Bob Hulley

Time to demand water protection

2010-03-18T17:14:00.001-07:00

(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

2010-03-11T14:31:00.000-08:00

(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

2010-03-04T19:30:00.000-08:00

(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.

A vision without a plan is just a dream

2010-02-25T16:29:00.000-08:00

(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

2010-02-18T17:11:00.000-08:00

(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

2010-02-11T20:21:00.000-08:00

(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.

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.

Harper mustn't get away with it

2010-01-28T17:10:00.000-08:00

(January 28) - I have been at several rallies and demonstrations in St. George’s Square. None have been even close to the size of the one last Saturday. Organizers estimated about 500 people turned out. News reports put the number at 300. Either way, it far outnumbered previous rallies against wars in far off places. It dwarfed rallies favouring action to reverse climate change. It sent a message that should reverberate on Parliament Hill.

The government would hear it, if the government was there. It isn’t, and that’s why we were.

Most Canadians, if asked, will agree that going to war is a foolish way to sort things out. Similarly, they will tell you that global warming sends a chill down their spines. The challenge, the near impossible task, is getting them to stand in the centre of the city and say so as a group.

Threaten their democracy, however, and it’s a different story. Shut down their parliament when there is still work to be done, and awaken a slumbering beast. The rallies in Guelph and across the country proved that citizens are not apathetic. They are not unconcerned about the basic responsibilities of citizenship. Although most of us make cynical wisecracks from time to time, we depend on the politicians we elect to do their jobs. These politicians make the mistake of their lives when they confuse trust with indifference. Stephen Harper made this mistake.

He must now wear the consequences of his contemptuous scorn for the traditions and institutions that define our civil society. He and his supporters natter on about how other Prime Ministers at other times have also prorogued Parliament. They say this and sit back smugly pretending they have said something profoundly clever. They haven't.

They should look the word up in a dictionary. It is done to mark the end of a session, when the legislative agenda is complete. Our Prime Minister has used it twice when the agenda he set himself was far from completed. It was in danger of falling apart. He did it to play hide and seek with the voters. He has been found. He has been exposed. He has been called to account.

There is one more step to take. At the first opportunity when parliament reconvenes in March, the opposition parties should pass a motion of non-confidence. Put this government out of its misery. Give us the opportunity to get it out of our misery.

I am not confident. Many of the people in the Square on Saturday went to Knox Presbyterian for a panel discussion. It was standing room only in the hall. One young man asked the question on most of our minds: would the government fall on this issue?

Our MP, Frank Valeriote, was in prominent attendance. He had spoken at the Square and again in the hall. He said lots of wise and wonderful words accurately reflecting the thoughts of the assembly. In answer to the big question of the day, he said no. He didn’t think it would.

The opposition parties, Liberals and New Democrats both, can no longer hide behind the excuse that Canadians don’t want an election. Whether we do or we don’t, we need one. Most Canadians won’t mind. They never do. If an election is called, two-thirds will go out and vote. If one isn’t, the spirit shown across the country on Saturday will be hard to sustain.

If the Prime Minister gets away with this atrocious behaviour again, he will be encouraged to greater offences in the future. Look at the things he has done with a minority government. Be very, very afraid of what he will do with a majority.

Guelph’s superior to Waterloo

2010-01-19T17:08:00.000-08:00

(January 19) - It was interesting to see a report last week ranking Guelph’s attractiveness to immigrants. We came in 13th in a field of 50 Canadian cities. We handily beat Cambridge, Hamilton and Winterpeg, but so what? Anyone should be able to thump those burgs.

Waterloo beat us! They came in on the A list of the top six cities. We were relegated to the 14-city B list.

What does Waterloo have that we don’t? They might have Blackberry’s world headquarters, but we’re the centre of the Linamar universe. Who cares if they have Jim Balsillie? We have Linda Hasenfratz. Waterloo has two universities. We only have one, but it’s a good one.

The Conference Board of Canada ranked the cities on 41 indicators. Obviously music didn’t count. We have the River Run Centre. If they want to see a concert they go next door to Kitchener’s Centre in the Square. Our stage is overflowing with top-drawer bands, ranging from the kramdens to The Speakeasies. Waterloo has lederhosen and polka kings.

We wash our garbage before putting it to the curb. They don’t even sort theirs properly. Waterloo Region will even pay us to compost their kitchen scraps when we get our organics facility up and running. I don’t know what the Conference Board was thinking. I’m an immigrant and I prefer Guelph.

