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Well, what goes around comes around. Or is that what comes around goes around? I'm never sure and, frankly, not certain it matters in a post-literate world.
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Well, what goes around comes around. Or is that what comes around goes around?  I'm never sure and, frankly, not certain it matters in a post-literate world. It's kind of like walking the walk, talking the talk or talking the walk which, for years, I was sure had something to do with lying about your golf score but now suspect it really refers to sustainability. Doesn't everything?

About a year ago I ended my on-again, off-again relationship with General Motors - Motto: we were number one... honest - when they explained to me, after heartlessly subjecting me to hours of tortuous hold music, that customer service at GM pretty much meant no service at all.

Fifteen minutes after the warranty expired on my GM car, a part never before known to fail on any car I'd ever owned, including a 25-year-old Chevy truck, the heater core, bled out like a sacrificial lamb. No amount of explaining how this was a come-to-Jesus moment for my relationship with GM could sway them to come around to my point of view - that they'd made the core out of recycled Coors cans and they should pony up the replacement. They offered to send me a $2,500 coupon for a new GM car. I countered by sending them the sharp shards of my GM Visa card with the heartfelt hope they didn't hurt themselves when they filed them where the sun don't shine.

And now inexplicably, I own the company. Of course, you do too. And all the rest of our brothers and sisters from sea to sea to sea and all our cousins in the land of the free, home of the brave. Now more than ever, what's good for GM is good for the country.

Except that what's good for GM right now is probably bankruptcy. And the country, having flirted with that state of monetary distress under the last Regressive Conservative regime of Brian "Cash'n'Carry" Mulroney, is better off not traveling the same road again, all current indications to the contrary.

The reasons GM should be allowed a dignified death are numerous. That their cars suck is only the most obvious. Far from being a key part of their corporate culture, quality at GM has been an infrequent and seemingly unwanted visitor. This is, after all, a company that produced a car, not many years ago, so well engineered the service people discovered they had to dismount and slightly raise the entire engine to replace the spark plugs. You can't design quality like that; it is simply the Hand of God at work.

And now, GM is in effect, a governmental entity, like Parks Canada or the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  While the Harper Conservatives play a proportionately fractional role to the Big Obama Machine, the only thing I can imagine that would be worse than the management of GM continuing to run GM - which it appears they will - is the government of either the U.S. or Canada running GM... with the United Autoworkers as their partners!

Stop and think about this for a minute. But be careful. I find when I think too hard about it, I get excited. This has all the hallmarks of being one of those fabled acid flashbacks they used to warn us about and I felt so cheated never having experienced.

The government and the unions are going to own, operate and make strong once again a major corporation that has been so badly run by people who ostensibly knew what they were doing that it is bankrupt in all but name.  This is an example of why I don't write fiction; I can't make stuff up as weird as this.

How can the combined forces of the U.S. and Canadian governments, whose last really successful ideas were... were... I'm thinking. Don't look now but this just may be one of those dead-end thoughts where a complete-the-sentence contest would come in handy. If you have any good answers to the question "What was the last really successful idea either of those governments had?" feel free to send it in.  There must be a Pique cap around here for a prize.

Anyway, you understand. GM needs great new products, fresh thinking and a corporate culture transplant to be successful again, assuming of course that we simply ignore the grotesque over-capacity of the global auto industry. If we don't, someone's gotta die and GM looks like the most likely candidate at the moment. But in the spirit of reader participation, let's pose a multiple-choice question. That desperately needed fresh thinking and insightful management is going to come from: (a) existing management; (b) the combined force of the U.S. and Canadian government; (c) the UAW; (d) all of the above working in peaceful harmony for the betterment of humanity; (e) leprechauns.

Put your pens down when you've finished.

It would be unthinkable to let GM fail, or so the thinking goes. Think of all the autoworkers, think of all the suppliers, think of all the dealers, mechanics and Chevy salesmenandwomen who would suddenly be tossed on the scrapheap, traveling that well-worn road of the displaced and downsized.  That scenario has played out so many times in the past 25 years it doesn't actually require any thought. Memory perhaps; thought, not necessarily.

What's truly unthinkable is that this bizarre troika is going to snatch the limp body of GM - intently peering into the white light at all its long-departed friends De Soto, Hudson, Nash, et. al. - and breathe life back into it. The 50 per cent of the dealers who survived the first cut, the workers and others thrown a lifeline can hold on and wonder when the end may come for them.

The rest of us can wonder what the government might have done with the billions "invested" in dying technology, moribund management and yesterday's big ideas. We can wonder how it is there's always money sloshing around for corporate misadventure, Olympic projects and election-time vote buying but never enough to seriously tackle healthcare wait times, crumbling infrastructure, social housing or, closer to home, a 20 th century sewer for Alta Lake Road. Those are relatively simple things we could fix with more money and existing intelligence. If we can find the dough for GM but can't find it for those things, where in the world will we ever find the money and the smarts to begin to tackle the really difficult problems? Yes, that was a rhetorical question.