May running here will liven up the election

(June 30) - Elizabeth May is thinking of running in Guelph. Let’s hope she does.

We got used to being the centre of attention last summer. During the by-election, Guelph had a steady stream of visits from two national party leaders. May herself was here a lot to support Mike Nagy’s campaign. Jack Layton could have saved on bus tickets by renting an apartment in town.

The Liberal and Conservative leaders weren’t here as much. Stephen Harper took a look at Guelph and decided it was a waste of time. The Conservatives were dead ducks from the get go. Stéphane Dion was no help to anyone before, during or after the campaign. When the by-election turned into a general election, the leaders turned their attention to the rest of the country.

If the Green Party parachutes May into Guelph for the next general election, we’ll be thrust back into the spotlight. She’s weighing her chances in a few ridings where her party did reasonably well last October. If not here, it could be Owen Sound where they got 27 per cent of the vote. Nagy took 21 per cent in October. Most Greens believe he would have won the September by-election.

It is possible we’ll be into an election next September. It all depends on Michael Ignatieff. These days he’s doing a wonderful impersonation of the lion in the Wizard of Oz. He jumps around challenging Harper to "put’em up, put’ em up." Before push comes to shove he finds a reason to put them back down.

None of this is doing him any good in the opinion polls. If his numbers don’t improve, the odds of him bringing down the government will dwindle.

If May chooses Guelph, it will get local Greens out of a bind they share with the NDP: lack of a candidate. Both parties ran long, grueling campaigns with credible, high energy candidates. After the votes were counted, Tom King and Mike Nagy both declared they would never do it again.

Both riding associations are now searching for new candidates. If May goes somewhere else, I don’t know that either will have someone in place for a September election. There aren’t a lot of people positioning themselves for the nominations.

In any event, if an election is called this fall the local campaigns will be flying the flag and going through the motions. It is highly unlikely that the decision made last October will change.

Even if local Conservatives get over the Kovach–Barr debacle, Harper doesn’t have the coat tails to carry them anywhere.

With or without May, the Greens won’t win. They need look no further than the NDP experience of last year. It takes more than a high powered star candidate to capture the hearts of Guelph voters.

Jack Layton, I am sorry to say, is doing nothing to inspire anyone to move to the New Democrats. The government’s response to the recession included a concerted attack on unions and the standard of living the labour movement won for workers.

When Tony Clement, Jim Flaherty and Dalton McGuinty insisted that government help for the auto industry must be tied to worker concessions, where was Layton? I never once heard him defend the integrity of collective bargaining. It’s unlikely he’ll do it during an election campaign.

As Ignatieff moves the Liberal Party more to the right, Layton moves the NDP closer to the centre. He wants to occupy ground abandoned by the Liberals. It won’t do him any good.

At least if May runs in Guelph it will liven up an otherwise dismal event.

It won’t change the result, though.

Cleaning up other people's messes

(June 23) - Whether you own a downtown bar, drink too much in one, or own 65 acres of heritage woodland, the attitude is the same: dodge responsibility. Make a mess and someone will come along and clean up after you’ve gone home.

On second thought, all three are not the same. The people who fall out of Van Gogh’s Ear at 2:30 a. m. are not at the top of their game, physically or mentally. They wander around looking for slices of pizza or a container of Chinese take-out. Some get mouthy and behave like idiots. You can’t blame them. They’re drunk. They’re having trouble getting home. The bus drivers are tucked away in bed. The cabbies are busy.

It’s like the Duke of Edinburgh once said. Drink a pint, piss a quart and flush a gallon. Except that at three in the morning there’s no flushing. When the urge becomes uncontrollable they stand up against a building and let go.

The bar owners are behind locked doors, emptying the tills and counting the take. Most weekend nights the big box bars will rake in more than most workers bring home in three months. What responsibility should they have for cleaning up the sidewalks? They say they’d rather have none, so the solution du jour is to buy some pissoirs. Set them out at night, put them away in the morning and all will be well.

Apparently these things work well in European cities like Paris. The romantic notion is that if we put them out on Macdonell Street, rowdies with a belly full of Blue will suddenly behave responsibly. They will act like poet philosophers caught short after downing a bottle of Bordeaux on the left bank of the Seine.

It might happen. Or it might not.

A better solution would be to resurrect the idea of a bar stool tax. All bar owners should pay a portion of the cost of cleaning up after their customers. The bigger the bar, the bigger the share. As good corporate citizens and dynamic contributors to the Guelph economy, how could they say no?