It is an awful mess down in Haiti. You can’t pick up a newspaper, watch the television news or surf the Internet without coming face to face with the awful tragedy that befell the people of that always sad nation. It was a natural disaster of a colossal nature.

The closest in recent memory would be the Asian tsunami. It killed about 300,000 people. The death toll in Haiti could reach 100,000. Its full impact is much wider than that. News reports say three million people, or one-third of the population, have been affected. They are badly injured. They are bereaved. They are homeless.

It is heartening to see the outpouring of generosity shown by individual Canadian contributions to disaster relief. If you do a little ‘googling,’ you’ll easily find a list of organizations that are helping. Donations can be made online, over the phone or at many financial institutions. Doctors Without Borders got my money. It could just as easily have gone to the Canadian Red Cross, or Oxfam, or UNICEF or several others.

No matter how badly any of us were hit by the recession, no matter how little we have in the bank, we are all better off than the average Haitian. That was true before the earthquake. It is more so today. Choose your relief organization and send them some money.

Be careful about giving money to people who come to your door with a collection bucket. It’s a horrible sign of the times that scam artists will take advantage of any tragedy to make a buck. Think of them as the local face of the global corporations Naomi Klein warns us about in Shock Doctrine. They seize on disasters to extend their control over devastated communities.

When the tsunami hit Asia in 2004, local musicians held a superb fundraising concert at the River Run Centre. It may happen again. Local musician and social activist Sam Turton sent an e-mail around last week. It seems that some local churches and community groups are in the early stages of thinking this through.

There are an incredible number of very talented people in and around Guelph. They give generously of their time and talents when the need arises.

If they come together for Haiti, I’ll stand in line to get tickets.

Virtual forums are not enough

2010-01-12T10:13:00.000-08:00

(January 12) - Proroguing Parliament was arrogant, beastly, cowardly, despotic –go through the alphabet and find 26 suitably infuriating adjectives. It was all of this and more. It deserves to be called out and shouted down. But in the end it was legal. That is where the problem lies.

In 2008, the Prime Minister ended the session when faced with a non-confidence motion he was sure to lose. This winter, he was faced with a binding order from Parliament to produce documents related to the treatment of prisoners of war. He didn’t want to comply, so he shut the shop and sent the help home.

There has been immediate and widespread outrage across the country. There is even a Facebook group called Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament. In less than a week it grew to almost 120,000 members. As of Monday the group’s membership had grown to 151,000. There is even a Guelph chapter of this group with over 100 members.

How effective is Facebook as a tool for organizing political protest? We shall soon see. The test will be on Saturday Jan. 23 when the Guelph group is planning a public event.

You can’t change the world on a laptop. You can send messages, involve people in the issues, convince them of your arguments. But if it stays on the computer screen, nothing will change. Change happens when people get off their bums and go to the union halls, the church basements, the community centres and make their voices heard.

Virtual voices in virtual forums produce virtual democracy. It, in turn, produces nothing. If you want to do something to reverse the direction in which Stephen Harper is moving our country, get off the computer and get on the move.

Signing up on Facebook tells everyone you are unhappy. Doing nothing else tells them you are prepared to live with your unhappiness. That is exactly the thing Stephen Harper is hoping to hear.

At the bottom of this whole mess lies a fundamental truth. It pains me to say it, but it is something with which I am in agreement with Stephen Harper. Unelected Senators should not overrule decisions made by elected members of Parliament. It is easy to cheer for the Senate when we don’t like what the government is doing, but it is still wrong.

Any agreement with Harper ends there. We differ on what to do about it. He has chosen to get down into the muck with the Liberals. He will appoint enough Conservatives so the Senate will blindly support anything he does. It will also block as much Liberal legislation as it can when that party gets back in.

The problem will not be solved. The situation will not be improved.

The Senate itself needs to be abolished. It is a useless relic from the old days of feudal England. When the old “nobility” adapted to the emerging parliamentary democracy, they had to share power with the “commoners.” They allowed a House of Commons to enact laws, but kept a House of Lords with the power to overrule what the people got up to. The Senate is our knock-off version of the House of Lords. Unelected and unaccountable.

To stop Prime Ministers in minority governments from proroguing Parliament at will, we need to get out from under the oppressive weight of a Queen, a Governor-General and 105 senators. Take the power out of the Prime Minister’s Office and give it back to the MPs. No prorogation until the majority of members vote for it.

