Angry in the Great White North

As was reported over the last few days, Perley Edmund Holmes, a BC union leader for the Ironworkers Local 97 (president and financial secretary), has been in arrested in Washington state, allegedly in the process of smuggling $4.3 million in cocaine on foot across the Canada-US border. Further investigation has uncovered a large cache of weapons on the Canadian side.

One of the amusing side notes is how Holmes was a supporter of Stephane Dion during the Liberal Party leadership race. Though the charges have yet to be proved in court, the page with the endorsement was ripped off the Dion website in what certainly seemed to be a panicked response to a scandal, which in all fairness, has nothing to do with Stephane Dion.

In any case, this unattributed comment on the blog Construction Maintenance Allied Workers made me laugh:

Perley Holmes, proposed drug and alcohol testing at the last round of bargaining.

Of course, I don't expect drug dealers are dumb enough to use drugs themselves. They know what a drug addiction does to people. If that's the case, and Perley Holmes actually proposed testing, I would guess that Perley Holmes knew he would come up clean on any test.

Hey, maybe he figured that with drug testing results, he could find out who was using and could be turned into a client, and who was clean and so was worth targeting with a marketing campaign.