Time to demand water protection

(March 18) - It’s funny how some of the things we learned in school don’t make sense anymore. They may have been true at the time, but not now. Admittedly, it has been a long time since I graduated. More than half of all Canadians living today were not born when I finished university. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. There was so much of it that we didn’t need a World Water Day. We do now. We’re going to have one next Monday.

It was in either elementary or high school science that we learned all about the water cycle. Water was a natural resource unlike any other. It wasn’t non-renewable, like petroleum. Oil is a “use it then lose it” commodity. Here today, gone tomorrow. It wasn’t a renewable resource like bamboo. Cut that down and turn it into furniture or flooring or cutting boards. By the time you’re done, another crop has grown.

Water was like neither of those. It was just there. As constant and dependable as my grandmother’s rhubarb jam. Whenever we wanted some, there it was. We couldn’t run out of it because of the water cycle. Evaporation, condensation and precipitation. Put simply, steam rises, cools off and falls down as rain. In one form or another, the same amount of water was always in the system. Solid on the ice caps. Liquid in the oceans. Vapour in the clouds.

What could go wrong? What did go wrong? To put it bluntly, we did. For one thing, there are a lot more of us using the water. Back in the less complicated days when I first heard about the water cycle, there were three billion people in the world. Today there are close to seven billion. The amount of water to share around hasn’t increased to keep pace. Quite the opposite. The volume of water might be approximately the same, but the amount that is usable has gone way down.

The United Nations says each person needs between 20 and 50 litres of safe, fresh water every day for drinking, cooking and cleaning. One in six people don’t have access to this. Two and a half billion people, including close to a billion children, live without basic sanitation. One and a half million children die every year as a result.

The statistics on the UN water website are frightening. In developing countries, for example, 70 per cent of industrial wastes are dumped untreated into the water supply. We can thank ourselves for this. Manufacturing plants that used to provide jobs here got tired of the rules and regulations they had to live with. They could make greater profits by relocating to parts of the world where anything goes. It’s another way in which globalization and deregulation are putting the boots to mother nature.

We can’t live without a secure supply of clean, usable water. It’s not a problem restricted to faraway places like China or Russia, although that is where it is at its worst. There were 679 boil-water advisories in Ontario in 2008. Serious enough, no doubt, but it pales in comparison with this statistic from the United Nations: “In a world of unprecedented wealth, almost two million children die each year for want of a glass of clean water and adequate sanitation.”

Wellington Water Watchers is celebrating World Water Day at John F. Ross Collegiate on Monday evening. Google them and get a ticket. It’s only five dollars. We can’t wait another day before we stand up and demand action to protect our rivers, lakes and oceans.

Give the wealthy a taste of poverty

(March 11) - I don’t know if the task force for poverty elimination will ever be able to meet its goal, but it is off to an encouraging start. It released a report last week that identifies the root cause of poverty: a lack of money.

One guiding principle says we need to move away from a culture that emphasizes alleviating the effects of poverty and towards one that focuses on eliminating poverty itself. All too often these types of committees have become stuck in attempts to manage poverty. Make poor families feel good about themselves with activities to boost their self-esteem. Or organize food drives to keep a hot meal on their tables. Set up clothing closets so they’ll have a warm coat in the cold winter. These are all nice things to do, but they don’t end poverty. They make it a bit more tolerable.

The poverty task force takes a look at the crux of the problem. It opens discussion about income security. You can’t talk about this without looking at a guaranteed annual income.

At the moment there are too many different sources of income. The basic one is employment. You work, you get paid. As long as you are working, life is more or less good. Trouble starts when you’re not working. Then you could be getting your money from one of several different sources. Employment Insurance. Workplace Safety & Insurance Board. Long-term disability payments from an insurance company. Canada Pension Plan disability benefits. Ontario Disability Support Program. Ontario Works. Private pension plans. Canada Pension. Old Age Security.

All provide different levels of income replacement. All have different qualification rules. All have their own bureaucracy. Why not combine them all into a single system that gives an equitable, fair income to everyone who needs it, regardless of circumstances?

The best buffer against poverty is a job. The second best is a caring community that does not allow people to suffer deprivation and want because they are physically or psychologically damaged, or because an employer moved away.

The report contains a novel idea. It suggests a reverse mentoring program through which a corporate CEO would spend some time living with a poor family. Get a comfortable, well paid executive to leave wallet and credit cards at home and get down and dirty with a family of five in a two-bedroom basement apartment. See what it’s like to spend over half your income on rent and utilities. Get to know the challenges of making ends meet.

