Perhaps it's time to get rid of Gerry Ritz...

Imagine you run a company. Your department managers, whiz-kids from one business school, execute a new business model over the course of three years which depletes your cash reserves. Your balance sheet bottom line is still black, but the number is lower than it has ever been in ten years.

The whiz-kids tell you not to worry. They can run each of their departments better if they can spend the money to reposition the company. In the end the company will be leaner, more competitive and, perhaps best of all, it will be feared by other companies - even bigger ones. They project a bright and promising future by using the money to make the company, in their eyes, more powerful. The need for a cash reserve will be overcome by the enormous projected revenue generated by the new business model.

As the next year's figures come in you realize that the whiz-kids have done exactly what they said they would do. They spent the cash reserves, shifted funds and reformed the company. The departments look considerably different. Some have grown while others have virtually disappeared.

One department, however, resisted the change to the new business model and continued, despite pressure from the whiz-kids, to operate under the old model with some minor adaptations.

The whiz-kids provide the latest numbers and to your horror it is a balance sheet covered in red ink. The department which did not change to the whiz-kid business model is the outlier. It has outperformed even its own projections. It is profitable and healthy. Workers are enjoying good pay, bonuses and a bright outlook for the future. The department has captured market share from other larger companies and stands to do better in the next year.

Then the whiz-kid in charge of that department comes to you and tells you to eliminate that department - because it doesn't fit the only business model they ever learned at their one business school.

Would that make any sense to you? No?

So why would anyone even consider getting rid of the Canadian Wheat Board in today's market environment?

Now go read Buckdog.

Ritzeriosis

Christie Blatchford wishes everyone would just shut the hell up about AgMin Gerry Ritz's appalling remarks about the listeriosis deaths:
"He wasn't speaking publicly. He was at work ... He was having what he assumed was a private discussion."
"It was perfectly normal human behaviour", she explains, just like the newsroom she once worked in that "had a pool guessing the date Terry [Fox] would die."
Well, she's Blatchford, isn't she?

RossK at The Gazetteer has his own concerns about all this concentration on Ritz's "death jokes".
In "Are The Media Dropping The Ball To Follow The Shiny Ritz?" , he notes that media attention on the jokes and who leaked them obscures the more important original question of

"who was involved in crafting changes to CFIA policy that led to the removal of government inspectors from meat processing plants after Nov 2007?"
"It is the identity of the person or persons who made that public health policy decision regarding self-regulation, not the identity of the person or persons who squealed on a Minister"

that is important here, says Ross.

Well, exactly.
Ross put the question to hard-working Hill reporter David Akin, whose response raises a whole load of other important issues about the difficulty reporters face in posing any questions to Harper at all.
Or to anyone else the PMO doesn't want them to talk to.

Akin writes : "Harper himself seems relatively unfazed by the disclosure of Ritz's comments."
I'll bet he is. Disclosure of Ritz's comments have been a positive boon.
Now we're no longer demanding to know who is responsible for the Decision of the Treasury Board Meeting, November 13, 2007 to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency:
"Inspection of Meat and Meat Products - shift from full-time CFIA meat inspection presence to an oversight role, allowing industry to implement food safety control programs and to manage key risks."

My take on the unfortunate media focus on the "jokes" goes like this : People like Blatchford will remember some off-colour remark they once made at work and how they didn't get fired for it so why should Ritz?
End of listeriosis issue. End of accountability for 18 deaths. Next.
Till the next case of Ritzeriosis privatization disaster.

Crossposted at Creekside