. The only transit maintenance workers in Canada who would have been higher paid were those who worked for Calgary Transit. There has to be a better way to get rid of Bob Kinnear that to have a TTC strike. The union is not at all apologetic. Adam Giambrone on the other hand did issue an apology to the people of Toronto and has stated that they will now look at scaling back some of the offers made in the tentative agreement. Wouldn’t it be poetic justice if at the end of the day the union walked away with less than they turned down?