Vote for 2019’s Scumbag of the Year

Once again, Rankandfile.ca’s readers have come up with a disgusting collection of human waste for our consideration.

We’ve narrowed the field down to ten candidates in both the private and public sector. Past winners like Doug Ford have not been nominated because they’ve already earned the title Scumbag For Life.

Now it is up to you, our readers, to vote for Scumbag of the Year. Vote for your candidates at the bottom of page. Voting closes on New Year’s Eve.

Meet the candidates

Private Sector

David Albert, Managing Director of Foodora Canada
Yet another blowhard anti-union tech turd holding down wages and leeching off the public sector. Albert makes ridiculous claims about job “flexibility and freedom” while holding fast to Foodora’s fiction that its couriers are “independent contractors”. And he’s used this anti-union legal claim to get the results of the Toronto Foodora union drive sealed. With Doug Ford’s Bill 47 assisting Albert’s misclassification of his workers, Foodora secured an exclusive delivery contract with the publicly-owned LCBO liquor board. Foodora’s “innovation” is nothing new: just more anti-unionism, poverty wages, favours from right-wing politicians, and using the public sector to keep their business venture afloat. Get stuffed, David.

Scott Banda, CEO of Federated Co-operatives Limited
Banda is a corporatizing fox in the co-operative henhouse. Over the past year, strikes against concessions were forced in the Moose Jaw and Saskatoon Co-ops. Just recently, 200 Co-op warehouse jobs in Calgary were killed by outsourcing to a private grocery wholesaler. Banda and his corporatization cronies have since built a towering mountain of bullshit trying to justify a massive scab operation involving helicoptering in these lowlifes and supplies to the Regina Co-op refinery after locking out 700+ refinery workers. Despite turning $3 million in profit each day, Banda wants to destroy what remains of their pensions. There is no co-operation with scum like this. Burn, Banda, Burn!

Don Demens, CEO of Western Forest Products
While pocketing a cool $2.3 million each year, Demens cried poor when forcing 3,000 Vancouver Island forestry workers out on strike July 1. The union refused to accept sweeping concessions on pensions, outsourcing, two-tier wages, and shift scheduling, all while the employer refused to deal with injuries, broken equipment and many other issues. Only a few months before the strike started, Demens was touting WFP’s “record year” in 2018. At every turn since, Demens and his team have refused to bargain in good faith, let alone make an offer that the membership could be expected to vote on. Where’s a wood chipper when you need one?

Linda Knight, CEO of CarePartners
Knight’s control of this publicly-subsidized for-profit homecare agency in Ontario has somehow managed to become worse. In Sudbury, clerical workers were locked out for demanding more than the poverty wage. After six months Knight laid them off, busted the union, and shut down the CarePartners Sudbury office. Knight is now taking the same approach to bargaining with thousands of Personal Support Workers who are paid poverty wages with no benefits, no sick days and no pensions, and peanuts for mileage. Thousands of workers and clients are suffering under this crumbling homecare system – all while public money lines CarePartners’ profit margins. Linda is a parasite.

Boris Serebyany, CEO of Fiera Foods
On September 25 2019, Enrico Miranda was killed in the Fiera Foods industiral bakery in North York, crushed in a machine that he was cleaning. Miranda is the fifth known temp worker to be killed at Fiera Foods since 1999. Serebyany’s factory, which supplies Sobey’s and Dunkin Donuts and other companies, has a workforce of 70 percent temp workers to exploit Ontario’s awful labour laws which place the onus on temp agencies for injuries and death, not Fiera Food itself. The undercover investigation by Sara Mojtehedzadeh revealed that temp workers at Fiera Foods only receive five minutes of safety training. Boris needs to be crushed.

Public Sector

Canada Post management
For over a year, Canada Post workers have been without a contract after Trudeau’s pro-management strike-breaking legislation in late 2018 that brought rotating strikes to an end. The legislation has tied up bargaining in arbitration for over a year now, all of which has served to reward management for their bullying tactics, denial of health and safety concerns, and record high injury rates. Management continues to refuse to deal with pay equity for Rural and Suburban Mail Carriers, and has routinely walked away from the bargaining table. Workers’ control of the post office is the only punishment fit for this bloated, top-heavy army of scumbags.

Neil Fassina, President of Athabasca University
Putting this small but strong university on the map for all the wrong reasons, Fassina is a particularly nasty version of the corporate groupthink administrators trashing post-secondary education around the country. Despite the university running a surplus, Fassina is hiking tuition fees and demanding concessions of the workforce, including a union-busting proposal that would remove 2/3s of the faculty association’s membership. To make matters worse, Fassina is moving dozens of jobs out of the small town where the university is the largest employer. Neil needs to be stuffed in a locker.

Blaine Higgs, Premier of New Brunswick
The Irving Oil executive who runs New Brunswick has spent the year trashing basic rights of overworked, underpaid nursing home workers across the province, and undermining the care required for thousands of people. Early in the year, Higgs and the employers refused to bargain fairly with the nursing home workers and then secured a court order suspending their right to strike. After spending millions in public money over months of legal actions against worker and union rights, Higgs then rammed through Bill 17 to again curtail the rights of nursing home workers. Now Higgs has the honour of presiding over the poorest province in Canada, which he is responsible for as both a former Irving Oil executive and Premier.

Jason Kenney, Premier of Alberta
This sweating fundamentalist ham handed over $4.7 billion to oil companies who turned around and laid off hundreds more workers. Then the Premier and then took an axe to services and thousands of jobs, ushering in the Kenney Recession. In addition to healthcare and education being chopped to death, he’s unilaterally stolen control of the province’s public sector pension funds, cut 46,000 people from the Seniors Drug Benefit Plan, gutted Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped, and spent millions on an authoritarian war room to spy on and slander on anyone who isn’t kissing the ass of oil and gas. These are just some highlights. Let’s hope he shares a cell with Higgs one day.

Stephen Lecce, Ontario Minister of Education
Before he even carried on the Tory tradition of trashing Ontario’s public education system, jacking up class sizes, smearing teachers, and causing labour unrest, this weasel was working in the Prime Minister’s Office of Stephen Harper as a 20-something brown-noser. A brainwashed Tory child soldier who campaigned for a Harris cabinet minister at age 12, Lecce attended the super-elite St. Michael’s private school, and was a frat boy president at UWO before getting on the Conservative Party’s Welfare Program. Lecce is why re-education camps were invented.

2019 Private Sector Scumbag of the Year
David Albert, Managing Director of Foodora Canada
Scott Banda, CEO of Federated Co-operatives Limited
Don Demens, CEO of Western Forest Products
Linda Knight, CEO of CarePartners
Boris Serebyany, CEO of Fiera Foods
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