Time to demand water protection

(March 18) - It’s funny how some of the things we learned in school don’t make sense anymore. They may have been true at the time, but not now. Admittedly, it has been a long time since I graduated. More than half of all Canadians living today were not born when I finished university. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. There was so much of it that we didn’t need a World Water Day. We do now. We’re going to have one next Monday.

It was in either elementary or high school science that we learned all about the water cycle. Water was a natural resource unlike any other. It wasn’t non-renewable, like petroleum. Oil is a “use it then lose it” commodity. Here today, gone tomorrow. It wasn’t a renewable resource like bamboo. Cut that down and turn it into furniture or flooring or cutting boards. By the time you’re done, another crop has grown.

Water was like neither of those. It was just there. As constant and dependable as my grandmother’s rhubarb jam. Whenever we wanted some, there it was. We couldn’t run out of it because of the water cycle. Evaporation, condensation and precipitation. Put simply, steam rises, cools off and falls down as rain. In one form or another, the same amount of water was always in the system. Solid on the ice caps. Liquid in the oceans. Vapour in the clouds.

What could go wrong? What did go wrong? To put it bluntly, we did. For one thing, there are a lot more of us using the water. Back in the less complicated days when I first heard about the water cycle, there were three billion people in the world. Today there are close to seven billion. The amount of water to share around hasn’t increased to keep pace. Quite the opposite. The volume of water might be approximately the same, but the amount that is usable has gone way down.

The United Nations says each person needs between 20 and 50 litres of safe, fresh water every day for drinking, cooking and cleaning. One in six people don’t have access to this. Two and a half billion people, including close to a billion children, live without basic sanitation. One and a half million children die every year as a result.

The statistics on the UN water website are frightening. In developing countries, for example, 70 per cent of industrial wastes are dumped untreated into the water supply. We can thank ourselves for this. Manufacturing plants that used to provide jobs here got tired of the rules and regulations they had to live with. They could make greater profits by relocating to parts of the world where anything goes. It’s another way in which globalization and deregulation are putting the boots to mother nature.

We can’t live without a secure supply of clean, usable water. It’s not a problem restricted to faraway places like China or Russia, although that is where it is at its worst. There were 679 boil-water advisories in Ontario in 2008. Serious enough, no doubt, but it pales in comparison with this statistic from the United Nations: “In a world of unprecedented wealth, almost two million children die each year for want of a glass of clean water and adequate sanitation.”

Wellington Water Watchers is celebrating World Water Day at John F. Ross Collegiate on Monday evening. Google them and get a ticket. It’s only five dollars. We can’t wait another day before we stand up and demand action to protect our rivers, lakes and oceans.

Give the wealthy a taste of poverty

(March 11) - I don’t know if the task force for poverty elimination will ever be able to meet its goal, but it is off to an encouraging start. It released a report last week that identifies the root cause of poverty: a lack of money.

One guiding principle says we need to move away from a culture that emphasizes alleviating the effects of poverty and towards one that focuses on eliminating poverty itself. All too often these types of committees have become stuck in attempts to manage poverty. Make poor families feel good about themselves with activities to boost their self-esteem. Or organize food drives to keep a hot meal on their tables. Set up clothing closets so they’ll have a warm coat in the cold winter. These are all nice things to do, but they don’t end poverty. They make it a bit more tolerable.

The poverty task force takes a look at the crux of the problem. It opens discussion about income security. You can’t talk about this without looking at a guaranteed annual income.

At the moment there are too many different sources of income. The basic one is employment. You work, you get paid. As long as you are working, life is more or less good. Trouble starts when you’re not working. Then you could be getting your money from one of several different sources. Employment Insurance. Workplace Safety & Insurance Board. Long-term disability payments from an insurance company. Canada Pension Plan disability benefits. Ontario Disability Support Program. Ontario Works. Private pension plans. Canada Pension. Old Age Security.

All provide different levels of income replacement. All have different qualification rules. All have their own bureaucracy. Why not combine them all into a single system that gives an equitable, fair income to everyone who needs it, regardless of circumstances?