Speaking of good corporate citizens, how about Carson Reid? He just blew his chances of winning the Civic League’s citizen of the year award. About a week ago he got some industrial strength logging equipment and cleared a ton of trees from 65 acres of woodland between Clair and Maltby roads. It is part of the Paris Galt Moraine, and clearly protected.

The land is identified in the city’s Natural Heritage Strategy as a core feature of the Hanlon Creek watershed. Part of it was secondary growth forest planted by the Ministry of Natural Resources. All of it is protected by a city bylaw prohibiting “the injury or destruction of any live tree in the City of Guelph.”

Not all trees, but certainly those on lots larger than 0.6 of an acre. For sure the ones that Reid decimated.

Most of the trees Reid cut down were mature. Let’s see if he is as well.

One sure sign of maturity is the ability to accept the consequences of your behaviour. The rowdies who spill onto Macdonell Street have to. They can’t avoid the hangover, and if the police ticket them for fouling the sidewalk they can’t avoid the fine.

What will Reid say and do when he is brought to book for this mayhem on the moraine?

I know what the city should do. They should deny Reid any and all future building permits until he plants as many trees as he destroyed, and they have reached the age of the ones we lost.

Municipal taxes: money well spent

(June 16) - We got our property tax bills last week. My final 2009 taxes are $2706. Of this, about $2200 is for city services, and $500 is for the school board. My municipal portion is a bit below the $2600 average. It is hard to find a better bargain.

Compare it, for example, with my Rogers bill. Since January 1 I’ve paid them $935. Over the year that will be $1870, only $330 less than I pay the city. Then there’s another $900 a year to Bell Canada for a land line and $400 to Sentex for an Internet connection. That’s $2200 for municipal services and $2600 for 2 cell phones, one landline, cable TV and an Internet connection.

I could easily pay Rogers a lot more. We have a cell phone each, on what they call a pooled family plan. They’re not Blackberries or anything like that. Just your basic run of the mill phones.

I can call someone, send text messages, keep track of appointments and set a count down timer to beep when it’s time to turn the pork chops on the barbecue. We have the basic cable television package. No digital bells and whistles, no movie channels.

My guess is that I am in the minority in this. Granted, there’s an even smaller minority. Some people live their lives entirely without a cell phone or a television, but I’m not one of them. I like watching Blue Jays games on Sportsnet. I love watching federal cabinet ministers squirm on Newsworld.

I don’t need movies on demand and I don’t want to be part of the 500 channel universe. I don’t need to check e-mail on my cell phone. A lot do, and I bet they shovel a lot more into Rogers’ bank account than I ever will.

The $500 for education is a bargain, even though it’s been six or seven years since my daughter got out of high school. She and her three brothers before her got a darn good public education for –all things considered – next to nothing out of my pocket. Now other people’s kids are getting ready to make the world a better place. And before too long my granddaughter will lift her back pack full of books and trundle off to grade school. All for about the same as I pay for Internet service.

What do I get for my property taxes? Incredible value for money when you think about it. For $286 a year I get 24 hour a day fire protection, every day of the year. Police protection costs me $418. Another $132 gets my garbage collected 52 times a year. That’s $2.50 a week.

For $308 I get to drive on paved roads. Or mostly paved ones. You’re better off walking on Lemon Street between Stuart and Metcalfe. Cars have been known to disappear into pot holes down there.

For $375 we get a lot of social services, mostly administered by the county. A lot of families get some reasonably decent and affordable housing for this money. Not enough, but a lot more than if we didn’t have the opportunity to pay taxes.

A lot of us love to complain about taxes. At other levels of government this is a justifiable activity. The distribution of the burden is very uneven. It hurts to see our income taxes used to promote the sale of asbestos to developing countries, for example.

We have every right to complain when provincial taxes are swallowed by the scandalous behaviour of the people who run eHealth Ontario.

Local taxes, on the other hand, are money well spent.

Change in direction is what's needed

(June 09) - Winston Smith is alive and well. He works for a living somewhere in the basement of the Ministry of Transportation. His job is to make us believe that something guaranteed to make life worse can be an improvement.

For those who don’t know, Smith is the central character in George Orwell’s novel
1984. He worked for the Ministry of Truth. That was the government department that came up with inspirational slogans such as war is peace, ignorance is strength, and other truisms.

It’s like the evolution of political thought in Canada and Ontario. Less is more. Bad is good. Lies are truth.

As an aside, there are eerie coincidences throughout this analogy. Orwell’s prophetic novel was published 60 years ago yesterday, on June 8, 1949. Twenty years ago last Thursday, on June 4, 1989, the Chinese government sent tanks and bullets against protesters. In true Orwellian fashion they then erased the event from their history books. This year, on June 5, 2009, consultants working for the Ontario Ministry of Transportation began a public review of the environmental impact of “improvements” to the Hanlon.

