I used to be a chimney

(October 27) - Obsessively obnoxious. I’ve been searching my brain for a two-word description of Canada’s insurance industry, and that’s the best I’ve come up with.

I am not saying they are crooks. They aren’t. They just get to follow a set of rules that couldn’t be better for them if they’d written them themselves.

Maybe they did.

I used to be a chimney. Smoke poured into, and out of, my poor old body for about 45 years. Every so often I would make an attempt to stop, but my heart wasn’t in it. The need for nicotine is desperately strong. It overrules the most thoughtful resolutions the brain can muster. I seldom worried about what made sense. I was far too dedicated a smoker. Like most, I would always have the pack I was working on and a spare in my jacket pocket. Or in the car’s glove box.

I tried several different brands – even Gauloises in the days when I thought I was a young sophisticate wandering the bars of Montreal. In the end, it was Export A that really took my breath away.

As the years wore on, there got to be fewer and fewer of us. We all knew that smoking was a dead end street, that smokers were a dying breed, but we hung in. Some days I didn’t have the will power to stop. Other days I was too stubborn to listen to reason. Those of us who thrived on the self-abuse would troop out to the sidewalk, rain or shine, and huddle together. We enjoyed our fresh air breaks, or so we thought.

In all those years, I never had any difficulty getting life insurance. It was an obviously self-destructive habit, but there wasn’t an insurance company in the realm that refused to put my money in their bank.

My wife always got lower rates, because she didn’t smoke. I was told that I would get them as well if I became a non-smoker.

Addictions are never about money, though. When you can light up a ten dollar bill every day of the week and stub it out in a grubby ash tray, you don’t put a lot of thought into saving fifty bucks a month on life insurance premiums.

Then, on Jan. 11, 2006, I broke the habit once and for all. It took a bit of a heart attack to get the job done, but good results don’t come easily. That was it. I haven’t had a cigarette since. Not so much as a cheater puff. Nothing.

I’m not saying I don’t miss smoking. It is such a pernicious addiction that it never goes away.

Almost four years later I still have nicotine fits. They don’t last, and they don’t beat me back into submission.

My health is a lot better now, thank you. Blood pressure is better than ever. Cholesterol is good. Breathing is clearer. No more gurgling noises on the intake, no more hacking cough with the outflow.

I get out for walks and can even make it up the Eramosa Road hill without stopping.

I felt so good that I contacted the insurance company about the non-smokers discount they talked about way back when. They have a questionnaire. I tell them about the heart attack. I tell them about my medication. I tell them I haven’t had a smoke in almost four years.

How do they congratulate me? They drop me like a spent cigarette butt.

Smoke like a fool and they’ll sell you insurance.

Recover from a heart attack and they don’t want to know you.

Like I said. Obsessively obnoxious.

Hanlon ‘improvements’ environmental disaster

(October 21) - It was hardly a surprise. The alleged “improvements” to the Hanlon Expressway passed the Environmental Assessment. This means that in the opinion of the Ministry of the Environment there is nothing wrong with the plans of the Ministry of Transportation.

The first plan is to build a major cloverleaf intersection at Laird Road. Then other changes at Kortright, Stone and College.

On the face of it, the project is an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Its impact will dwarf the development of the Hanlon Creek Business Park, yet it is pitched to us as an integral part of it. They want to rush the start into 2011 because of the HCBP development. Once this intersection is built, another just north of Woodlawn Road will be next, joining the Hanlon to a bigger and faster highway to Kitchener- Waterloo. Curtis Road lines up almost perfectly with a virtually unused intersection on the Conestoga Parkway at Wellington Street.

It’s all a folly.

Workers and supplies and products should be able to get in and out of the business park without relying on big 18-wheelers chugging up and down the highway. This is especially true if the type of companies being attracted there turns out as planned. Green jobs, you would think, rely on green transportation. All it takes is political will and corporate imagination.

If politicians force necessity to become the mother of invention, businesses will become inventive.

Go on the Internet and Google the Ontario Environmental Commissioner. You will find out why it is no surprise the highway redesign got approved. In his 2008 annual report, Gord Miller takes a hard and critical look at the whole process of environmental assessments. He calls it “a vision lost”. Born in the hope that public input can stop large developments from killing our natural heritage, it has morphed into a rubber stamp.

Miller says the process leads “inexorably towards the approval of projects.” Only two have been refused since 1996. A major flaw, in his opinion, is that large development projects are frequently split up into small components that each get their own assessments.

This piecemeal approach is supposed to be frowned upon, but happens all the time. Last January, an assessment was approved for the stretch of Highway 6 from near Hamilton to the Hanlon. The one just approved takes it from Maltby Road to Wellington Street. Another will look at the intersection planned for Silvercreek Parkway at Curtis Road. Yet another looks at the redevelopment of Highway 7 to Kitchener. The impact of the mega highway will be far greater than the sum of its parts.

Miller talks about the need to improve the Environmental Assessment Act by introducing the concept of a sustainability assessment. “Among other characteristics,” he says, “sustainability assessment emphasizes precaution; addresses cumulative and indirect effects, … recognizes natural limits; and above all, aims for greater community and ecological sustainability.”

What a concept. We wouldn’t just look at how well a cloverleaf fits onto a couple of acres of land today. We’d also look at how the highway fits onto a couple of hundred square kilometres of land 10 years from now. Some things make so much sense you have to wonder why they haven’t already happened.

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Incidentally, the city’s capital cost projection for the interchange is $3 million in 2011 and $17 million in 2012. Tonight, councillors start examining which big ticket items they will move forward with and which will be postponed.

