By the way.....still waiting for the acpa official, IVR "majority of the acpa pilots" survey, that shows that the majority of all the pilots (total amount of pilots represented by acpa)wanted to fight this issue in the first place. Wish someone would post the audited results here, so we can all read it.
In absolute terms it amounted to about 40 percent of the membership voting to take this thing to the wire.
Job 1, touted at around 700 pilots over 5 years. That was often quoted as the general target statistic in retirements short term.
Worst case scenario it should have been possible to delete 700 chairs up the ladder before it all hit the fan and the music stopped.
News flash, Parliament just stopped the orchestra about 4-500 seniority numbers short of the Master Plan, and 200 are queued up in court. So that's out the window. Thinking was never our strong suit. Now we'll see how 'accurate' the 'survey' was.
Zero representation, zero foresight, zero planning. The roughly 40 percent in absolute numbers was ‘parlayed’ in the press from an underwhelming minority into an ‘overwhelming majority’, democratically of course, with all the usual semantics about how the vote was representative in traditional terms. You forgot to vote? Tough. It doesn’t matter how you slice it, in absolute numbers, a minority is dictating the fiscal fortune of everybody else, but hey, that's democracy.
The huge glaring error that was made right out of the gate however, was assuming that a vote can replace individual rights, pretty much the cornerstone of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and when that error was transmitted through every major news publication in the country on Day 1, it likely caught the notice of a lot of very important people.
Of course what it really did was legitimize the earmarking of carte blanche war cash as required from the other 60 percent who either didn’t vote or who were against it. This thing is potentially not possible on the backs of 40 percent.
If it goes against, which is where the signs are all pointing if you have followed the litigation heading into the big downtown Courtrooms, it could effectively wipe out any percentage increase in any new collective agreement, by the time the Executive calls. The only squabbling over the liability you would assume would come from who is really liable – everybody? The 60 percent who didn’t vote for it? Pilots not yet on the property at the time the scheme was drafted? Returning pilots? To get it spread over 3000 pilots likely seemed do-able at the time until you start reading through the volumes of decisions and where they’ve landed on the ledger. 40 percent gets the other 60 percent to fund it? Softens the blow if you can make it stick. If you can’t, you’ve perhaps got yourself a very large mess.
