I rather enjoy reading Heather Mallick's weekend column in the Globe.
Here is one from last week that some of you will perhaps find amusing.

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Mr. Milton, Fasten Your Seat Belt

By HEATHER MALLICK - The Globe And Mail
Saturday, April 5, 2003 - Page F4


The temptation is to let Robert Milton, CEO of bankrupt Air Canada, or Ar Cnda as it is now known to save painting those extra letters on the planes, have it with both barrels. But we are a polite people. He is a guest in this country and he was brought in to make the airline a lean mean flyin' machine, which he has done with too much gusto. It's a skinny plane all right and there's probably only one left.

I am reminded of being on a British Airways plane landing for refuelling in New Delhi some ways from the terminal, because of buzzards strolling on the runway. We rolled slowly along by land. "For those of you who think we are actually driving to Calcutta, I can assure you this is not the case," the captain told the passengers with a nice dry English wit.

Thanks to Mr. Milton, it now seems that on my next visit to Edmonton to see my nieces, the plane will be pulled by dogsled, with the passengers as dogs. Have you seen the film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, about this Inuk who runs naked along the ice floes? At times, I feel as one with him.

Okay, the hell with courtesy to foreigners. Let the lizard loose on this useless, hopeless, pathetic business import. What kind of dim business mind could bankrupt a monopoly airline?

MONOPOLY. The Canadian sky was yours alone. You bought the opposition. Air Transat -- whatever the Gallic beauty and cleverness of that pilot Robert Piche who can land a plane over shark-thick waters without any fuel -- is a small player, as is WestJet.

I travelled on United Airlines years ago and was agog at the peeling paint on the seats and the toilets that rivalled Greyhound for their reek and ruin. You'd never see this on Air Canada, I thought smugly.

And then, sure enough, the banks of tiny seats on Ar Cnda planes began to look like what tattooed people have up on blocks in their front yard: old Mustangs. I started quoting The Other Milton. "When I consider how my flight is spent . . ."

Your mantra, Bob, like every layoffing business dimwit in the Nineties, was "excellence," which led to contracting out on the cheap, staff who hated you, a massive "pension deficit" and taking the cash I paid the airport to help redecorate and just plain old keeping it.

When you agree to pay your staff their pensions, you pay your staff pensions, and if there's a shortfall, because of market conditions or whatever, you fill it. End of story.

I would never store my pension in a company account. It stays in my hot little hands.

Mr. Milton, educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology, can't help his face, as I can't help mine, but I'll say this: Never trust a man who doesn't show his teeth when he smiles. He blames Canadian unions, which decline to take pay cuts. Of course American airline unions made concessions. American workers are treated like peasants and their weird biddability over the past few decades bewilders me.

It's the American way. It is not the Canadian way.

Mr. Milton is joined in this chorus by unionized journalists whose job security is made of reinforced concrete, yet who never mention that when they pontificate. Business writers don't take pay cuts. Why should pilots?

Get ye back, Mr. Milton, to whatever company spawned you (an Atlanta cargo startup) and ruin things on someone else's dime.

I don't want this Texas Pacific Group catfish junk dealer buying a stake in Ar Cnda and telling unions to accept McWages. I call on Ottawa to buy a controlling interest and fix the thing. Hire a smart Canadian CEO. Don't lay off staff, as their income keeps the economy spinning. I don't want to hear about deregulation any more. We Canadians don't deregulate kindergartens or traffic lights or hospitals. Why? Because some things don't need to compete.

Why did we deregulate the most efficient way to fly from Montreal to Vancouver? This is a big, cold country. We need our own airline. It's not a frill.

Furthermore, start charging a fare that fits. Economy fares are fantastically low; business class fares are stratospheric. Find me something in between and I'll fly twice as much, I promise.

And a nation that has the technology to make snow melters can surely find a way to fill an airplane cabin with fresh, non-recycled SARS-free air.

I suggest a small, high-tech, carefully placed hole. Make it the size of a Timbit.

Don't follow the American business model. Call me demanding, but it doesn't work. Americans can't even shoot straight. They shoot cruise missiles at Iraq and they land on Syrian buses, of all things. If I may steal a joke, it's like Hannibal crossing the Alps to lay waste to Rome and saying, "Oh s-t, this is Austria."

What's Mr. Milton saying right now? "Oh s-t, you wanted, like, an actual old-time flying machine-type organization? With wings and cocktails and the pilot telling you when you flew over Gimli?

"Whoops."