Why not tell the province we can’t do the cloverleaf because we’re putting the $20 million towards a new library?

Library building in serious disrepair

(October 13) - The timing is either ironic or inspired.

City council meets next Tuesday to look at its capital projects. They may shuffle the timetables. They may take some things off the table. They may push some projects so far into the future that they might as well have fallen off.

One of the projects under consideration will be the new downtown library. There is an interesting series of coincidences surrounding this. The discussion will take place on the Tuesday of Ontario Public Library Week. The week ends with the third annual giant book sale sponsored by the Friends of the Guelph Public Library. The book sale will be held in the old Wyndham Arts store, one of the properties the city will buy to make room for the new library.

Our library is now 126 years old. Its first permanent building was donated by Andrew Carnegie in 1901. It cost us nothing. It lasted until 1964 when it was demolished and replaced by the present building which cost $555,145.64. So far, that is the sum total of capital expenditures we have put into library bricks and mortar. An average of $4,405.91 per year. I’d say we’ve had our money’s worth and more.

In the city’s 2009 capital expenditure budget, the new library had a cost estimate of $31.5 million, plus a related capital cost of $15.75 million for a parking garage. Look at the library expenditure, and project it forward for an estimated life span of 60 years. That makes $32,055,145.64, or $172,339.49 per year, for 186 years worth of library building.

Fifty years from now our grandchildren will sit in their library and marvel that their grandparents bought it so cheap. They will thank us just as eagerly as we now thank our parents and grandparents for investing wisely and providing for us. With interest rates where they are, now is the perfect time to finance the building.

What happens if the library is put off for another five years? The Norfolk Street building is running on fumes right now. Without sinking significant cash into things like the elevator, the washrooms, the roof, the basement and other areas of building integrity, it won’t have the gas to make it.

It is not fair to expect the men and women who work in the building to endure these working conditions for another five years.

As one example, the computer systems are set up in the basement. Directly above them is the public walkway leading to the front door. It will soon be dug up and repaired.

Before that happens, the computer systems need to be protected in special containers. Staff will need to wear hard hats and safety boots when running them. Some staff will have to move into the boardroom upstairs next to the children’s story room. Inter-library loan, reference and audiovisual staff could all work from the boardroom at one time or another while the walkway is repaired. There is nowhere else to put them. It is the last few square feet of usable space there is.

How many of us had an old beater of a car that needs a new engine? Should we fix it or invest in a new one? My old Intrepid carried me almost 400k. It got so that gassing up doubled its value. When the engine started to go, I ran out of options. I borrowed money for a new one. At some point we realize we will be nickel and dimed to death if we don’t move forward.

With the library, we have reached that point. Standing pat is penny wise but pound foolish.

Thanksgiving in co-op week

(October 06) - We have a lot to be thankful for in Guelph, and I’m not talking about electoral politics. As we approach Thanksgiving Day next Monday, we also approach National Co-op Week. It is very appropriate that the two events coincide this year.

Almost everyone in Guelph is touched by a co-operative at some point in their lives. There are almost thirty operating in town. Four provide childcare. Seven provide housing. Five are credit unions.

The Canadian Emu Co-operative has its head office in Guelph, as do the Ontario Lamb Producers, Co-operators’ Insurance, Gay Lea Foods, Planet Bean, Ag Energy Co-op, the Guelph Community Car Co-op, Organic Meadows Co-op and UPI Energy. Both the Ontario Co-operative Association and the Ontario Workers’ Co-operative Federation are headquartered in Guelph.

You can live, bank, borrow a car, gas it up, insure it, go for a coffee, and buy almost everything you need to eat - all without leaving the co-op sector. If you are fortunate enough to belong to one, you can wake up and have breakfast and at the end of the day go home to sleep in a co-op.

There are about 1300 co-ops in Ontario, and a lot more across the country and around the world. The International Co-operative Alliance says that more than 800 million people belong to co-ops. That’s a lot of economic activity generated by organizations owned and operated by their members.

There is a growing movement to think globally and spend locally. It is driven by a need to empower individuals and integrate them with their communities. Co-operatives are a very big part of this, because they are, for the most part, local organizations. When they need to provide products that can’t be found locally they rely on fair trade suppliers. Things like coffee beans, bananas, and clothes can be bought from farmer and worker co-ops all over the world. Supporting them strengthens local economies and global trade.

Next weekend, when you sit down for a Thanksgiving meal, do it right. Bake a turkey from a local farm, serve it with root vegetables that were organically grown in southern Ontario, follow with a pie baked with local fruit and some good Gay Lea ice cream. If you are so inclined, you can wash it down with a pint of beer from an Ontario microbrewery or a glass of fine Niagara wine. Cap it off with a mug of fair trade coffee. When you feed your family you'll feed your community.

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A microphone can be a dangerous thing to get close to. Many politicians have discovered this to their dismay when mistakenly thinking one was shut off when it wasn’t.

Several years ago, Tiger Woods hooked a drive straight into the Pacific Ocean during a tournament at Pebble Beach. He spontaneously turned the CBS air blue with language commonly used by hackers on golf courses everywhere. It’s not a big deal.

A University of Guelph football player recently got stung, but not by the word so much as by the mike. The sporting fields are not a place to show off the depth and breadth of your vocabulary. He could have said “fornicate Western” but there’s no sense wasting your breath with three syllables when one will do.

Even at the university level you don’t need to do well in a spelling bee to be selected for the football team. If oratorical skills put points on the board, they’d scout the Scrabble clubs for quarterbacks and appoint librarians as hockey coaches.

Suspending a player for using macho language in a high testosterone sport seems a bit off-side to me.