Time to Mete Out Mistletoe, Coal

(18 December 2007) - Mistletoe and coal. Reward and punishment. It’s part of the season. As another year ends, columnists everywhere sit in judgement and decide who has been good and who has been bad. Who is rewarded and gets to sit below the mistletoe. Who is punished and has to walk around for a day with a lump of coal in a stocking toe.

This year, there are lots of candidates for the mistletoe. One sprig goes to Steven Truscott for the determined way he fought to clear his name and the dignified way he reacted to his success. There’s not many like him, and we’re lucky to have him among us. Another goes to our mayor, Karen Farbridge. She has taken a city council composed mostly of novices and helped it reach a lot of good decisions. Not easily done when seven of the 12 are new to the game. Harder still when half the tossed out ones are trying to torpedo everything this council tries to accomplish. They can have a lump of coal each.

On a global level, a sprig has to go to whoever selects the Nobel Peace Prize. They were astute enough this year to split it between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. I have never been a big Al Gore fan, but he is one of the highest profile people raising the alarm about global warming. I was rooting for Sheila Watt-Cloutier, but that’s neither here nor there now.

The Nobel decision that global warming is a threat to world peace was very profound. It should have caused politicians and people around the world to wake up and smell the fumes. Some people did. Down in Australia, they woke up in time to overturn their government. The new one moved quickly to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Some politicians didn’t wake up, Stephen Harper and John Baird chief among them. Thanks to them, Canada came first in the fossil of the day awards at the United Nations climate change meeting that concluded in Bali last week. They behaved just as badly at the Commonwealth summit meeting in Uganda last month. For their efforts, Harper and Baird get a lump of coal large enough to match the odious footprint they leave wherever they go.

It’s not just that Baird embarrassed our country. He’s endangering others. At both meetings, leaders of low lying islands pleaded for action to stop the polar ice cap from melting and flooding their countries. Baird did not care. He was more interested in cuddling up to the Bush administration and mirroring their backward policies.

Before we run out of coal, we must pass a few lumps along to the bright lights in the provincial Ministry of Transportation who want to turn the Hanlon into a full bore 400-series highway. It’s a dumb idea that will devastate a large part of our city. A full sprig of mistletoe goes to Maggie Laidlaw for her determination to halt the Hanlon hoax, as she calls it. Get on her bus and help her succeed. If you want to improve the Hanlon, think traffic circles. If you want improved traffic between Guelph and Waterloo Region, think Light Rapid Rail.

Mistletoe is a renewable resource, so there’s a lot more of it around than coal. This is good, because a lot more people deserve a sprig of it. We can start with all the people who continue to wash and sort their garbage properly even while the composting facility is under repair. It’s taking a while to get the old Council out of our teeth, but the city is getting back on track. We want to be ready to resume our leading spot in waste management as soon as we can. There are other folk around town doing their bit to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. I’m thinking now of the growing number of locally owned restaurants with 100-mile menus. If you want to preserve your landscape you have to eat from it. The Woolwich Arms is a good example. Their draught beer and their food are produced within shouting distance of Guelph. There must be others doing the same thing. They should hang up their mistletoe and exercise their bragging rights.

To one degree or another, we are doing our bit to reduce global warming. For that, I get the final lump of coal: my puns are bad, but my poetry is verse.

Poverty Is All About Money

(04 December 2007) - It is not uncommon for governments to engage in periodic wars on poverty. They do it quite often. They never win, but that’s not the point. It makes great content for speeches. Wars on poverty are like the war on terrorism. Always noisy but seldom effective. This one is being waged by Dalton McGuinty. We know he knows how to do it. He already ended politicians’ poverty when he gave himself and his cronies a whopping raise last summer. In last week’s Throne Speech, he announced he was bringing the fight out of Queen’s Park and into the province.

To prove he is serious, he is setting up a new cabinet committee. It is going to “begin work developing poverty indicators and targets and a focused strategy for making clear-cut progress on reducing child poverty.” I’ve always thought a poverty indicator was easy to spot. You don’t need a room full of politicians and their assistants sitting around brainstorming about it. The lead indicator: it’s all about money. Poor people don’t have enough of it to pay their bills, bring in a decent load of groceries and keep a dry roof over their heads. As for developing a strategy to reduce child poverty, this shouldn’t take long. The only way to reduce child poverty is to reduce parent poverty.

The problem with this “activist agenda”, as the provincial Liberals like to portray it, is that it is not very active at all. It fails to address the biggest problems facing poor families. For the working poor, the minimum wage is much too minimum. At the moment, it is $8.00 an hour. For a 40 hour work week, today’s minimum wage earners get $320. Gross.

For those who are not working, a big irritant is still the claw back of the National Child Benefit Supplement. This is a payment of about $115 per month per child for families with an annual income below $22,000. If the family is living on either Ontario Works or Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) benefits, our provincial government takes this supplement from them. Last week’s Throne Speech said nothing about ending this injustice. Manitoba and New Brunswick don’t do it. Ontario shouldn’t.

During the 2003 provincial election campaign, ending the claw back was part of the Liberal platform. Within six months of winning, it became another one of McGuinty’s broken promises. Then it came back in 2007. At an all-candidates’ meeting during the last election campaign, Liz Sandals agreed that the claw back was wrong and should be ended. It’s still with us. Poor families in Guelph would have been better electing someone who will stand up for them.

To give the problem of poverty in Ontario some added perspective, consider the minimum wage again. The federal government set the level at which poor families needed a supplementary payment of child benefits. It is $22,615. A person working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year at $8 an hour will earn, before taxes, $16,640 per year. In March 2010, it will go up to $10.25 an hour. That’s $21,320 per year, still below today’s threshold.

The most reliable vehicle for lifting the working poor out of their desperate straits is a union. Once they have one, their wages and benefits start improving and their work starts getting safer. Before McGuinty found himself in the driver’s seat four years ago, the Harris Tories gutted the labour laws and made it more difficult for workers to choose a union. The Liberals have done nothing to level the industrial relations playing field.

Raise the minimum wage. End the claw back. Lift the road blocks to joining unions. These are easy targets to get a war on poverty off to a good start, but McGuinty takes aim at none of them. If our minimum wage earner took her pay and spent it on lottery tickets, she would still be poor. The only way to win on a lottery is to keep your money in your pocket. But at least she would have her dreams. When Dalton McGuinty gets ready for his next election campaign, poor families will still be poor. If we can use the past to predict the future, there will be even more families living in poverty. McGuinty will not only have taken their child benefit supplement. He will also have taken their dreams.