Slugs in Ottawa, slugs in the garden

(May 26) - I am an avid gardener in the way Brian Mulroney is an avid truth teller. We do our best, but it doesn’t always work out as we hoped.

The difference is in the consequences. They are always there when I fall down. If I sprinkle grass seed where periwinkle would have been happier, I wake up the next morning to a blooming field of dandelions. He forgets he got an envelope full of thousand-dollar bills, and no worries. That’s Brian all over, we say.

It’s quite understandable. If I was distracted by unifying Germany, ending apartheid and implementing the GST I’d have never even thought about the periwinkle option for the front yard.

Saving the garden and saving the world are two of the most challenging activities you can be involved in. I know, because I’ve tried them both. The hard part about saving the world is finding more than half a dozen people to sit down and listen to you at the same time.

The hard part about saving the garden is everything. It’s a lot easier to get rid of the slugs in Ottawa than the ones on your front lawn. That’s doubly true when you’re the sort of person who’d rather have a cruddy lawn than a neighbour with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

I used to think the mark of a successful gardener was getting through Victoria Day without having the fruits of your labour done in by frost.

This year, the May 24 was a horrible experience for people and plants. It was cold. It was damp. It was a misery, but nothing I planted was hurt by the neo-winter weather. The main reason for this is that I hadn’t planted anything. Perennials that turn a scornful eye at February blizzards couldn’t care less about a miserable day in May.

I am on a gardening mission. The aim is to enter a horticultural heaven where lawn mowers are as welcome as Karlheinz Schreiber at a Conservative convention.

Several paths lead to this goal. The ones I’m exploring are made of stone. Dry stacked walls. Flagstone paths. Gravel trails. They define garden areas, separated by judiciously planted ground cover.

Books by Lois Hole and other experts help us choose what to plant and where. It appears we can walk on a spread of wooly thyme as comfortably as we can on an expanse of lush lawn.

A lot of people are rushing to the conclusion that those who want to walk on a lawn fit for a putting stroke should go to the country club and pay their green fees.

In his poem Mending Wall, Robert Frost said “before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence.”

Walls don’t separate, they join. There are dry stack walls in Europe that have stood for thousands of years. Look over a landscape and see how they link one field to another. Get up close and see how changing vegetation and unchanging stone come together in perfect harmony.

The easy part about this approach to gardening is that I don’t have to do it myself. There are talented stone workers in town who are happy to do it for me. Of course, they want to be paid for their labour, and that’s only fair.

The thing that’s not fair is the deep distinction between me and Brian Mulroney. When I suffer the consequences of unsuccessful gardening, the cost comes out of my bank account.

When it happens to a former Prime Minister, everyone pays the bill but him.

Man of letters pens his memoir

(May 19) - Anyone who has even a nodding acquaintance with Guelph’s two newspapers will know Don Ewing. He is a frequent and fluent writer of letters to the editor. They are always short, terse and to the point. Now that his 92nd birthday is behind him, Ewing has expanded his writing to a book of memoirs.

As I Recall is a reminiscence of a life full of optimism and hope. Ewing tells his tale in 110 chapters. Like his letters, they are brief, averaging about five pages each.

He has always been a man of deep conviction. During the Second World War he registered as a conscientious objector and went to work fighting forest fires in British Columbia. Japanese families on the west coast were taken away from their communities and transported to prison camps in the interior. Ewing became aware that their children suffered from a severe shortage of qualified teachers. He offered himself for the job, and spent the last three years of the war teaching in an internment camp.

Ewing’s passions have always been for his family, his music, his church and his political party. He has served them all with an unbroken loyalty.

He was a United Church elder when the Wellington County Separate School Board hired him as their supervisor of music education in 1964. He held this job until his retirement.

I have known Don for many years through our mutual involvement in the local NDP riding association. While we haven’t always agreed about everything, I have always admired his grit and determination. Browse through his memoirs and you will see that his principles have not wavered an inch since he formed them.

It is the sort of book that you will browse, rather than read. You won’t start on page one and stick with it until you arrive at page 515. It is, strangely, the perfect book for the Internet age. Strange, because nearly all the tales he tells happened well before computers invaded our homes.

When Ewing cut his political teeth, he didn’t use a Facebook group to stay in touch with his friends. He would send them a letter, or call them on the phone. He didn’t need Twitter when he was organizing convention delegates to support a candidate or a cause.

So think Wikipedia. If you’re anything like me, you love it. Look something up, get part way through it, see a link to something else and follow it to a new revelation. Before you know it, you’re a few hours older and a few years smarter. Ewing’s book is like that. It’s not a smooth chronological thread. In Chapter 45 he tells some anecdotes about his time with the local CCF and NDP. In Chapter 57 he talks about getting the job in Guelph and eventually moving here. That’s how the book goes, and you’ll find yourself flipping backwards and forwards and sometimes sideways. You can find out about the houses he’s lived in, the cars he’s owned, the pianos he’s played, the books that inspired him and the people who shaped him.

It has been a remarkable life, and he recalls it in an often humorous and always interesting manner. We can help him celebrate it on the afternoon of May 31. That’s when he’s having his book launch at The Bookshelf downtown. You can buy a copy and he’ll sign it. You can meet his family. You can chat with himself. When you’ve done all that, you can spend time chatting with some of the people who’ve known him. Most have had pretty interesting lives of their own.