Then take this one step further. After spending a week with folk who are under-housed and overcharged, the CEO could move into one of the far too few social housing developments around town. See the difference when rent is set at 30 per cent of income. A little bit of this experience and our CEO would be lobbying governments to build more non-profit and co-operative housing projects.

Two things that will take a bite out of poverty didn’t make it into the task force report yet. Raise the minimum wage and enforce laws requiring payment of child support. While we shoulder collective responsibility to protect standards for those left behind by economic ups and downs, deadbeat parents must meet their individual responsibility.

Women, Guelph politics and the Olympics

(March 04) - The Olympics are over. The Guelph election campaign is underway. International Women’s Day is next Monday. There’s a connection between the three.

Women dominated the Canadian medal count. Women dominate Guelph electoral politics. Of the 15 people elected to three levels of government, 10 are women and five are men.

Anyone who wants to know what it would be like if women ran the world could come to Guelph to get a taste of it. They’d find it’s not much different from men running things.

Saying this doesn’t pop any feminist balloons. It recognizes that there is absolutely no justification for the glass ceilings that have traditionally kept women on the lower floors of most organizations. There’s nothing they can do that can’t be done.

Three of the sitting members of Guelph city council have already filed nomination papers for the coming election. A fourth says she will. A woman is challenging for a seat in Ward 1. Karen Farbridge, Vicki Beard and June Hofland have all filed. Maggie Laidlaw says she will run again. All have given us good and thoughtful governance over the years.

There’s a newcomer in the picture. Linda Murphy is running in Ward 1. She told me there isn’t any single issue pushing her into the election. She just wants more fiscal responsibility, accountability and transparency down on Carden Street.

If federal and provincial elections are sprints, municipal campaigns are marathons. Nominations open in January, close in September and we vote on Oct. 25. It is good to see some of the women get off to an early and enthusiastic start.

The four men on council will make up their minds in their own time. The one with the toughest decision is Bob Bell. He has been selected as the Green Party candidate in the next federal election.

There is no good reason why a sitting councillor can’t be a candidate provincially or federally. In fact, there is a lot of precedent for doing so. Harry Worton was our mayor when he ran provincially for the Liberals in 1955. Henry Hosking and Alf Hales were both sitting councillors when they were elected federally in 1949 and 1957, as was Rick Ferraro when he became our MPP in 1985. Carl Hamilton, Linda Lennon and Gloria Kovach all made unsuccessful attempts to jump from the horseshoe to higher office. Until recently, no one thought twice about it.

If they can do it, so can Bell. His enemy is the calendar. The chances of a spring vote recede further with every poor polling result for Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. There’s a reasonable chance of a late summer or early fall election, putting it in synch with the municipal. Bell would have trouble running two campaigns at the same time. The odds of him beating Frank Valeriote range from slim to none. It would be a shame to see him lose his council seat in the attempt.

And what about those Olympics? Two hundred and six Canadian athletes in Vancouver and Whistler. Ninety-one were women. Of the 26 medals won by Canadians, 14 were won by women, 11 by men. One gold went to the ice dancing pair. Forty-four per cent of the team won 56 per cent of the medals. It might have been more if they’d been allowed on the ski jumping slope.

The Olympics is a double-edged sword. On one side it is commercialism run amok. On another it is mesmerizing. The athletes grab our attention while the sponsors get away with our money. We need to sharpen the sporting blade while blunting the spending one.

A vision without a plan is just a dream

(25 February) - John Lennon said life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. Let’s hope he wasn’t right.

The city had a consultation on its downtown secondary plan last week. There were two days of workshops about the direction it will take over the next two decades. I only managed to get to the Wednesday evening one. The workshops went on all day Thursday and into the evening.

Participation was more or less by invitation. Notices were sent to various downtown stakeholder groups and individuals. In the interests of full disclosure, I made the list because I was recently elevated to the chairpersonship of the Library Board. A new library is a key component of downtown redevelopment.

Libraries are genteel institutions that don’t make rush, or rash, changes. We stand politely in queues, sometimes for as long as a quarter of a century. We don’t mind. We’re more than half way down the line by now. Fifteen years in and we can already see the misty outline of a new library taking shape on a horizon a mere ten years out.

That’s the thing about the future: pessimists say it never arrives. An optimist will tell you that every week brings it seven days closer.

The workshop last Wednesday appealed to the optimist in me. We were presented with great visual renditions of how our downtown could look in 2031. The planning consultants have a tremendous vision. They see a boulevard down the centre of Macdonell Street. Wider sidewalks with outdoor cafes. A more attractive St. George’s Square without a bank on every corner, anchored instead by restaurants and shops.

