Greetings, all. Sorry for the absence. I’ve been busy . . .

Sooo, as some of you may have heard, there seem to be laws for the powerful and laws for the not-so-powerful. Let me tell you a tale about the mayor of Montreal, one Denis Coderre.

Canada Post decided last year that it would discontinue home mail delivery and almost everybody, with some exceptions, would have to pick up their mail at community mailboxes.

As you might expect, there was a lot of opposition to the plan, and it was an issue during the federal election campaign, with Justin Trudeau and his Liberals promising to cancel the plan if they were elected (which they have been).

Meanwhile, during the campaign, Canada Post went about installing community mailboxes in, well, communities throughout the city of Montreal and its suburbs.

One day, Mayor Denis Coderre — who loves to garner attention to himself with publicity stunts — decided to go to one such community mailbox site and show his displeasure for Canada Post’s plan. They hadn’t yet installed the mailboxes, only the concrete base. So, the mayor shows up in his little hardhat with a jackhammer, and with the media recording it all, he proceeded to tear up the concrete base.

Yes, the pictures were in all the papers. Denis Corderre was a jackhammer outlaw. He took matters into his own hands.

And he is above the law, apparently.

The crown, Canada Post and the police never filed a charge against him, say, for criminal mischief. But a citizen filed one. To no avail, it was announced yesterday. Denis Coderre won’t face any charges for the incident — or, as the media so graciously put it — the “stunt.”

Now, tell me. If you or I had taken a jackhammer to that piece of Canada Post property, do you think we would face charges? Even if we explained it was a “stunt”?

Mayor Coderre, it should be noted, was the only mayor in Canada — to the best of my knowledge — who felt it was necessary to bring in/hire a special co-ordinator from outside to handle the influx of Syrian refugees in Montreal. The person he hired is an old crony pal from Denis’s days in the federal government, at a cost of $1,800 a day. Opposition members in city hall have pointed out that there are hundreds of unpaid volunteers throughout the city who are co-ordinating all sorts of efforts to help the refugees, and there are hundreds of civil servants already on the payroll capable of overseeing things. But, no, Denis insists his pal is worth the $1,800 a day.

Then also yesterday, Coderre and company fired figurative cannonballs with the announcement that up to 2,400 city blue-collar workers will be suspended without pay for a week because they attended an “illegal union meeting” on work time, for two hours on a quiet day when there really wasn’t much else happening. Various leaders of the union will be suspended for up to two months without pay as a result.

Well, maybe it’s Coderre’s unique form of economic management: save money by suspending the blue collars, and pay his pal for essentially doing a job that could have been done for nothing extra by a blue-collar worker already on the payroll.

I could go on and on about the mayor, who some have referred to as Fred Flintstone, which is unfair to Fred, I think.

— Jillian