I’ve been reading the opinion pieces in the Calgary Sun lately. (I know, I know, I shouldn’t. But it’s always offered to me at work, and I sometimes get a laugh out of reading it.)

There has been a lot of talk about how textbooks in Albertan schools are thrown out each year as new ones come in. I think it’s great that we have the resources to get the most up to date textbooks in our schools; it’s great for our education system! However, if it is true that these books are thrown away (Could someone please confirm it, I emailed the Calgary Board Of Education one month ago an did not get any response.), I think they could be put to much better use.

Starting within the province, we could go to other school districts that may be strapped for cash, and offer to give them better text books. This could easily be done by setting up a database on the internet. Each time a school wants to replace its textbooks, it must place the ones they want to get rid of on an online database. Other schools then can view this database and if they need any of the text books they can request to have them. This would be a great way to improve our education system in Alberta and we would also be helping out the environment at the same time. And if the text books are so obsolete that no one wants them, then we can recycle them.

This does not just need to happen within the province of Alberta only though. I know that when I was in British Columbia, we were using text books from the 70’s/80’s. If provinces could trade with each other, this program would be even better.

Sometimes the solutions are simple.

Darren Entwistle’s (Telus CEO) made 14.096 Million last year.

A minimum wage earner in Alberta made $14,560 working full time last year.

This means that the Telus CEO made 968 times the amount of money as a minimum wage earner in Alberta did. Does he really deserve it? To break it down even further, it only took the CEO of Telus nine hours to make the same amount that the minimum wage earner makes in a year. Does he really do the same amount of work in those nine hours as the minimum wage earner does in an entire year? Not to mention he makes that money even while he is sleeping, unlike the minimum wage earner.

This is corporate corruption at its worse. If the telecommunications industry were under public ownership again, the person in charge would not be making nearly as much as this. This means that more people could get hired, which means more jobs. Also, we don’t even need to shut Telus down. The government could compete with Telus. With little or no profit margin, the government could easily offer services for a lot cheaper then Telus could ever dream of. Also think of what we could use the little profit that we could make for. I can think of tons of things, starting with fixing the roofs of many schools in Calgary.

With Telus’s poor service and lack of regard for its unions, I say it’s about time we bring public ownership back to the telecommunications industry.

I was having a discussion with my coworkers the other day about why I boycott Wal-Mart. I stated my number one reason is that they force manufacturers to seek out cheaper labour to keep prices down. This forces the manufacturers to set up shop overseas and pay out slave wages. I am against these slave wages, and I am sure most Canadians are against them too.

So it got me thinking. We have laws for Canadian businesses. We have minimum wage in each province (Which isn’t adequate, but that’s for another article.) and we have regulations that businesses have to follow. Why not extend this legislation overseas? If you want to do business in Canada, you should have to follow Canadian Laws overseas and abroad. I’m sure this would go against NAFTA and/or other trade agreements in someway, but we should be working for the betterment of Canadian and World Citizens. And if agreements are making it possible for corporations to pay out slave wages, I say these agreements are not worth following, or they need some serious revising.

So why can’t we extend Canadian laws overseas for corporations in Canada having operations abroad? Whether they hire the labour directly or indirectly, I think they should have to follow Canadian labour laws. The labour laws in Canada seem to have no meaning if corporations can just outsource jobs elsewhere to get around the laws. The labour laws of Canada are meant to protect Canadian workers. If we don’t enforce the laws on Corporations that are outsourcing their jobs, then workers in Canada and around the world become less protected.