Olympic protest missed the mark

2010-01-05T14:30:00.000-08:00

(January 05) - If we can’t do stuff on stolen native land, we can’t do stuff anywhere in Canada. Or hardly anywhere. It was all stolen, seized, plundered and pilfered in the years following the European “discoveries.” Some reparations have been made as land claim disputes were negotiated with governments or settled in courts.

Leaders of the Squamish Nation govern land that encompasses North Vancouver up to and including Whistler. They are still negotiating their claims, and have entered agreements to preserve and enhance their rights during the Olympics. They had band council elections on Dec. 6. If the members of the Squamish Nation thought their interests were not being looked after by the incumbent leaders, they would have turned them out last month. There is no indication they did.

Marching up Macdonell Street chanting no Olympics on stolen native land doesn’t have much intellectual clarity. It makes about as much sense as no universities on stolen native land. Or no Guelph Transit on stolen native land.

There are lots of other reasons to object to the games. The International Olympic Committee has amassed enough power to bully and browbeat nations. It wields so much economic clout that committee members get what they want, when they want it. They set a standard for greed that corporate sponsors can only aspire to meeting.

There are reasons to support the Olympics, such as the good jobs created in the years and months leading up to them. They also give elite young athletes, people like our own late Victor Davis, a goal to strive for. They can prove they are the best in the world at what they do. Mind you, this would have more value if the billions spent on the games trickled down, somehow, to support national amateur sports programs and general physical fitness. This never happens in any meaningful way. The athletics are just a little side show to distract us from the bigger picture. The Olympics used to be all about amateur athletes. Not anymore.

It is certainly something worth protesting, but how? Blocking the passage of a young woman carrying the torch is a childish and churlish thing to do. It says nothing of value, makes no meaningful point. Better to turn off the television, at least until we see which team of NHL millionaires gets to the gold medal game. Boycotting the sponsors would make a difference. Somehow we have to cure ourselves of our obsession with mega-things.

Stephen Harper has cancelled Parliament again. It’s the same thing he did last year at about this time and what I predicted he would do in last week’s column.

There is so much wrong with this it is hard to know where to start. When they broke for the holidays, MPs were beginning a serious enquiry into the treatment of prisoners of war. No matter what we think of the cause the other side fights for - whether Nazi or Taliban - individual soldiers, when captured, must be treated according to the Geneva Convention. There is strong evidence the defence minister knew these rules were broken, yet did nothing.

It is the job of the official opposition to hold the government accountable, to make sure it is acting within the laws and traditions of our country. If they don’t hold the prime minister’s feet to the fire, who will?

It is wrong for the Prime Minister to cancel the business of Parliament because he’s scared of the direction it’s going.

If we are in the mood for protest, let’s get going on this one.

And prepare for an election. We need one, badly.

The year that was and the year ahead

2009-12-29T15:41:00.000-08:00

(December 29) - When this year started, I made a commitment. I would lose weight and get into better shape. I end the year on the same note.

Twelve months ago, Tiger Woods had one thing in common with people everywhere. He’s a better golfer than I am. By the end of the year, I had one thing in common with thousands of others. I’m a better person than he is.

It has been an interesting and memorable year. My granddaughter had her second birthday, my father had his last. Lynne and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary. Of people who used to be children, my oldest turned 40 and my youngest reached her quarter century.

My older brother turned 65. My younger brother celebrated his 61st birthday by going on a 122-mile bicycle ride. Sixty-one miles out, 61 miles back –in one day. I didn’t match that, but I did get my first set of hearing aids. That’s something neither he nor Tiger has.

But 2009 wasn’t all about me, was it?

It was a lot about political brinkmanship in Ottawa. At the start, we almost had a coalition government of the Liberals and the NDP. It failed because the leaders of the two parties counted their chickens before they hatched. They didn’t anticipate how the prime minister would respond to what ended up as amateur hour on the opposition benches. Like a pair of inept chess players, Stéphane Dion and Jack Layton thought they had Stephen Harper in checkmate. They didn’t realize he had one decisive move available, and he used it to checkmate them.

By year’s end, the Conservative government had put itself in contempt of Parliament. A vote was passed requiring the government to release certain documents related to the treatment of prisoners of war in Afghanistan. The government flatly and boldly refuses. What can the opposition do? They spent the last year propping up Harper’s government. If they find a way to do something, Harper will repeat his coup de grace. He’ll end this session of Parliament and go away until spring.

