Moya Greene is no Martha Stewart
First let me clarify that there is nothing wrong with cooking and spending time in the kitchen whether you are male or female. I was a chef by trade myself originally. The Report on Business from the Globe and Mail recently ran a rather different article on Moya Greene. It claimed that Moya Greene learned to cook while attending the University of Newfoundland using Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I kid you not. Betty Crocker here we come. If you want to master French cooking why not consult the French? Escoffier's Ma Cuisine.
This article is a cross section of just what is wrong with Moya's Madness. Here she is bragging to the world what a wonderful cook she is claiming to be an expert on French cuisine while she admits that she became an expert on the French culinary art by reading a Betty Crocker paperback. Personally I find it offensive she claims to know anything about the French culture not to mention cuisine when her first order of business as CEO of Canada Post was to close the Quebec City Post Office without consultation.
The article claims Moya Greene loves the heat of her job at Canada Post but can't stay out of the kitchen. You have got to be kidding. In the article she states “I can’t remember the last time I made a Béarnaise sauce, I don’t want to fuss with things any more—simple is good now.” Let's take a look at Béarnaise sauce. It's a French word for a sauce that is very similar to Hollandaise made with heated egg yolks and clarified butter. Full of cholesterol but perfect on a schnitzel with shrimp or crab or popular with eggs benedict. The French wrote the book on the culinary arts. Twice. First it was demiglace, chaud-froid and aspic. Then they rewrote the book with Nouvelle Cuisine and the heavy sauces were replaced with lighter, healthier and simpler meals.
Now the intent of Nouvelle Cuisine was not to promote the Corporate way of do whatever is cheapest and easiest. The intent was, not to over due somethings or cover up their natural beauty. Roast Ham or Turkey for example. Although the garnishes that went with the chaud-froid were magnificent, there really isn't a need to cover up their natural beauty and flavor. Nouvelle Cuisine was not a call to make hollandaise sauce out of a package. Clearly Moya Greene missed the revolution.
Mayonnaise is made in a similar way to Hollandaise. Whipped egg yolks with cooking oil not clarified butter gradually added but it's all done cold. Although homemade mayonnaise is an art, the stuff that comes out of the jar is fine for all practical purposes. However, Hollandaise sauce out of a package is not the same. I took my daughter out for seafood schnitzels a while ago. I was looking forward to the old school treat. But when I looked at the consistency of the sauce and tasted it my heart sank.
I guess fake Hollandaise doesn't glaze properly. These schnitzels were not glazed under a salamander. The sauce tasted plastic. It was fake. I couldn't finish it. Real hollandaise sauce fluffs up when it is glazed and tastes magnificent with seafood on a schnitzel. There is no substitute for real hollandaise. Like people, On n'est pas jetable. One is not replaceable. That is something Moya Greene cannot comprehend.
Before we toss Moya Greene's double sided coin into the air to make the next random decision on how we are going to screw up the economy and a profit making dividend paying corporation we need to examine both sides of the coin and determine if either side is something we really want.
One one side of the coin we have a complete air head. A lawyer from Newfoundland who helped crush Bombardier and derail CN waltzes into Canada Post with no experience in the field and randomly waves her magic wand around at will to wreck havoc on the company and the families it employs. That leave us with the other side of the coin. A ruthless, arrogant, I'm not going to listen to anyone experienced in the field axe murderer killing jobs at will for no apparent reason simply because it makes for a good headline.
Let's look at that dark side of the coin. Closing small post offices is one thing but Quebec city? That was dumb. Every small town in the country can't have a mail sortation plant. However, there comes a point where redirecting massive amounts of mail from large city centres to another city centre then back again becomes counter productive. Thus we saw in the decentralized, centralized mail redirection unit. We're in a serviced based industry. Delaying the mail for no reason reduces the quality of the service. Redirecting huge amounts of city mail for no reason increases handling and labour costs.
Closing the Quebec city Post office was bad business but Moya Greene didn't care. She had an axe to grind and she was determined to use it. It didn't matter what business, MP's, city hall or the public said, she knew better and wanted to make a name for herself. After all being a CEO is really simple. Cut jobs and thereby gain approval rating in the private sector. That's all the private sector want to hear - jobs were cut. The old ways however involve hard work and customer service. That is old school. Moya's drive to remove public accountability cares not about these things.
Not picking up the mail on the weekends when the competitors do. That reduces business revenue. Before I could mail an expresspost on Saturday and know it would be there Monday morning. Now I mail it Saturday and who knows when it will get there. Some places it won't even get picked up till Monday afternoon. But she doesn't care. She is here for one purpose only. To axe jobs and services leaving nothing but a teenage wasteland. Don't forget her mandate states that she and the private sector think public sector managers and the public are stupid. That's quite a different reality than her air head persona conveys to the public. Just ask her managers who make the horrific mistake of disagreeing with her.
So, on one side of the coin is a ruthless arrogant axe murderer. The other side on the coin is an absolute Air Head. Look at what she wore on youtube speaking on the world economic situation. The living room drapes. Holy meds batman it makes one wonder why mental health is her personal charity of choice. At least when I dress like a pirate on a picketline I'm joking. If she had listened to her special advisor she would of got some feedback on that outfit before she brazenly defied risk aversion. Speaking on youtube is a good thing. Obama does it well. But you have to be careful what you say and how you portray yourself.
Aside from talking nonsense, the image she portrayed is that of a complete airhead. That is not a sari. It looks like the livingroom drapes. It's like her STD brainstorm. Moya Greene said it wasn't fair for people who have worked at the company for many years to have saved sicktime if they haven't used it when new employees have none. Like that makes any sense at all. But she was serious and her solution was to steal all that banked sick time and do away with it completely. If you get sick, she expects you to go in EI. I kid you not. It was called the Short Term disability program or STD for short. Where on earth does she get these anachronisms from? That's why PSAC members called her the STD Queen for stealing their sicktime under her Short Term Disability program.
We won't even mention her following in Telus' footsteps and censoring the Internet or how she screwed up our pension and stole out severance pay. Much. But we will mention that sleazy stunt she pulled getting that bogus article printed in Macleans magazine. After closing the Quebec City mail sortation plant without consultation the Union launched Operation Transparency. It was a proactive attempt at getting information about the real agenda and calling for more public accountability. It was totally within reason especially when the scandal broke about Moya Greene giving falsified documents to Parliament about the plant closure. That scandal was covered up pretty quick even though Conservative MPs Luc Harvey and Daniel Petit went to the local police station where Luc Harvey filed an official complaint, claiming that documents used to analyze the impact of transferring mail processing from Québec City to Montréal were falsified. Anyways, her new "special advisor" was the former editor of Macleans and favors were pulled to get a very biased and unprofessional piece of journalism printed in their tabloid.
My point is, Moya Greene is a fake. She comes out of a package. Her blind arrogance is without merit and her ruthless job killing tragic. As is the small but devoted cult following that actually believes that she knows what she's doing and is doing anything good for business. The ultimate tragedy and dilemma is that they threw Saint Martha in jail while Mad Moya has been free to roam with a government supplied axe to murder at will. Tragic indeed. This isn't a story about beauty and the beast. It's a tale of the axe and the airhead. A Shakespearen tragedy indeed.