Twenty years ago, The Gazette eliminated the composing room because they said it no longer made sense to separate basic page design from copy editing, since technology now allowed editors to do both jobs. Recently, the paper decided it somehow made sense to split the jobs back up, and force copy editors in Montreal to waste time sending pages to a non-unionized Canwest company in Hamilton, Ont., have them do the basic design and then send them back.

Non-news pages at The Gazette are being increasingly composed by workers at Canwest Editorial Services in Hamilton. The sole purpose of this transfer of work is to have low-paid, unskilled, non-unionized employees perform the work of local copy editors. And it’s actually wasting money instead of saving it.

The result is poorly-designed pages and an increase in the amount of work done by unionized employees in Montreal, who have to spend more time writing instructions for unskilled workers in Hamilton than it would take them to do the jobs themselves.

What’s worse, pages come back so incompetently done that copy editors have to spend even more time fixing CES’s layout mistakes. This is a waste of time and money with no benefit whatsoever.

Although Canwest would never admit it, the only logical reason we can assume that it would force an inefficient, money-wasting system like this on newspapers (other than incompetent management) would be as a stepping stone to something else: either the complete outsourcing of newspaper production to other companies (as has been done already to the Driving section, which The Gazette has little control over), or as a way of getting around anti-scab laws in case of a strike.

Affected pages include:

• Editorial (daily)
• Opinion (daily)
• Your Business (Mondays)
• Mini Page (Mondays)
• Driving (Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays)
• Youth Zone (Tuesdays)
• Fitness (Arts & Life, Tuesdays)
• Getaways (Arts & Life, Thursdays)
• DVDs (Arts & Life, Fridays)
• Calendar listings (Arts & Life, Fridays)
• Books (Saturdays)
• Working (Saturdays)
• Weekend Life (Saturdays)
• Travel (Saturdays)
• Science (Sundays)
• Insight (Sundays)

Have you noticed a dramatic decrease in the quality of design and editing on these pages? Do you want The Gazette to find something better to do with your subscription fees than needlessly paying someone in Hamilton, Ont., to do work already done by a worker in Montreal?

Tell publisher Alan Allnutt you want your Montreal Gazette produced in Montreal.