baggage – mackaycartoons

Thursday January 5, 2023

January 5, 2023 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday January 5, 2023

Ottawa is passing the buck on this holiday season’s air travel chaos

December 23, 2022

Over the past couple of weeks, air travellers have experienced what will likely be remembered as the most difficult Christmas travel peak in recent memory. For Canadians, it was a sad repeat of the challenges they faced last summer. While much of the chaos air travellers experienced this Christmas can be chalked up to bad weather, those travelling with Southwest Airlines and Sunwing, in particular, saw their plans upended by challenging recoveries in the days that followed.

Both airlines saw their operations turned upside down, leaving thousands of customers affected. But that is where the similarities end. The response of the respective airlines, as well as that of the senior-most transportation official in each country, couldn’t have been more different.

Southwest made the difficult but ultimately correct decision to reset their severely disrupted operations by cancelling upwards of two-thirds of their flights for much of the week following Dec. 23 to get aircraft and crew back in place. By Dec. 30, Southwest resumed near normal operations and started its recovery.

April 23, 2014

Sunwing, on the other hand, correctly, however belatedly, leased aircraft from other carriers to deal with their stranded customers but also was forced to cancel flights until February, including all its flights out of Saskatchewan. While the airline confirms that most stranded travellers have now returned to Canada, the longer-term cancellations make it clear that the airline marketed and sold flights which they did not have enough resources to operate. Where Southwest took the “short-term pain for long-term gain” approach, Sunwing decided that extending and spreading the pain well into the winter season made more sense.

While U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on virtually every major network news program, Canadian Transport Minister Omar Alghabra took to Twitter to voice his concern.

Against this backdrop of air travel chaos, several key lessons can be drawn. The first and most important lesson is to be pro-active.

Many of the issues faced by travellers were not only predictable, they were predicted. The problems travellers encountered during the summer peak became self-evident by spring yet nothing was done. With its sprawling bureaucracy, it should not be too much to expect Transport Canada to better monitor operational performance so that trends can be more easily identified and appropriately addressed.

May 25, 2022

Mr. Alghabra spent 2022 playing catch-up rather than leading. He should be the last person in Canada surprised by anything happening at airports during his watch, yet feigning surprise or being firmly in denial, was his and his department’s modus operandi. By being pro-active, he could have helped alleviate some of the long lines at airport security and customs that plagued airports last summer and could have been in a stronger position to encourage Sunwing to repatriate its stranded customers in a more timely fashion. (Continued: The Globe and Mail)

Saturday October 15, 2016

October 14, 2016 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday October 15, 2016

Donald Trump’s problem isn’t a conspiracy. It’s him.

This has been a bad week for Donald J. Trump. But what shouldn’t be lost is that it’s been a bad week because of Donald J. Trump.

That’s not how Trump sees it, of course. In his wild, conspiratorial speech yesterday, he blamed a “concerted, coordinated, and vicious attack” by the media and the Clinton campaign. He explained that his campaign represented an “existential threat” to “those who control the levers of power in Washington” and “the global special interests,” and it was their counterattack that was behind his current troubles. If he loses, he said, it will be because the system is “rigged.”

[slideshow_deploy id=’8949’]

The only person who doesn’t know what’s gone wrong for Trump’s campaign, it seems, is Donald Trump.

None of Trump’s errors were forced. None of his problems were out of his control. He wasn’t buffeted by bad economic news, or a staffer who said something dumb on television, or a change in geopolitics that undercut his campaign.

Instead, the last week has been driven by three characteristics that are purely Trump’s: his absence of impulse control, his overwhelming desire to be and to seem dominant, and his tendency to lash out counterproductively and personally when attacked. (Continued: Vox)

Ontario Election Throw-Back: Monday September 10, 2007

May 30, 2014 by Graeme MacKay

By Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Monday September 10, 2007

Ontario’s election campaign now underway

They’ve been running all summer. Now comes the 30-day sprint to the finish.

