Work Life Balance Doesn’t Exist in Canada

A recent study by an Ontario college says over a third of Canadians spend 10 hours or more at work (though those hours also include the travel time to and from that work).

Everest College in Toronto claims Alberta has the most dedicated workers, with 44 percent of those surveyed saying they spend 10 or more hours per day on office related tasks. Manitoba and Saskatchewan tied at 39 percent, while Ontario and the Atlantic province came in at 38 percent. The west-coast is often mocked for it’s casual hippie-type lifestyles, but maybe that image is true, as only 28 percent of people surveyed from British Columbia said they spend 10-plus hours per day at the office.

Funny thing, when computers were just beginning to enter homes back in the 1980’s, futurists, technological gurus, and computer geeks everywhere were saying that those magic mechanical boxes of blinking lights and whirling noises were going to cut the amount of time spent at work. Some even boldly declared we’d have four-day work weeks by the dawn of the new millennium.

I should have known that was flawed, when 1999 rolled over into 2000, and although everyone was worried about the dangers of Y2K, the work week still was five long, laborious days.

Computers actually in more instances than not, INCREASED our amount of time at the office. They constantly fill our minds with emails, instant messages, and manage our overflowing voice-mails. Instead of walking over to our colleague’s desk to discuss that new report, we just send it through email – and in turn, that once 25-page report comes back to us through email, often hundreds of pages more, and requiring a read through.

Thanks to computers, we can work at home – many offices have secure networks you can link to, and our voice networks – run by computers – allow us to call into conference calls from anywhere around the world.

That also means we can be reached at anytime, anywhere by work. How many of you have taken your office-issued BlackBerry or other smart phone with you on vacation, only to find yourself reading and responding to work related emails?

And if your co-workers can email you even when you are on vacation, they can call you too. “Just email that contract to my BlackBerry, I’ll sign it right away.”

As the labour market continues to shift from an employee-based one, towards contract and temporary consultant-based, more people are burning the midnight oil at the office.

Companies generally don’t care if they burn out a contracted consultant, they don’t have to pay for your benefits, so if you get sick or develop psychological issues from being constantly under the gun, it’s no skin off their back. Need to take time off to deal with that overtime-related stress? Doesn’t bother your “employer” – contractors don’t generally get sick days, extended medical coverage, or other benefits, so it won’t cost your boss anything if you take it off. Worse still, consultants only get paid for the time they spend working, so anytime of is lost wages.

And as more and more full-time staff jobs are lost in the new economy, there are suddenly a whole lot more people willing to work those excessive inhumane hours, just to keep a roof overhead, and food in their tummies.

Statistics Canada’s employment numbers for this month weren’t very good – the Canadian government department which keeps tabs on these things says the economic recovery has slowed down, as thousands more full-time permanent jobs have disappeared, most likely forever.

This tosses fear into the working world, causing those with staff jobs to do whatever it takes – even if it means working more hours than are healthy – in the hopes that our employers will spare our jobs from the cutting block.

And so continues the cycle of constantly increasing working days, and shorter recovery times.

Time for a break . . . I think . . .

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Monkey Meatballs – What’s In Your Food?

Yesterday, Indonesian police arrested two cooks for serving up meatballs made from the flesh of endangered monkeys.

About a dozen Silver-Leaf monkeys were poached from Baluran National Park, in Java Island by these “chefs” and the meat was used to make meatball soup (known locally as “bakso”) which is a local delicacy.

The rare monkeys were used because the pair couldn’t afford the more expensive beef or chicken usually used in the meatballs.

Here in North America, we’re more fortunate to have better controls on what goes on in our local eateries.

Or are we?

Just last week, a cop in Vancouver, Washington, USA found a big gob of spit on his burger, from the local Burger King. DNA testing was used on the burger, and matched up with the burger giant’s employee who made the burger. The burger flipper pleaded guilty to assault and the matter is before the courts.

A few years back, an Alberta, Canada food inspector found four skinned and gutted canines in a Chinese restaurant’s freezer. The inspector wasn’t able to determine from the carcasses if they were dogs or coyotes.

When we go out for a night on the town, or stop off at a fast food joint for a quick bite, we never really think about what we are putting into our bodies.

We don’t stop to think about whether the chef that tossed your salad washed his or her hands, if the kid that asked if you wanted fries with that spat in your burger, or if that burger itself is made from monkey, dog, or some other stuff, which might not be what we intended to consume.