It can’t get much spookier than this: three things in the sixth month of years ending in 9 and spanning six decades. Can you spell 666?

If you want a close look at satanic city planning, go over to Kitchener and take a drive down the Conestoga Parkway. Better yet, get off at Homer Watson and find your way to Avalon Place. Park in front of number 160 and take a look at 118 Chandler Dr. You can see the back of it quite clearly. If you could heave a brick across four lanes of traffic, you’d break its window. Walking from one to the other is a 3.5-kilometre trek. Before the expressway was built, it would have been 3.5 minutes.

The Conestoga is a child of the 1960s, born at the same time as people in Toronto successfully fought the Spadina Expressway. All the arguments used to rally public opinion against the Spadina could have been used on the Conestoga. Or the Hanlon.

When Bill Davis, the Conservative premier at the time, conceded defeat, he said: “If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop.”

Read Spadina, think Hanlon.

Be clear about one thing. The villain in this piece is not to be found on Carden Street. It is somewhere in the dark bureaucracy of the provincial government. Someone is clinging to antiquated notions of moving people and products. In these and other matters, the province is boss of the city. If the province has its heart set on a project, it is hard for a city to say no. But the people can. This was proven 40 years ago by Jane Jacobs, John Sewell, and the citizens they galvanized.

The public review process is open until Aug. 4. Get involved. Tell them what you think. It’s not just about the environment. It’s not just about traffic. It’s about our community.

Don’t worry too much about perfecting a clever understanding of the issues. We can argue until we’re blue in the face about how much light rapid rail is better than heavy slow trucks. The people working in the basement of the Ministry of Congestion don’t care. They already have their minds made up.

The best argument is to convince Liz Sandals that future electoral successes won’t happen unless her government takes a fundamental change in direction.

Green sheen not getting job done

(June 2) - Tomorrow is Clean Air Day. City buses will be fare-free zones for most of the day. We are encouraged to leave our cars at home and find other ways of getting around. Walking, cycling, rollerblading, public transit, car pooling.

It’s all part of National Environment Week. It will be good fun while it lasts, but on Thursday we’ll get back to the dirty air days. There’s a lot more of them. If you take out tomorrow, Earth Day, your birthday, and nine statutory holidays, you’ll have 12 relatively clean air days every year. That leaves us with 353 of the other ones. Or 354 in a leap year.

What will it take to reverse these numbers? The first and surely most obvious answer is that we have to change our thinking. Just as an experiment, we should all take the bus to work tomorrow. Or maybe just half of us. We’d all clock in long after the starting buzzer goes off. There aren’t enough buses in Guelph to move us all around.

If we want cleaner air, we need governments that will put more resources into public transit. Light rapid rail systems between cities, more buses within cities.

The province has to get away from the foolish notion that we need bigger, wider and faster highways. Not because no one will be using them 20 years from now, but because too many of us will be. Nature abhors a vacuum, and traffic hates an empty highway.

When I began commuting to Toronto almost 20 years ago, the 401 had two lanes from here to Mississauga and back. They were always congested every morning and afternoon. By the time I stopped 10 years later, there were three lanes each way. They were still congested.

Let’s make every day a clean air day. It won’t happen tomorrow and it won’t happen by having hyped up feel-good days a couple of times a year. It will happen by doing little things like stopping the Laird Road cloverleaf and moving goods over long distances by rail instead of trucks. If we do these things well, there will be a lot fewer children in Guelph suffering asthma attacks.

Speaking of the Hanlon, there was a flurry of excitement a couple of weeks ago. Someone found a salamander with genetic evidence that a purebred Jefferson might be in the area. The one they found wasn’t pure. It was a hybrid. There’s nothing wrong with a hybrid salamander. The more the merrier, we all say. A large number of them is a good indicator that the land is healthy and the waters are clear.

Hybrids are not up to the task of thwarting development of a business park. That’s a job best left to the Jeffersons. They are protected by federal and provincial species at risk laws. You can’t kill them, or pave over their homes. But what if the biggest threat to the Jefferson salamander isn’t the bulldozer? What if it’s the impure hybrid?

In order to stop the Jefferson family tree from losing its leaves, we need to find at least two purebreds. Sal and Sally Jefferson. When the lights go down and the hormones go up, we’ll have to keep them away from all the randy little hybrids who cruise the wetland looking to blow off a little steam. It’s not going to be easy.

Clean air days and save the salamander societies are great ways to raise awareness. Activists have been doing that for 40 years. These days you can’t find anyone who doesn’t love the environment, but the damage keeps getting worse.

How do we figure that one out?