They see creative uses for our riverfront with more parkland and no strip malls. Everything downtown will be linked by attractive pedestrian corridors. If you want to walk along a path from Cork St. to Quebec St. you won’t have to step gingerly around puddles of last night’s puke.

It will be a wonderful place, in 2031. Almost makes me want to start looking after myself to improve my odds of being here to see it.

It’s a grand vision, but a vision without a plan is just a dream.

A plan is not simply a description of the destination. It must outline the ways and means of getting there. How do we get the banks off the Square, and where do we put them? How do we get the strip mall off the corner of Gordon and Wellington and open the river front? How do we stop new ones from being built, if they conform to current by-laws and plans?

Big box development on the edge of town, as allowed by the Commercial Policy Review, isn’t about to go away. It is the root cause of downtown misery, but the OMB won’t let us stop it.

I was pleased as Punch to see the new downtown library open for business in the 2031 vision. It means we won’t be left in the queue for ever. The optimist in me thinks it is great that planners still see all this as achievable in 20 years, even though they’ve bumped Baker St. redevelopment off for ten. Unless, of course, some government infrastructure money puts the shovels in the ground sooner. If that happens, we’ll be ready. If it doesn’t, we’ll keep on waiting.

You can see the dream for yourself at a city hall open house on March 9. I hope they can make it work because, as Mark Twain said, twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did.

Labour history levelled

(February 18) - I was driving down Dawson Road a couple of weeks ago. Lynne and I were going to Rona to see what they had in the way of kitchen counters. Suddenly she let out a shout somewhere between a question mark and an exclamation point. The Steelworkers Hall is gone, she said. I looked over and, sure enough, there it wasn’t.

The sight was more of a shock than a surprise. There had been lots of warning that the building would be torn down. Even when you see something like this coming, it is still a slap when it arrives. It hasn’t been the St e e l w o rk e r s Hall for 10 years, but I’m the sort who still refers to the Olde Quebec Street Mall as "the old Eaton’s Centre". As we all know, that’s just down the street from where the Red Barn used to be.

The Steelworkers was a huge part of the lives of a huge number of Guelph workers. Good things happened there.

The three meeting halls held union meetings, labour council meetings, NDP meetings. Thirty years ago, the large hall saw more wedding receptions than just about any other place in town. It held scores of contract ratification meetings. There was a time when it was fashionable for unions to hold annual dinner dances for their members. The Steelworkers was the place to have them. The NDP riding association held annual fundraising banquets in the large hall.

In the early ’70s I was recording secretary and then president of CUPE Local 1334, representing maintenance and custodial workers at the university. We belonged to the Guelph Labour Council, and the monthly meetings were in the middle room. It wasn’t unusual to get as many as 50 delegates at a meeting. Issues important to the labour movement were hotly debated. Then, on adjournment, we’d go through to the club room and unwind.

The bar was the home of the Royal City Labour Association. If you held a union card, you could join. If you joined, you could get in and enjoy cheap beer and good company. If you weren’t a member, you could be signed in by someone who was.

Every Saturday afternoon it was taken over by a dart league. The atmosphere was friendly, the darts were competitive. Double in and double out was the order of the day.

Union halls are neither salamander nor silver maple. We don’t go all bleary-eyed at the prospect that one day they too will become extinct. I think there is only one left in Guelph, the CAW hall on Silvercreek. It is in a 19th-century schoolhouse and is protected from demolition. The building envelope that held the Steelworkers Hall was not deemed to be “architecturally significant.”

Its importance was as a cultural and historic landmark. It contained the legacy of old union leaders, people like Charlie Pinson and Joe Mezey. They, and others like them, lifted working families into the financial middle class. They built their halls not just for themselves, but for their neighbours. Unions are the quintessential community organizations. They have always been vehicles of social progress, lifting standards not just for their members but for all who work for wages. The halls were their way of engaging with the communities from which they grew.

Unions may be an endangered species these days, but they cannot become extinct. Like salamanders, they can regenerate lost limbs. They will march again as we emerge from this recession with lower wages, fewer benefits and greater insecurity.

Meanwhile, the Steelworkers Hall is gone for good. It won’t be forgotten. It will be missed.

Earthquakes, far and near

(February 11) - I just got back from the Help for Haiti show, and it was a tremendous event. Too bad it takes a disaster to bring all those musicians onto the same stage on the same night. Sam Turton, Ajay Heble and Rev. Paul Clarkson deserve a lot of credit for putting it all together in such a short time. When they went fishing for performers, they cast their nets straight into the deep end of Guelph’s talent pool.