When the year began, Stéphane Dion was on his way to becoming only the second Liberal leader who didn’t become prime minister. At the close, Michael Ignatieff seems set to become the third.

At the provincial level, the roles are almost reversed. It is the Liberals who are mired in ongoing scandals such as eHealth and the Lottery Commission. They are floundering, stubbornly clinging to power while showing little imagination or vision. They now float the idea of selling the LCBO, even though it is the biggest money maker they have outside income taxes.

The provincial Conservatives are equally adrift. They sound foolish when they criticize the Liberals for doing the very things they have long advocated themselves. The NDP’s Andrea Horvath is leading a focused and credible fight against the Harmonized Sales Tax and other symbols of Liberal mismanagement.

In the municipal arena, it has been another year of achievements and disappointments. In total, the former outnumber the latter. They opened the new city hall. They also opened Norfolk and Wyndham streets. The sewer pipes they found were a sight to behold. There are more streets to fix next year, so get your shock absorbers tuned up.

We will have a municipal election in 2010. We might have a federal one. We won’t have a provincial. Beginning next week, candidates for city hall can declare themselves, start campaigning and raising money.

Of all the things we’ll do next year, the most important will be to sift through all the noise and focus on the facts.

Mugs of eggnog and a lump of coal

2009-12-22T17:10:00.000-08:00

(December 22) - Forget all that rubbish from the lunatics who say Christmas is under attack by invading hordes of immigrants. It isn’t. It was beaten senseless by the credit card companies ages ago.

You don’t have to be a practising Christian to have a pleasant Christmas, or to wish a merry one to people you meet. I’m not and I do.

It’s the season for remembering friends and giving a little something to people you don’t know. That’s why we buy a couple of extra non-perishables with our groceries. Instead of bringing them home, we drop them in a food bank bin. Not knowing who will be on the receiving end makes the giving more meaningful.

The same spirit lurks in the background of the very successful United Way drive this year. The $2.66 million raised will go a long way for those who have been hit hard by the recession. Tough times bring out the generosity in most folk.

It is time to hand out warming mugs of eggnog. First in line should be all of you who donated to one or both of the United Way and the food bank. Without you, a lot of families would not have much of a Christmas at all.

I’ll offer another mug to our mayor and councillors. They did a good job of dealing with the mess left behind by higher levels of government. Regular readers know I would have liked to see a higher tax increase to preserve the services we need. Oh well. That’s behind us now.

We lost bus service on holidays, but kept sidewalk snow plowing.

We delayed the opening of the east side library branch, but helped downtown businesses by keeping free on-street parking in the downtown.

I’ll offer an extra mug of eggnog to Coun. Maggie Laidlaw. She made a motion, which went un-seconded, not to delay the library branch opening. The delay has been accepted by the library board. Laidlaw’s motion had no hope of success, but it was a graceful gesture. It would have been nice if the Ward 1 councillors had supported it, just as a nod to the good people on the other side of Victoria. I hope those residents understand that in June they will have a library branch to be proud of. It will be worth the wait.

It appears we can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. I have raged against the Laird Road interchange on the Hanlon for many years. I don’t intend to stop. But the raging shouldn’t happen on Carden Street. Take it down Woolwich Street to MPP Liz Sandals’ office.

The problem is with the province. I am told they have a hold on land east of the Hanlon, which can’t be developed until the interchange is built. So no eggnog for the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Transportation who refuse to let go of outdated traffic flow concepts. Give them a lump of coal instead. They are the ones who can alter the plan and unlink its components.

We started squeezing the Hanlon land 30 years ago. Much of it was run of the mill farmland. Not particularly sacred, but the corn was good. When the province decided to build a four-lane highway from an arbitrary spot on the 401 to Woodlawn Road, they unleashed a chain of events with its own internal dynamic. It is hard, almost impossible, to stop.

I’ll offer a mega-mug of eggnog to the first person to come up with an effective plan to divert the provincial government from its mega-project mentality.

Whatever you celebrate at this time of year, do it wisely.

Cutting taxes is not a cure-all

2009-12-15T12:14:00.000-08:00

(December 15) - Tonight’s budget is not so much an admission of failure as an accusation. Councillors have found themselves stuck between a snow drift and a bus pass. The forces that brought them here are out of their control.

The accusations of failure must be directed higher up, to the federal and provincial governments. For the past 30 years, they told us the solution to our economic problems is to cut taxes and reduce government spending.

It was a lie. The economy today is in worse shape than it’s ever been. It is true enough that there is only one taxpayer. My taxes go to support the services provided by all three levels of government. That didn’t just start today. It’s been the case for as long as I can remember.