The campaign for the Oct. 10 Ontario election gets underway Monday when Premier Dalton McGuinty visits the lieutenant-governor to formally drop the writ and dissolve the Ontario legislature.

The vote is expected to be a referendum of sorts on McGuinty and the Liberals, with their healthy majority – won in 2003 atop cresting public dissatisfaction with Conservative spending cuts – hanging in the balance.

Chipping away at an apparent Liberal lead are the reborn Progressive Conservatives, who are embracing the “progressive” part of their moniker in an effort to distance themselves from the slash-and-burn days of Mike Harris and Ernie Eves.

The issues and tone expected to shape the campaign were in full evidence Sunday, as Conservative Leader John Tory trashed what he called McGuinty’s record of broken promises and the Liberal leader took aim at a Tory proposal to fund faith-based schools.

The Conservative and Liberal platforms are similar in many ways, with both promising more money for health care and education.

The New Democrats have yet to unveil their platform, but Leader Howard Hampton has made several campaign pledges of his own in recent weeks.

More: Two decades of Ontario Elections

Tuesday October 2, 2012

October 2, 2012 by Graeme MacKay

By Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday October 2, 2012

The U.S. dumps a problem on Ottawa, with Omar Khadr’s return

For the Conservatives, Omar Khadr was an opportunity. Now he’s just a problem.

Mr. Khadr has finally returned to Canada, to serve out the remainder of his sentence for crimes committed against the United States in Afghanistan. Stephen Harper’s Conservative government had done everything in its legal power, short of a diplomatic breach with the U.S. government, to keep him interned at Guantanamo Bay, America’s problem.

But those efforts ran out, and now Mr. Khadr is coming home, where he will earn more than his share of unwelcome attention.

When Mr. Khadr was first apprehended on an Afghanistan battlefield by American forces and sent to Guantanamo, the Liberal government of the day treated him like the embarrassment he was. Foreign and Justice ministers spoke about him only when pressed, and then only in the most guarded of sentences. Ottawa was happy to let the Americans prosecute his crimes.

The Conservatives were less circumspect. Mr. Khadr was a wedge, one they were happy to exploit.

Human rights advocates saw Mr. Khadr not as a criminal or terrorist, but as a victim. At worst, he was a young offender, duped by his family into joining a war he was too immature to comprehend.

He was, in their eyes, a child soldier, no more complicit than the children impressed into the armies of African warlords. And his detention at Guantanamo was part and parcel of the Bush government’s abusive war against terrorists.

Conservatives have no truck with such talk; nor, they believe, do most Canadians, especially those Canadians inclined to vote Conservative. (Source: Globe & Mail)

Wednesday June 6, 2012

June 6, 2012 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator, Wednesday June 6, 2012

Opposition to stall budget bill

The federal NDP is warning it’s prepared to force potentially hundreds of confidence votes – taking dozens of hours – on amendments to the Conservatives’ sweeping budget bill that will keep the Tories on their toes in the House of Commons.

The NDP, Liberals and Green party leader Elizabeth May are informally teaming up to delay passage of bill C-38 and highlight to Canadians what they say is undemocratic tactics by the government to stuff so many “reckless changes” into one piece of legislation that will overhaul environmental protection and the country’s social programs.

While the government views the opposition’s tactics as procedural stunts, the proposed reforms in the 425-page budget implementation bill would have profound impacts on Canadians of all ages for decades to come. Bill C-38 proposes major reforms to Canadian environmental and fisheries laws, natural resource project approvals, employment insurance benefits, Old Age Security eligibility and food safety, among the hundreds of measures included in the legislation.

To combat the looming changes, opposition parties have been introducing dozens of substantial amendments at the Tory-dominated House of Commons finance committee, which is reviewing the bill, and a subcommittee that already examined the proposed reforms to environmental protection and resource development.

The finance committee is expected to send the legislation back to the Commons as early as today, where the Green party leader (who doesn’t have a seat on the committee) plans on introducing somewhere between 100 and 200 major amendments of her own. (Source: Saskatoon Star Phoenix)