A vision without a plan is just a dream

(25 February) - John Lennon said life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. Let’s hope he wasn’t right.

The city had a consultation on its downtown secondary plan last week. There were two days of workshops about the direction it will take over the next two decades. I only managed to get to the Wednesday evening one. The workshops went on all day Thursday and into the evening.

Participation was more or less by invitation. Notices were sent to various downtown stakeholder groups and individuals. In the interests of full disclosure, I made the list because I was recently elevated to the chairpersonship of the Library Board. A new library is a key component of downtown redevelopment.

Libraries are genteel institutions that don’t make rush, or rash, changes. We stand politely in queues, sometimes for as long as a quarter of a century. We don’t mind. We’re more than half way down the line by now. Fifteen years in and we can already see the misty outline of a new library taking shape on a horizon a mere ten years out.

That’s the thing about the future: pessimists say it never arrives. An optimist will tell you that every week brings it seven days closer.

The workshop last Wednesday appealed to the optimist in me. We were presented with great visual renditions of how our downtown could look in 2031. The planning consultants have a tremendous vision. They see a boulevard down the centre of Macdonell Street. Wider sidewalks with outdoor cafes. A more attractive St. George’s Square without a bank on every corner, anchored instead by restaurants and shops.

They see creative uses for our riverfront with more parkland and no strip malls. Everything downtown will be linked by attractive pedestrian corridors. If you want to walk along a path from Cork St. to Quebec St. you won’t have to step gingerly around puddles of last night’s puke.

It will be a wonderful place, in 2031. Almost makes me want to start looking after myself to improve my odds of being here to see it.

It’s a grand vision, but a vision without a plan is just a dream.

A plan is not simply a description of the destination. It must outline the ways and means of getting there. How do we get the banks off the Square, and where do we put them? How do we get the strip mall off the corner of Gordon and Wellington and open the river front? How do we stop new ones from being built, if they conform to current by-laws and plans?

Big box development on the edge of town, as allowed by the Commercial Policy Review, isn’t about to go away. It is the root cause of downtown misery, but the OMB won’t let us stop it.

I was pleased as Punch to see the new downtown library open for business in the 2031 vision. It means we won’t be left in the queue for ever. The optimist in me thinks it is great that planners still see all this as achievable in 20 years, even though they’ve bumped Baker St. redevelopment off for ten. Unless, of course, some government infrastructure money puts the shovels in the ground sooner. If that happens, we’ll be ready. If it doesn’t, we’ll keep on waiting.

You can see the dream for yourself at a city hall open house on March 9. I hope they can make it work because, as Mark Twain said, twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did.

Labour history levelled

(February 18) - I was driving down Dawson Road a couple of weeks ago. Lynne and I were going to Rona to see what they had in the way of kitchen counters. Suddenly she let out a shout somewhere between a question mark and an exclamation point. The Steelworkers Hall is gone, she said. I looked over and, sure enough, there it wasn’t.

The sight was more of a shock than a surprise. There had been lots of warning that the building would be torn down. Even when you see something like this coming, it is still a slap when it arrives. It hasn’t been the St e e l w o rk e r s Hall for 10 years, but I’m the sort who still refers to the Olde Quebec Street Mall as "the old Eaton’s Centre". As we all know, that’s just down the street from where the Red Barn used to be.

The Steelworkers was a huge part of the lives of a huge number of Guelph workers. Good things happened there.

The three meeting halls held union meetings, labour council meetings, NDP meetings. Thirty years ago, the large hall saw more wedding receptions than just about any other place in town. It held scores of contract ratification meetings. There was a time when it was fashionable for unions to hold annual dinner dances for their members. The Steelworkers was the place to have them. The NDP riding association held annual fundraising banquets in the large hall.

In the early ’70s I was recording secretary and then president of CUPE Local 1334, representing maintenance and custodial workers at the university. We belonged to the Guelph Labour Council, and the monthly meetings were in the middle room. It wasn’t unusual to get as many as 50 delegates at a meeting. Issues important to the labour movement were hotly debated. Then, on adjournment, we’d go through to the club room and unwind.

