They’re at it again. Yes. Again. Our part-time faculty colleagues in Canada are on strike. The Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association (WLUFA), which represents 365 contract faculty, announced at the beginning of Masrch that part-timers are striking in response to the latest pay offer from the college. WLU officials offered a 3.5 percent pay increase. The raise would have bumped up salaries for part-time faculty at the school to $6,211 per course. No, that is not a typo. WLU’s 365 part-time faculty earn over $6,000 per course. Union leaders called the strike because at the nearby University of Waterloo, part-timers are paid $6,708 per course. Wilfrid Laurier University union leaders want the university to match that. Leaders are also miffed because WLU officials refused to negotiate a better system of seniority.

Who says people in Canada are more polite? Piss off the part-timers’ union by offering $6,200 per course instead of $6,700 and they’ll close you down, eh? (Read about the strike here.)

I recently travelled the Loyalist Highway. It runs through the Province of Ontario and into Quebec, near the border crossing with upstate New York. The Loyalist Highway: Think about that for a moment. The people who traveled that road were the colonists who wanted nothing to do with the American Revolution. They didn’t want to break with England. They were lovers, not fighters. They tramped loyally into British held Ontario/Quebec and started working on their Canadian accents.
Here we sit, 700,000 of us, south of the border, preternaturally proud of having revolted against and of having defeated Britain, the literal 800 pound gorilla of the 18th century. Forward-thinking colonists, freedom-loving Americans. Don’t tread on me. Blah. Blah. Blah.

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