Money needed to start process

(May 12) - Recession busting infrastructure money is coming to Guelph. Some is aimed at upgrading the housing in which some of our poorest community members live. It is still uncertain how much is coming, but it is on the way.

Wellington County Housing Services provides an umbrella under which families occupy almost 3,000 homes. Ownership ranges from co-ops to private nonprofits to county-owned housing. The county is the service manager, overseeing several housing providers. On April 20, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing wrote to service managers across Ontario to say that the provincial budget allocated $704 million for social housing renovation and retrofit projects. Wellington County will get a share of this money.

Housing providers were asked to submit a list of projects they are ready to move forward on. This had to be done last week, and the work, if approved, has to start in June and be finished by next March. Two of the criteria to be used in choosing which projects will get money are enhanced energy efficiency and reduced operating costs. The importance of these can’t be overstated. Most, but not all, of the families living in those 3,000 homes are receiving rent-geared-to-income subsidies. This money comes directly from the county’s tax base. The less it costs to operate the system, the lower the strain on you.

There has not been much new social housing built in Ontario in the past 15 years. Most of it is getting old and tired. Even the new housing is approaching 20 years old. Furnaces are starting to break down. The ones that were put in were generally bottom of the line construction grade units. No high efficiency furnaces were put into low income housing. Now they are coming to the end of their natural life expectancy. They will need to be replaced. By the end of this year, all new furnaces sold in Ontario must be at least 90 per cent efficient. These are more expensive, of course.

There is a similar situation with home appliances. All of the co-ops and nonprofits provide at least a fridge and stove. The fridges that were made 20 years ago were not energy efficient and are starting to break down. It is better to replace them with Energy Star models, but here’s the Catch 22: the upfront capital replacement money isn’t there, but the cost of keeping them running is a huge burden on operating budgets. There are rebates available, and there is a payback time. These are geared more towards private homeowners, and the process for getting rebates is complicated. The first step is an energy audit, then the energy upgrades are done, then a follow up audit, then the rebates come. This must all be done within an 18-month window.

I’ll give one example from the housing co-op where I work. It has 82 townhouses. At about $3,500 each, before rebates, the cost of installing a high efficiency furnace in each one is over $300,000 after taxes. Rebates of around $1,000 per furnace would drop this to about $220,000. Add in the cost of upgrading attic insulation, fixing draughty windows and doors, and buying more efficient appliances and you are looking at big dollars. It’s easy enough to say there is a 10-to 15-year payback time. The trick is finding the money to kick-start the process.

A system designed for private home owners breaks down when it is applied to multi-residential social housing complexes. Families who live in them shouldn’t have to wait for a recession before being included in the movement to reduce global warming.

Keeping things in perspective

(May 05) - Brangelina can’t be expected to have twins every time the world needs a bit of a distraction. The supermarket tabloids don’t have enough paper and ink to sustain it. Rogue asteroids bearing down on the planet are sometimes good for taking our minds off other problems. They are, fortunately, a distant distraction. There’s limited value in a threat we can’t see coming. An old-fashioned plague is always good for the system.

We obsess about our health. Those who are reasonably well want to stay that way. The others worry about exposure to anything that might make them worse. The mere mention of the word pandemic strikes fear in the hearts of both the hale and the frail. For good reason. New diseases are emerging with alarming frequency. A few years ago it was SARS. Then it was avian flu. Then listeriosis. Now swine flu.

The precautionary principle demands that we can’t simply mention that no one in Guelph has come down with swine flu. We always have to tack on the word “yet”. Health officials are waiting nervously for the first case to hit town.

The media loves it. Newspapers and television networks are weary of talking about the recession, the implosion of the auto industry and wars around the globe. Swine flu brought a chance to talk about something new, and they seized the opportunity with gusto. As I write this, the CBC website banner headline reads “number of confirmed swine flu cases in Canada now at 83.” You have to read down to the sixth paragraph to find out the cases are all mild.

It also gave governments the chance to look like they are doing something. While they issue dire warnings about a pandemic, they hope people will stop asking them about withering pension plans. There isn’t much they can say or do, though. The best they could think of at the start of the outbreak was to tell us to stay away from Mexico City. As the kids say these days, “well, duh!”

I would feel better if they used this illness to examine the effects of deregulation. The entire food chain, from production to processing to purchasing, is monopolized by a few large corporations. The treatment of animals on factory farms might be a good place for governments to look. Instead of that, they knuckled under to industry pressure to stop calling it swine flu. The sale of pork products might drop. It never struck me as a wise idea to rely on large corporations to police themselves. It’s a poor substitute for legal regulations. Now we can see why.

I’m not a doctor, but I used to watch Marcus Welby. Now I watch House. This training tells me the threat of disease is always serious, but we should try to keep it in perspective. A lot more people will probably die this year from regular flu than from this new strain.

It is always a good idea to be cautious and reduce your exposure to germs. Wash your hands regularly. Sneeze into your elbow. Follow standard hygienic practices. Watch what you eat. As much as possible, buy meat that was raised and slaughtered locally. Organically grown fruits and vegetables are always healthier than those that are trucked in from far and wide. The amount of preservatives and pesticides they carry will do you more harm than any number of trips to Mexico City.

Above all, stay calm. If you feel feverish, don’t assume the worst. Don’t rush into Emergency. Go to your doctor and take a few days off school or work. This too will pass.