A fitness centre for your mind

(June 24) - It’s official. Reading does not make you fat. Watching television does. Sitting in front of a computer for hours on end helps widen the waist line. Reading doesn’t. Books expand the mind without expanding the love handles.

We know this because Statistics Canada studied the relationship between leisure time activities and body mass indexes of more than 42,500 Canadian adults. The results were released last week. What do they tell us? Watch a lot of television and look like Jabba the Hutt. Read a lot of books and look like a buff heart throb. Exercise helps as well, but reading is the secret ingredient in the fitness meringue.

If we were to take everyone in Guelph and toss us all onto a scale, we’d find a ton of excess poundage. There’s a lot to lose and it will take a lot of reading to get it off. None of us can afford to buy all the books we need, nor would we have room to keep them. That’s why we have a library. It gets the books and stores them for us. All we have to do is borrow, read and return them.

Our library likes to keep books circulating. It has no choice. As vice-chair of the Public Library Board, I can offer one certainty: if everyone decided to return all their books on the same day, it would be a disaster. There wouldn’t be room for them. That’s not news any more. Most of us know we need a new library, and we can be fairly confident we will get one. Public discussion on the issue has shifted from “should we” to “when will we” and “where will it go.”

We’re getting closer to knowing where. It will be somewhere on the Baker St. parking lot. The City hired some consultants who presented three preferred options to a recent city council meeting. Two have the library fully contained on the parking lot land. One has it fronting on Wyndham St. and backing onto the lot.

There’s a public consultation in the library this evening from 5:00 – 8:00 p.m. It’s a drop-in type of event where you can come and go as you please. The consultants will be consulting. People will be questioning. City staff will be responding. City councillors will be listening. Tax revolters will be revolting.

The most controversial option would see the city acquire the buildings currently occupied by the Family Thrift Store and Wyndham Art Supplies and the cowboy bar. There are apartments above the shops. The bar is between them and the health centre on a historical site. It used to be the Odeon Cinema and, before that, the old opera house.

It would probably make more sense to leave the two shops and their apartments alone and renovate the saloon. If we had bought the Post Office building, the library would have taken up the whole building and extended into the parking lot. A good architect should be able to do much the same thing with the bar.

In the end, the decision about location is the city’s. Public money funds it. The Library Board is responsible for ensuring it provides the services people need where and when they need them. City Council is responsible for providing the space in which it operates. Citizens are responsible for making sure their voices are heard as they participate in the planning process. That’s what this evening is all about.

It’s your library, and your downtown. Make sure they reflect your values and vision.

Then there’s ownership. The library will always be owned by you. The Public Libraries Act guarantees it. What your councillors have to decide soon is who will own the building. From the beginning of its days, the library building has been owned by the library.

Because of pressures resulting from a very real cash shortage, the city is considering the option of turning Baker St. over to private interests and leasing back the space. It’s a false economy. We’ll either pay in the capital budget now, or in operating budgets for decades to come.

Either way we’ll pay, so we might as well own it.

The public library is a fitness centre for the mind, and the staff are our personal fitness trainers.

Use it, cherish it, and keep it firmly within our grasp.

Down On Downloading

(June 17) - I don’t steal songs. I used to, but not any more. Several years ago, Roy Orbison’s widow caught me at it and forced Napster to cancel my account. All because my turntable died and I couldn’t play my old vinyl copy of Running Scared. That, and the fact that I was too cheap to go to the mall and buy his greatest hits CD. Other file sharing programs were magnets for spyware, adware, viruses and the other trash found in the ditches along the information highway.

Then, after a while, my CD player also died. My computer became obsolete. Technological upgrades came into the home in the form of a new beast with a hard drive big enough to hold all the software a family could ever want plus more songs than Roy Orbison could ever have written. Run some long speaker wire through the computer room floor, across the basement ceiling joists and back up through the living room floor and Bob’s your uncle. The stereo is connected to the computer. You don’t need a CD player, unless you’re a sensitive audiophile. If you want to hear the pin that fell on the recording studio floor, running music from your computer isn’t the way to go.

My technological upgrade went hand in hand with an upgraded sense of social responsibility. No more pirating. Barbara Orbison had made an honest man of me.

It might sound like it, but I wasn’t stealing everything that wasn’t tied down. There were rationalizations I thought made sense at the time. The Kramdens don’t have a lot of money, so I bought Quiet Collision. The Rolling Stones do, so who cares if I get Sticky Fingers without paying? Other than them, I mean.

The trouble is that sticky fingers are found all over the Internet. If you can find something, you can take it and keep it and multiply it and give it away to all your friends.

There are people who think they learned everything they need to know in kindergarten. When they get on the Internet, their principles become governed by the number one rule of the playground: finders keepers, losers weepers. Or, in the harsher language of the 21st century: you snooze, you lose.

