Are private jets really essential?
Bombardier shut down its Downsview plant but didn’t have to.
We are finding out what is essential, and it is happening so fast. Do I have enough food? What about toilet paper? What do I miss most? For most people, when you look at the bigger picture of the coronavirus — and that picture will get so much grimmer — the baubles and frivolities and excesses should seem so much less important. Because, of course, they are.
And in Ontario we have closed everything but essential services, and surely we can all agree that some services are essential. That said, the province’s list is not just expansive, but vague. The best way to illustrate this would involve sweet-ass private planes.
“It’s like a sports car for these folks,” says Scott McIlmoyle, the president of UNIFOR Local 112, which represents approximately 1,300 employees at Bombardier Aviation’s Downsview plant, which manufactures the Global 7500 series of private jets. “When I get home and my wife is watching “Young and the Restless,” Victor Newman’s private plane? Like that.”
A Global 7500 goes for just under $75 million. You can get a bedroom in there, a tub, leather seats, all kinds of stuff. They can fly you from Toronto to Australia. The people who make them make an honest living, no problems there. The plant all but closed down around midnight Tuesday night. Since maximum social distancing is critical to keeping our health-care system from being overwhelmed, and will literally save lives, that’s good.
But the problem is this: Under what constitutes an essential service, the Bombardier plant didn’t have to, according to the union. McIlmoyle was told by a Bombardier executive it was not Ontario’s 74-item list of essential services that closed the plant.
“They wanted to keep business as normal as they can right now,” said McIlmoyle. “They were having trouble getting parts suppliers out of the States, because so many places were closing down. I think there have been some customer issues, in terms of when they would get their orders, and with the virus they said, let’s make this decision.
“And Bombardier, as always, pushes things to the end. Pushing the envelope? Yeah, I think they did.”
The Quebec-based company announced its shutdown Tuesday, but declined to say whether it was due to provincial regulations. Bombardier spokesperson Mark Masluch said, “I think the decision was made to keep as in mind as possible with the intent of what the governments were mandating to protect our team members … we wanted to support the decisions of the government and request to shut down non-essential manufacturing.”
Sure, there is no record in this country or any other of Bombardier being anything but an altruistic corporate citizen, and surely not a favourite of the federal government.
The other aircraft manufacturer at Downsview, De Havilland, shut down Friday, as nobody was ordering commercial prop planes; 580 people were laid off. According to sources familiar with the plant and confirmed by the company, the Bombardier plant actually closed two of its bays this week after a positive COVID-19 test came back from a contractor. The contractor had felt flu-like symptoms March 16, and was sent home. The test came back March 23.
It was not clear when exactly the contractor received his test, but it took a week before the two bays were evacuated and cleaned, and all workers who had contact with him sent home, too. Those workers, over a week, could easily have spread COVID-19.
That list of Ontario’s essential services has been criticized as too broad, and there are so many other businesses driving delivery trucks through the loopholes. An employee of Hamilton’s Coaster Factory, which manufactures beer coasters for bars and restaurants that are not currently open, says the company still is employing up to 25 people to fill an order from the old world. Train cars are still being assembled in Hamilton, too. Postal workers are still delivering flyers and third-class mail, which accounts for approximately a third of their interactions with people’s mailboxes.
The Ontario Construction Consortium, an umbrella group that represents several unionized trades, including painters and carpenters, begged the province to take construction sites off the list. Renovation crews are still working, and one employee of a company doing a home renovation told the Star his boss had to be forced to self-isolate after a family member returned from abroad. The workers had to threaten to leave.
“This whole ordeal has really shown us where we stand in the labour food chain,” the employee said, “and it is directly at the bottom.”
SmartStop Self Storage is an American company that has several locations around the GTA. According to one employee, the company used No. 62 on the province’s list: “Rental and leasing services, including automobile, commercial and light industrial machinery and equipment rental.” According to employees, those first four words were used to justify staying open.
“It’s not that I don’t want to work,” said an employee of the storage company who was granted anonymity because people get fired for the truth sometimes. “It’s just that based on how fast this is spreading, I don’t think the right answer to flattening the curve is still going to your job that in all honesty isn’t essential. People aren’t going to die if they don’t have a space to put their extra stuff.”
The totals of what is not truly essential must be staggering, and it matters. We are being asked to stay six feet away from every person outside our immediate families, and the first waves of the coronavirus start to lap up against our hospitals. A source familiar with the private plane industry said there were not a lot of orders for new planes being requested right now. In fact, few are flying. “There was a surge at the beginning of the epidemic,” the source said, “and now everybody’s where they want to be.”
Not everybody.