Before we get into the debate about the city budget, remember one thing. Taxes are not evil. They are the price we pay to live in a civilized society.

We pay taxes to get everything from universal health care to weekly garbage collection. There is a cost to everything, and it has to be paid. When you add up all the services provided by all levels of government, you come up with the final bill. The full cost of living in Canada. It’s a lot of money. It has to come from taxes.

When one level of government cuts taxes, the burden falls onto lower levels. By the time it reaches the city, there is almost nowhere left to go.

Federal and provincial governments can run deficits. Cities can’t. All they can do is choose between undesirable options. Two of them are to raise taxes or cut services. There is a third option, but I’ve never heard anyone raise it until now.

We are consumed by a fear of a tax increase. All of us. The councillors who charge it, and the rest of us who pay it.

Tonight, we’ll see the distance they will go to avoid one. Eliminate sidewalk snow plowing. Raise the price of university student bus passes, even though all students pay $61 per semester whether they get one or not. Build an east end library branch but leave it sitting unopened until June. Why do all this and more?

To avoid paying more taxes.

What we can’t hear is a willingness among the members of our community to bite the bullet. The citizens who make Guelph the city we all want to call home are not accepting the consequences of the choices they have made over the past 30 years. They are not sitting at the kitchen table telling their kids it is time to face reality. We have demanded lower taxes, and now we can’t fund summer camp programs. Wives are not telling their husbands about the city’s third option: “Well, dear, we have brought ourselves to a nine per cent property tax increase, so we’ll need to cut back on the number of digital TV channels we receive.”

Oh no. We’d rather save $89,000 by eliminating a dining room program at the Evergreen Seniors Centre.

We have come to the point where everyone must suffer except us. Everyone but me must pay the price for the fiscal mismanagement of the federal and provincial governments we elected. That is not how to build a community. It is an insult to our parents and grandparents, the people who made great sacrifices to build the country that is being dismantled before our eyes and with barely a whimper of protest.

A 9.2 per cent tax increase is not fair to me. A 4.5 per cent increase is not fair to my community.

To whom is council responsible?

It's gonna get messy

2009-12-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

(December 08) - City council goes through the next step of its budget setting process tonight. Last week councillors heard from staff. They were told what they can afford, and when they can buy it. Tonight they hear from citizens. You can tell them what you want them to spend money on. Next week they hear from themselves. They’ll debate and decide.

According to a report from the CAO, Hans Loewig, just staying even would mean a 9.2 per cent budget increase. More than half of this, he says, results from a projected revenue shortfall of $8.1 million in 2010. The rest is from contractual commitments. This alone sets up a mess. It gets worse when you see the proposed measures to reduce the increase to 4.5%, or to 3%.

By last Saturday, 31 people were on the list to speak to council about the projected cuts. Scan down the list and you can bet there won’t be many speaking in favour.

One proposal is to recover $667,000 by eliminating free on-street parking at downtown meters. Downtown business owners will be there to say why this is a bad idea.

Forty-two thousand can be saved by closing Lyon’s pool. Those who use it to cool down are pretty hot.

Ending sidewalk snow plowing will save about a hundred thousand. Ending bus service on stat holidays, cutting back a meal program for seniors, forcing all staff to take five days off a year without pay, and staff layoffs are all on the table. Opponents of each cut are on the speakers’ list. Probably some supporters as well.

It’s going to be messy. This is the election-year budget, and our councillors have not left themselves any wiggle room. Someone somewhere in town is hurt by each proposed cut. The capital budget picture was bad enough. It is spreading into the operating one. This is where the pain will be even more acute. It is also where most of tonight’s delegations are coming from.

No one wants to see a nine per cent property tax increase, but what will we give up to avoid one? Sidewalk snow plowing? Fine if you can depend on property owners to do it. We all know that many won’t. Still fine if you are reasonably healthy and get about in an upright manner. If you have some mobility challenges, you need a clear path. The city has a responsibility to provide one.

Should we cut funding to the neighbourhood groups? Two Rivers, Onward Willow, Waverley Drive, Brant Avenue, Hanlon Creek and others provide good services to families all over town. They do things like community gardens, breakfast programs, clothing exchanges, children’s activities for PD days when parents still have to get to work.

Who wants to see downtown businesses strangled? Who wants to see people put out of work? Who wants to see access to youth sports programs reduced? Or participation fees increased?