Try this in the bank one day. If the teller goes to the toilet and leaves the cash drawer unlocked, help yourself to a fist full of twenties. Then explain to the police that you were allowed to take it because it was there and who cares anyway because the bank has loads of money.

Moral justifications used on the Internet fall apart behind the marble pillars of the banks. Quite often, moral justifications are neither.

There are a lot of talented singers and song writers in Guelph. A lot of them hold down regular day jobs to buy the groceries and pay the mortgage. They still find time to create beautiful music. The next time you’re downtown, go into Ground Floor Music and buy a copy of Lucky Blue by Tannis Slimmon. It’s as fine a piece of work as anything made by any skilled cabinet maker. People who make music are as entitled to earn money from it as are people who make furniture.

Last week, the federal government introduced amendments to the Copyright Act that set hefty fines for piracy. Like most things coming out of Ottawa these days, it is harsh. Those people who think the Internet should be an unregulated free for all are whining because they might be forced to pay for music. They shouldn’t cry. They’ve no one to blame but themselves.

They should remember kindergarten, and what the teacher did when one kid took another’s lunch money.

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Speaking of the federal government, Prime Minister Harper got something right last week. The apology for forcing native children into residential schools was an overdue recognition of the deep injustices in our nation’s past. It’s been a long time coming.

Now we need to see what happens next. Words alone, no matter how eloquently spoken, can’t erase the past. Neither can money. What we need is concrete action to recognize that Native Canadians have seniority rights in this country.

Let’s hope this turning point helps bring a healthy conclusion to disputes about natural resource rights on Indian land, and support for strengthening the political and social infrastructure of their communities. That will put flesh on the body of the apology.

No easy way out of the energy crunch

(June 10) - There are connecting lines joining apparently unconnected things. They’re not usually straight lines with arrow heads pointing clearly from one cause to a resulting effect. Sometimes they are round, or oval, or confusingly squiggly. No matter what, they are always there.

If we squint up our eyes and look closely at the events of the past couple of weeks, we can see a line joining Detroit, Rome, Quebec City and Guelph.

If we plot the line on a graph, it goes from point E to point N, back to point E, up to point R, down to point G, and way up to point Y. That’s my hokey way of saying it’s all about energy. Or the impending lack of it.

I don’t have Detroit on the list because of the Stanley Cup. It’s true enough that I ran out of the energy needed to watch hockey after the first third of the baseball season was in the books. There's more to it than that.

Detroit is about a lot more than talented Swedish athletes. It’s also the home of General Motors. The world is running out of the energy needed to drive many of GM’s vehicles. Thousands of workers will suffer the consequences when the company closes the Oshawa truck plant.

Buzz Hargrove is understandably upset because it’s only been a few weeks since he concluded an early collective agreement with GM. It froze wages across the Canadian operations for three years in return for job guarantees from the company. If the job guarantees are not there, the contract should be declared null and void. Wages should be unfrozen until they get back to the table in September.

It is absurd for the company to claim they were taken by surprise by a two week decline in truck sales or a two week spike in the price of crude oil. No one else was surprised.

They weren't surprised in Rome where a recently concluded UN conference looked at the crisis in the world’s food supply. Soaring oil prices bring more biofuels which bring soaring food prices.

Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. Lots of people want to save the environment without giving up the creature comforts that are killing it.

We can’t have it both ways. Every litre of ethanol in the tank of an SUV lifts the price of corn around the world. People go hungry. The higher the price of corn, the more land is given over to growing it. Rainforests disappear.

At the Rome meeting, the United States, Brazil, Canada and some European countries blocked a clear statement linking biofuels to food prices. These countries are leading the global charge to convert arable farmland from food to fuel production.

At least biofuel doesn’t directly emit greenhouse gases. In an effort to deal with companies that do, the premiers of Ontario and Quebec got together in Quebec City a week or so ago. They reached a carbon “cap and trade” deal that is supposed to help us meet our Kyoto targets.

These schemes are accurately described as free market environmentalism. There’s an interesting article about this in the April 19 edition of New Scientist magazine. If you are a library member, you can read it on the their web site. The bottom line is that a polluting company can buy carbon credits on an open market. The article points out: “You can gain carbon credits for burning biofuels in Europe, even if the crops from which they are produced are grown in fields created by draining peat swamps or cutting down forests.”

Meanwhile back here at home, the province is still trying to sell us their dream of a new and improved Hanlon and its money-pit-cousin, the GTA West transportation corridor. There are lots of cloverleaf interchanges, tons of steel and cement, lots of money and fast moving traffic. What it doesn’t have are traffic circles, common sense and a clear vision of the future.

It will be a highway designed to meet the faltering vision of a GM executive. That’s about as sensible as building a fourth multi-level parking garage downtown when we should be getting away from our dependency on cars.

There is no easy way out of the energy crisis. The only sure thing is there is no free lunch. Whatever we do carries a cost. One way or another, sooner or later, we are going to have to pay.