The best buffer against poverty is a job. The second best is a caring community that does not allow people to suffer deprivation and want because they are physically or psychologically damaged, or because an employer moved away.

The report contains a novel idea. It suggests a reverse mentoring program through which a corporate CEO would spend some time living with a poor family. Get a comfortable, well paid executive to leave wallet and credit cards at home and get down and dirty with a family of five in a two-bedroom basement apartment. See what it’s like to spend over half your income on rent and utilities. Get to know the challenges of making ends meet.

Then take this one step further. After spending a week with folk who are under-housed and overcharged, the CEO could move into one of the far too few social housing developments around town. See the difference when rent is set at 30 per cent of income. A little bit of this experience and our CEO would be lobbying governments to build more non-profit and co-operative housing projects.

Two things that will take a bite out of poverty didn’t make it into the task force report yet. Raise the minimum wage and enforce laws requiring payment of child support. While we shoulder collective responsibility to protect standards for those left behind by economic ups and downs, deadbeat parents must meet their individual responsibility.

Women, Guelph politics and the Olympics

(March 04) - The Olympics are over. The Guelph election campaign is underway. International Women’s Day is next Monday. There’s a connection between the three.

Women dominated the Canadian medal count. Women dominate Guelph electoral politics. Of the 15 people elected to three levels of government, 10 are women and five are men.

Anyone who wants to know what it would be like if women ran the world could come to Guelph to get a taste of it. They’d find it’s not much different from men running things.

Saying this doesn’t pop any feminist balloons. It recognizes that there is absolutely no justification for the glass ceilings that have traditionally kept women on the lower floors of most organizations. There’s nothing they can do that can’t be done.

Three of the sitting members of Guelph city council have already filed nomination papers for the coming election. A fourth says she will. A woman is challenging for a seat in Ward 1. Karen Farbridge, Vicki Beard and June Hofland have all filed. Maggie Laidlaw says she will run again. All have given us good and thoughtful governance over the years.

There’s a newcomer in the picture. Linda Murphy is running in Ward 1. She told me there isn’t any single issue pushing her into the election. She just wants more fiscal responsibility, accountability and transparency down on Carden Street.

If federal and provincial elections are sprints, municipal campaigns are marathons. Nominations open in January, close in September and we vote on Oct. 25. It is good to see some of the women get off to an early and enthusiastic start.

The four men on council will make up their minds in their own time. The one with the toughest decision is Bob Bell. He has been selected as the Green Party candidate in the next federal election.

There is no good reason why a sitting councillor can’t be a candidate provincially or federally. In fact, there is a lot of precedent for doing so. Harry Worton was our mayor when he ran provincially for the Liberals in 1955. Henry Hosking and Alf Hales were both sitting councillors when they were elected federally in 1949 and 1957, as was Rick Ferraro when he became our MPP in 1985. Carl Hamilton, Linda Lennon and Gloria Kovach all made unsuccessful attempts to jump from the horseshoe to higher office. Until recently, no one thought twice about it.

If they can do it, so can Bell. His enemy is the calendar. The chances of a spring vote recede further with every poor polling result for Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. There’s a reasonable chance of a late summer or early fall election, putting it in synch with the municipal. Bell would have trouble running two campaigns at the same time. The odds of him beating Frank Valeriote range from slim to none. It would be a shame to see him lose his council seat in the attempt.

And what about those Olympics? Two hundred and six Canadian athletes in Vancouver and Whistler. Ninety-one were women. Of the 26 medals won by Canadians, 14 were won by women, 11 by men. One gold went to the ice dancing pair. Forty-four per cent of the team won 56 per cent of the medals. It might have been more if they’d been allowed on the ski jumping slope.

The Olympics is a double-edged sword. On one side it is commercialism run amok. On another it is mesmerizing. The athletes grab our attention while the sponsors get away with our money. We need to sharpen the sporting blade while blunting the spending one.