It's all about the spin

(August 25) - The good old New Democratic Party may be getting old but it’s still New. There were rumblings and grumblings that it might change its name to the more trendily Obama-friendly Democratic Party, but it didn’t happen.

Oh well.

Of all the problems it faces, the name is the least of its worries. As Tommy Douglas said, it keeps its legitimacy as long as New York keeps its name.

If the change was going to happen, it would have been at the party’s convention in Halifax last week. I wasn’t there, and it didn’t get to a vote, so the old name stays on as the new name.

It didn’t matter.

Anyone could tell at a quick glance how new the old party really is. You just had to look at its convention logo. HFX09. Made 4 tweeple with no time 2 spell the words they want 2 say 2 U.

Don’t get me wrong. It is great that the NDP is trying to become more attractive to a younger demographic. Old farts like me have hung around too long to leave now. The task is to look attractive to youth, but an old new party needs more than an image make-over to become a young old new party.

We can talk about what it does need in another column. This one is all about the spin.

All the parties are doing it. They are all controlled by communications gurus who fervently believe that it doesn’t matter how good you are. It’s how good you look that counts. Even the Conservatives gave it a try when they dressed Stephen Harper in a cool cashmere sweater.

There is a good reason why spin doctors are paid more than researchers. Facts don’t matter. Perceptions do.

There’s a lot of spinning tops all around us. Both sides in the Hassle at Hanlon Creek got in on it. They had to, because once the occupation began, each side had to present its position in the best light possible.

The city’s position is that the development can be carefully controlled to protect the sensitive environmental features of the land. They spun their case reasonably competently. The mayor courageously stuck her head out and argued the city’s position on her blog. It would have been nice to hear some councillors speak up in support of her.

The protesters had a tougher job. They were on the attack, and needed to speak in apocalyptic absolutes. When you’re on the outside looking in there is a tendency to make your case by overstating it. The land being developed is not Guelph’s last old growth forest. Carson Reid bowled over much older trees without consequence.

Of course the land under development is an integrated ecological system. What isn’t? If we wait patiently for the protesters to stop spinning we’ll be able to see where they would lead us. If the land along the Hanlon can’t be developed, nothing can. The truth of the matter is that wherever a shovel enters earth, a microcosm of plant and animal life is uncovered.

When John Galt took his axe and gave that maple forty whacks, he started a process of development that brought us to where we are today.

Some has been well planned, some has not. At every stage, the environment has been affected. It changed, it evolved, it suffered, and it recovered.

We can have a discussion about the earth’s ability to keep on healing itself. How long can it keep doing it?

While we debate, development will continue.

It can go Carson Reid’s way, or it can go Karen Farbridge’s way.

I know the direction in which my head is spinning.

‘New surroundings’ is one way to put it

(August 18) - You’ve got to love Canada Post. I did, for a couple of weeks a couple of weeks ago.

My brothers and I lost our father on July 24. We didn’t really lose him. None of us are that careless. We know exactly where he is. The last any of us saw of him he was being lowered into the ground in Stratford’s Avondale Cemetery.

A few days later, my brother Ron and I were doing some of the things we need to do to start wrapping up his affairs. I was expecting some bills and other documents, so I stopped in at a post office in Stratford to change his mail over to my house. I was ready to pay the sixty-something dollars normally charged for this service. No need, I found.

It can be done for nothing in the case of a deceased person. All I needed was a copy of the death certificate, which I didn’t have at the time. No worries, I thought. No rush, Ron said.

A week or so later I stopped in at the downtown Guelph postal outlet, death certificate at the ready. Thanks for this, they said, but we need more documentation. I thought they asked for a copy of the power of attorney, so I went home and got it. Thanks for this, they said, but we need a copy of the will to prove you are a legitimate executioner. So I went back home and got it. To be safe, I also got everything else I could put my hands on and carry in one briefcase.

Thanks for this, they said. That’s all we need. Sure enough, any and all mail sent to him in Stratford soon started arriving at my door in Guelph. His final Bell bill arrived. Other mail did as well.

Then last Thursday I got home from work and checked the mail. There was a package wrapped in clear plastic, addressed to Charles James Pickersgill at my home address.

The contents say, on one side, “Welcome to your new home.”

Flip it over and you find that it’s a little Canada Post magazine called, in the modern way, smartmoves. The cover story promises to tell my dad “How to get comfortable in your new surroundings.”

I don’t think I’ll ever cut open the plastic wrap. I’ll keep it for him. If he could ever see it, he would have a great laugh.

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Then there’s Rogers. You don’t have to love them. Cable and satellite TV companies have been told to make a $60 million payment to a local programming improvement fund. It is supposed to help the independent Canadian companies that will suffer when everything goes digital next year.

When it made this ruling last October, the CRTC said “The increased contribution represents a monthly average of 50 cents per subscriber. Given the health of the broadcasting distribution industry and the new revenue streams provided by the policies announced today, the CRTC does not expect companies to pass this cost along to their subscribers.”

Last week we got the word from Rogers that our bill would go up to cover the levy they weren’t supposed to pass on to us. Bell is doing the same to its satellite customers.

If you want to let the broadcast regulator know what you think of this, go to crtc. gc.ca and click on the link to making a complaint.

Rogers and Bell already charge the world’s highest prices for cell phone use. They can’t be too far away from the same position in television distribution. They call it service. I call it greed. Either way, we are getting Rogered.