The bar was the home of the Royal City Labour Association. If you held a union card, you could join. If you joined, you could get in and enjoy cheap beer and good company. If you weren’t a member, you could be signed in by someone who was.

Every Saturday afternoon it was taken over by a dart league. The atmosphere was friendly, the darts were competitive. Double in and double out was the order of the day.

Union halls are neither salamander nor silver maple. We don’t go all bleary-eyed at the prospect that one day they too will become extinct. I think there is only one left in Guelph, the CAW hall on Silvercreek. It is in a 19th-century schoolhouse and is protected from demolition. The building envelope that held the Steelworkers Hall was not deemed to be “architecturally significant.”

Its importance was as a cultural and historic landmark. It contained the legacy of old union leaders, people like Charlie Pinson and Joe Mezey. They, and others like them, lifted working families into the financial middle class. They built their halls not just for themselves, but for their neighbours. Unions are the quintessential community organizations. They have always been vehicles of social progress, lifting standards not just for their members but for all who work for wages. The halls were their way of engaging with the communities from which they grew.

Unions may be an endangered species these days, but they cannot become extinct. Like salamanders, they can regenerate lost limbs. They will march again as we emerge from this recession with lower wages, fewer benefits and greater insecurity.

Meanwhile, the Steelworkers Hall is gone for good. It won’t be forgotten. It will be missed.

Earthquakes, far and near

(February 11) - I just got back from the Help for Haiti show, and it was a tremendous event. Too bad it takes a disaster to bring all those musicians onto the same stage on the same night. Sam Turton, Ajay Heble and Rev. Paul Clarkson deserve a lot of credit for putting it all together in such a short time. When they went fishing for performers, they cast their nets straight into the deep end of Guelph’s talent pool.

They reached as far as Elora to bring in Kevin Breit. There was a time in my life when I thought that Roy Buchanan and Jeff Beck had taken the Fender guitar as far as a mere mortal could carry one. Then along came Breit. He’s a magician. I’m not in the business of flogging River Run tickets, but he is there again soon for the closing concert in the Borealis series. If you’ve never seen him, you owe it to yourself to do so.

He may work magic with a guitar, but we also heard the sorcery of the University of Guelph choirs. They worked magic with their voices. I was in awe at one piece that carried us down to the heart of the Amazon River. The blended sounds of the birds and animals transfixed me. Marta McCarthy has put together a jewel that deserves wider recognition.

The concert raised over $21,000 for the Canadian Red Cross. The relief work gets every penny raised. Like the very professional people they are, the performers graciously thanked those of us in the audience for our generosity. I want to take the chance now to thank them for theirs.

Had it not been for them, there wouldn’t have been anything for us to buy a ticket to.

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Speaking of earthquakes, one just ripped across the fault line separating the city from the county. No one was seriously injured, other than some cuts and bruises to the body politic. Some joint committees were turned to rubble. Now the question is whether or not they can be rebuilt.

I hope they can be. It will be a shame if the damage is permanent. The worst of the tremors were caused by an arbitration decision that gave the city the short end of the fairness stick. The city tried to save us millions of dollars a year and should get full marks for the attempt.

The relationship between the city and the county has been on a downhill slide since the dark days of the Mike Harris Conservative government. It was he who downloaded a bundle of social services to meet the greater goal of lower taxes. As is the case with all tax cuts, it was a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The cost is still there, and it is still you and I who pay it.

The burden of providing social services to all who need it, whether they live in Guelph or Garafraxa, was given to the county. Guelph citizens pay our share to the city through property taxes. The city passes it on to the county through a formula that was the basis of the arbitration.

If it did nothing else, the case revealed flaws in the way things are done. These must be fixed.

Politicians on both sides of the municipal boundary need to sort things out sooner rather than later.