Often we can’t see the food in a restaurant being prepared, usually we’re engaged in a social situation, and involved with the discussions with those at our table, instead of keeping a close eye on the cook.

The best advice is if something just doesn’t seem right, don’t eat it. If your beef burger doesn’t taste like what other beef burgers taste like, don’t eat it. If something which is supposed to be served cold isn’t refrigerator cold, don’t eat it. If something which is supposed to be served hot isn’t hot-from-the-oven hot, don’t eat it.

We can’t always control what goes into our food, but we can always control what goes into our mouths.

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Relax - It’s Only an F2

Last week six tornadoes hit parts of Ontario, Canada where few tornadoes have gone before. Two twisters hit two suburbs north-west of Toronto, they have been confirmed by the nation’s weather watchers - Environment Canada - as F2 on the Fujita Scale which classifies Tornadic activity by wind speed.

The Fujita Scale, or “F-Scale” named after it’s inventor, Ted Fujita who introduced the method to measure the violence of wind storms in 1971, has six le

Image via Wikipedia

vels, the least severe of F0 with wind speeds from 64KM/Hour to 116KM/Hour (approximately 40 to 72 miles/hour) to storms where nature’s fury is at it’s worst, an F5 tornado, which has wind speeds from 419KM/Hour to 512KM/Hour (approximately 261 to 318 miles/hour).

For comparison, the weakest tornado at F0 leave light damage to the surrounding area, such as branches broken off trees; shallow-rooted trees pushed over; sign boards damaged and so on. While an F5 tornado is nature’s ultimate killing machine, resulting in total damage to anything in it’s path, including houses lifted off foundations and carried great distances, large tractor-trailers and other cars and trucks picked up like toys and flung through the air creating large and extremely dangerous missiles, debris from houses, cars, trees - anything and everything sucked up by the funnel cloud - shredded into a deadly combination of flying woods, metals, glass, and bodies.

Image via Wikipedia

The biggest tornados to hit of the six in Canada’s largest province were F2 - which comes clocking in at about 181KM/Hour to 253KM/Hour (about 110 to 250 miles/hour). Classified as causing considerable damage, roofs are ripped off frame houses, large trees snapped or uprooted; light-objects become flying missiles crashing into buildings, cars and people.

The City of Vaughan, just north of Toronto where these two medium-sized twisters struck declared a state of emergency. The province’s premier and Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper both made statements of hope, and promises of help from their respective governments. The media sent their anchors to cover the devastation live, and everyone made a big stink about it.

Though we got off lucky. Not that I have no empathy for those whose homes were smashed, cars crushed, people that were hurt, and the family of the one who lost an 11-year-old son.

But F2 tornadoes are pretty tame compared to some of the massive twisters which have hit far poorer communities in the States. The area the tornadoes did their most damage in Vau

Image via Wikipedia

ghan is a pretty affluent one, and although people’s lives were literally uprooted, they have the political and financial means to get back on their feet.

Most people, aren’t so lucky. In the so-called Tornado Alley of America, (from northern Texas, northward through western Oklahoma and Kansas, through eastern Colorado, up through Nebraska, and into southeastern South Dakota, southern Minnesota and western Iowa) much more powerful twisters have ripped through areas of extreme poverty, where those with next to nothing, lose everything.

There have been numerous F5 killer twisters in Tornado Alley - from the first such classified one on May 11, 1953 in Waco, Texas, with 114 lives lost, to March 3, 1966, in Jackson, Mississippi with 57 confirmed deaths, to the more recent F5 tornado on May 3, 1999, at Bridge Creek, in Moore, Oklahoma, with 36 deaths.

The only F5 tornado confirmed in Canada was on June 22, 2007, in Elie, Manitoba, and no lives were lost. Information is scarce from the 1920’s, so the tornado which hid Frobisher, Saskatchewan on July 22, 1920 has never been officially declared an F5, but many believe it to be one. Four people lost their lives in Frobisher’s twister.

Canada’s second deadliest tornado occurred on July 31, 1987 in Edmonton, Alberta, with 27 fatalities, though this tornado was officially classified as a strong F4.

The majority of tornadoes landing in Canada are F1, with the odd F2 and F3. Which is a far cry from the more severe average of F3 and F4 tornadoes to hit the American mid-west’s Tornado Alley.

Tornadoes are dangerous, violent storms, but we Canadians are lucky - we don’t have it as bad as some other places ‘round the globe.

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