June 28, 2023

Mario Peloquin has been brought in under a Liberal government program of privatization of VIA Rail.

He comes in as being associated with, a manager of, or executive in many of the major private transport infrastructure companies in Canada.

He was at the NY Metropolitan Transit Authority, where he earned a salary of $412,000. He was only at the MTA from 2020 and was criticized for spending much of that time out of New York during the second stages of the pandemic. While that is hard to be too critical given that the MTA abandoned its upgrading project because of the pandemic, it also does not show what he is worth as a manager since the program he was managing took a back seat to the panedmic.

The project he was brought in to implement was a massive job cutting program at MTA. See here for the slide deck.

The plan was explicit about the elimination of jobs and cuts to services:

• Elimination of redundancies, reduction of layers, and streamlining of processes
• Improved executional effectiveness through improved planning, coordination, and collaboration
• Recommendation could result in a potential reduction of roughly 1,900-2,700 positions
• Total potential annual savings opportunities is an estimated $370-$530M

Now, he was brought in while Andy Byford was there. So, it really depends on if he was under Byford or brought-in to sideline Byford’s relatively pro-transit management orientation. However, there is some indication that he was brought in with Anthony McCord to replace Byford and implement the massive cutting campaign. McCord was brought in as the "chief transformation officer" and is also from Montreal as the head of Montreal's airport authority.

So, likely Peloquin was brought in as co-hatchet to McCord.

The only thing that seemed to temporarily derail the plan was the pandemic.

Peloquin served as vice president of SNC-Lavalin during its Quebec corruption tumult of 2019. He got that job after he was at O-Train as an operator and then manager.

Sounds like he was a Teamsters member at CN when he was younger for a hot second. Then onto the O-Train in Ottawa.

New research from the USA shows that the pandemic stimulus cheques were spent on paying down debt, not on lavish spending by the working poor.

This points to the obvious lie in the current narrative that workers drove inflation because of pandemic relief money. Of course, the counter to this is that making the working poor less poor you simply support their financial resilience. Which Keynesians blame for the current "stickiness" of inflation. They point to continued and almost inconceivable consumer confidence in the USA even as every part of the central bank system is trying crush them.

There is no way out of the circular argument that working people are causing inflation pain for themselves by not living in squalor.