They reached as far as Elora to bring in Kevin Breit. There was a time in my life when I thought that Roy Buchanan and Jeff Beck had taken the Fender guitar as far as a mere mortal could carry one. Then along came Breit. He’s a magician. I’m not in the business of flogging River Run tickets, but he is there again soon for the closing concert in the Borealis series. If you’ve never seen him, you owe it to yourself to do so.

He may work magic with a guitar, but we also heard the sorcery of the University of Guelph choirs. They worked magic with their voices. I was in awe at one piece that carried us down to the heart of the Amazon River. The blended sounds of the birds and animals transfixed me. Marta McCarthy has put together a jewel that deserves wider recognition.

The concert raised over $21,000 for the Canadian Red Cross. The relief work gets every penny raised. Like the very professional people they are, the performers graciously thanked those of us in the audience for our generosity. I want to take the chance now to thank them for theirs.

Had it not been for them, there wouldn’t have been anything for us to buy a ticket to.

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Speaking of earthquakes, one just ripped across the fault line separating the city from the county. No one was seriously injured, other than some cuts and bruises to the body politic. Some joint committees were turned to rubble. Now the question is whether or not they can be rebuilt.

I hope they can be. It will be a shame if the damage is permanent. The worst of the tremors were caused by an arbitration decision that gave the city the short end of the fairness stick. The city tried to save us millions of dollars a year and should get full marks for the attempt.

The relationship between the city and the county has been on a downhill slide since the dark days of the Mike Harris Conservative government. It was he who downloaded a bundle of social services to meet the greater goal of lower taxes. As is the case with all tax cuts, it was a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The cost is still there, and it is still you and I who pay it.

The burden of providing social services to all who need it, whether they live in Guelph or Garafraxa, was given to the county. Guelph citizens pay our share to the city through property taxes. The city passes it on to the county through a formula that was the basis of the arbitration.

If it did nothing else, the case revealed flaws in the way things are done. These must be fixed.

Politicians on both sides of the municipal boundary need to sort things out sooner rather than later.

Harper mustn't get away with it

(January 28) - I have been at several rallies and demonstrations in St. George’s Square. None have been even close to the size of the one last Saturday. Organizers estimated about 500 people turned out. News reports put the number at 300. Either way, it far outnumbered previous rallies against wars in far off places. It dwarfed rallies favouring action to reverse climate change. It sent a message that should reverberate on Parliament Hill.

The government would hear it, if the government was there. It isn’t, and that’s why we were.

Most Canadians, if asked, will agree that going to war is a foolish way to sort things out. Similarly, they will tell you that global warming sends a chill down their spines. The challenge, the near impossible task, is getting them to stand in the centre of the city and say so as a group.

Threaten their democracy, however, and it’s a different story. Shut down their parliament when there is still work to be done, and awaken a slumbering beast. The rallies in Guelph and across the country proved that citizens are not apathetic. They are not unconcerned about the basic responsibilities of citizenship. Although most of us make cynical wisecracks from time to time, we depend on the politicians we elect to do their jobs. These politicians make the mistake of their lives when they confuse trust with indifference. Stephen Harper made this mistake.

He must now wear the consequences of his contemptuous scorn for the traditions and institutions that define our civil society. He and his supporters natter on about how other Prime Ministers at other times have also prorogued Parliament. They say this and sit back smugly pretending they have said something profoundly clever. They haven't.

They should look the word up in a dictionary. It is done to mark the end of a session, when the legislative agenda is complete. Our Prime Minister has used it twice when the agenda he set himself was far from completed. It was in danger of falling apart. He did it to play hide and seek with the voters. He has been found. He has been exposed. He has been called to account.

There is one more step to take. At the first opportunity when parliament reconvenes in March, the opposition parties should pass a motion of non-confidence. Put this government out of its misery. Give us the opportunity to get it out of our misery.

I am not confident. Many of the people in the Square on Saturday went to Knox Presbyterian for a panel discussion. It was standing room only in the hall. One young man asked the question on most of our minds: would the government fall on this issue?

Our MP, Frank Valeriote, was in prominent attendance. He had spoken at the Square and again in the hall. He said lots of wise and wonderful words accurately reflecting the thoughts of the assembly. In answer to the big question of the day, he said no. He didn’t think it would.

The opposition parties, Liberals and New Democrats both, can no longer hide behind the excuse that Canadians don’t want an election. Whether we do or we don’t, we need one. Most Canadians won’t mind. They never do. If an election is called, two-thirds will go out and vote. If one isn’t, the spirit shown across the country on Saturday will be hard to sustain.

If the Prime Minister gets away with this atrocious behaviour again, he will be encouraged to greater offences in the future. Look at the things he has done with a minority government. Be very, very afraid of what he will do with a majority.