Guelph residents don’t deserve lazy

(August 11) - If this is the safest city in Canada, why does our police force still want more Tasers?

According to Statistics Canada, Guelph had the country’s largest one-year decline in its police reported violent crime index from 2007 to 2008. All in all, it went down by 15 per cent. We also had the lowest total crime severity index.

They come up with these numbers by tracking all the crimes reported to police. Each is given a weighted measure, with a larger number to those that receive the most severe sentences in court. The higher the number the greater the mayhem. As an example, Brantford scored 104.3 to our 57.7 on the general crime index. In violent crime their 87.5 more than doubled our 41.5.

We don’t need StatsCan to tell us Guelph is a better place to live than Brantford, but it’s nice to have it confirmed. Fifty kilometres north on Highway 24 makes a big difference. We are a lot more civilized up here. We provide late night urinals for late night party people. We provide a safe place for environmental activists to rage against the city. We stop our cars and wait when a family of geese want to cross the road. We care for our salamanders. We plant our own flowers on city boulevards. We hold doors open for each other. We are nice people leading nice lives in a nice, safe city.

Even our protesters do the common, contradictory things that beset a lot of people. Go to a web site called digitaljournal.com and type Hanlon in the search box. Then click on the story about the police serving an injunction and scroll down to a photo of a young protester playing his guitar. On the ground beside him is a case of 30 Nestles water bottles. There it is, plain as day. Sitting under the tarpaulin structure built by these defenders of Guelph’s water supply. Plastic water bottles do more to damage to the environment than carefully controlled land development ever will. This is as good an example as you could find of how some people charge ahead without considering the consequences of their actions.

Of all the things we still need in Guelph, Tasers should be way down at the bottom of the list. Officers in the tactical squad already have them, as do police supervisors. The higher-ups on Fountain Street want each and every officer to have one. This is such a bad idea that it is difficult to imagine why it keeps being brought up by otherwise intelligent adults. We even have a constable on the force who started his own company to promote the safe use of these electrifying weapons. The general mantra in the Taser community is that they are a preferred alternative to the use of lethal force. Tasers don’t kill people, they say, excited delirium does. This is a condition recognized by more police officers than doctors. It is aggravated by a high voltage jolt to the heart muscles.

Lethal force is a euphemism for shooting someone dead. It should be a measure of last resort. I can’t think of when the Guelph police last used it. They have used their Tasers, though. These things quickly become weapons of first resort. There is a video on the Internet of police at an Oakland Athletics baseball game trying to remove a fan. He refused to leave. They zapped him. What was the alternative? To shoot him?

These weapons are the lazy way out of a nasty confrontation. The peaceful, law-abiding people of Guelph do not deserve lazy. We deserve careful and thoughtful.

Controlled growth in business park plan

(August 04) -The Hanlon Creek Business Park is back on the front pages. A group of protesters camped out on the site last week. They vowed to stay there for as long as it takes to stop the project.

We are lucky to have these fine young women and men in our midst. They appear to know a lot more than the bureaucrats, consultants and scientists who have studied the area at great length. These people were in an obvious collusion with those who would destroy the environment and endanger our future.

In league with the Grand River Conservation Authority, they very cunningly set conditions on development. According to official sources, these included things like protection of the old growth forest grove, including all heritage trees except two that couldn’t be saved; protection of provincially significant wetlands; restoration of 10 hectares of meadowland; 20 hectares of tree plantings to increase the existing tree canopy coverage; and protection of ground water quality.

Fortunately for us, the protesters are not fools. They are not blinded by the glare of science. They know better. They know the world will be a better place when salamanders outnumber jobs.

They are even willing to lay down their cellphones, turn off their Twitters and follow the Salamander Messiah. This is the one that crawled out of its streambed in a valiant effort to save its species. It wasn’t exactly the Jefferson you might think would be the anointed saviour. It was a common hybrid. A salamander of the people.

It was found dead on the road. There have never been any reports that it was run over by a car or a truck. So it must have crawled out of the mud, struggled halfway across the pavement and expired. No other salamander has ever given itself so selflessly. No other has broken with the normal behaviour of its species in order to save its comrades.

Either that or it fell out of someone’s pocket.

We can be confident these protesters will lay down their cellphones. The press release announcing their good intentions points out several reasons to oppose the business park. One is that the land was used by indigenous people as a hunting and gathering ground for 11,000 years.

If this is good enough reason to oppose development, it is good enough to oppose cellphone towers constructed on those same ancient hunting grounds. No self-respecting activist would sully sacred ground by using it to tweet out a Facebook message.

It is not easy to be an environmental activist in the 21st century. The only acceptable blackberries should be the ones growing in bramble bushes. They are good for eating, but not for meeting. To get any kind of political movement these days, you need the wireless kind, but they depend on the types of high tech industries the city hopes to attract to Hanlon Creek. So what do you do?

The protesters say we don’t need a city “that has effectively become a mouthpiece for developers that only care about making a profit for the already wealthy.”

Absolutely true.

That’s why we helped bounce the last crowd out of office. We replaced them with new councillors, many of whom are committed to controlled growth that balances economic, environmental and social needs. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It still is.

Back in the good old days at the turn of the century we called it Smart Guelph. No one voted in 2006 for no growth. We wanted controlled growth. The Hanlon Creek Business Park is a textbook example of this. Apparently it’s still not good enough for some people.