A tax decrease today always leads to an increase in out-of-pocket expenses tomorrow. It always has and it always will.

If the only way to get from a 9.2% to a 4.5% or 3% increase is to nickel and dime our citizens to death, we have failed badly as a community.

It doesn’t have to happen. There is one construction project that will cost us about $16 million. That’s what we are spending to help the province build a cloverleaf on the Hanlon at Clair Road. We should step back. Tell the province it is the wrong project at the wrong time. Just say no and put our money into people instead.

Cycle of violence is never-ending

2009-12-01T09:53:00.000-08:00

(December 01) - I still remember the shock and horror of the CBC national news 20 years ago.

A man, angry and twisted by a hatred of women, walked into a Montreal engineering school and shot 28 people, four men and 24 women. Fourteen of the women died. There was no question, no doubt about his purpose. He declared his hatred for feminists. In his mind, any woman attempting to get ahead in life was a feminist. In one classroom he ordered the men students to one side and then shot all nine women, killing six.

It brought into focus, in the most graphic and disturbing manner possible, the reality of violence against women. Although such concentrated violence has not been duplicated in Canada, either before or since, individual acts continue unabated.

There is one difference between what happened that day in Montreal and what happens every day of the year in homes across the country.

The women who were shot in Montreal did not know their attacker. They were anonymous victims who suffered from a man’s blind rage. Almost all women who are beaten, stabbed, shot and abused know who hurt them. It was the man who, on their wedding day, promised to protect her. The man who, the night before, told her I love you. The man who couldn’t understand why she left him. The man who is a role model to his sons. Someone she thought was her friend, her companion, her lover.

You don’t have to look far in Guelph to see this ugly reality. You could sit in on any of the anger-management programs going on every day of the week. Most of the men who sign up have come nose-to-nose with a court date. When up against an assault charge for laying a beating on a wife or girlfriend, they take the best advice any lawyer will give: get ready to tell the judge that you are remorseful and trying to change your ways. When the charge goes away, so does the remorse. When remorse disappears, restraint goes with it and a woman gets hurt again.

You would also see it if you could look in on any of the several shelters operating throughout Guelph and Wellington County. Even if you could, you shouldn’t. They are not open to casual observers, and you don’t want to go through what people go through to qualify for a bed in one. Shelters are where the women in our lives go to escape the men in their lives.

What will it take to end this cycle of violence? Sometimes I despair that anything will. It is so deeply and darkly ingrained. If the people who create our cultural landmarks continue to defend Roman Polanski, there may not be any hope.

Polanski is a brilliant filmmaker. He directed movies such as Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist. He also had a troubled personal life. In 1977, when he was 44, he was convicted of raping a 13-year-old girl. He fled to Europe before sentencing. Now he faces extradition back to Los Angeles. Hundreds of other filmmakers and actors, people like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, have rallied to his defence.

Polanski can afford $4.2 million bail. He can do house arrest in a $1.6-million chalet in a luxury Swiss resort. He should not use his money to evade justice. Time does not heal all wounds, and money does not buy forgiveness. The rich and the poor can be equally abusive. Neither should get away with it.

Plant closure offers a lesson in politics

2009-11-24T11:07:00.000-08:00

(November 24) - When will working people learn? We constantly receive lessons from the experiences of others, and just as constantly ignore them.

When workers have a chance to join a union, why do they believe the chorus of nay-saying from people who profit from a non-union environment? Maybe they believe the employers who say either of two things: you don’t need a union, we will look after you; or, if you join a union we will shut down and move away. Or maybe they believe the conservative think tanks who say unions served a purpose 50 years ago but aren’t needed any more.

As we saw last week with W. C. Wood, when push comes to shove, employers look after themselves. They will abandon people who loyally punched the time clock week after week, year after year. When it suits their financial balance sheet, they will close down whether there is a union or not.

Unions do not plunge a company into bankruptcy. Poor management does. If anything, during this recession we have seen unions help companies survive.

The main thing unions do – as important and relevant today as it was in the dirty thirties –is protect workers from callous and arbitrary managers. Wages, working conditions and workplace safety are all better in a unionized workplace.

Could a union have protected these workers from the catastrophe of going into receivership? The CAW did for the men and women at GM and Chrysler, but those companies wanted to stay open. The Wood family gave up when they sold out to an American financial holding company that couldn’t have cared less about what happens to families in Guelph.

There is a bigger injustice here, though. Also an awful irony.

My guess is that the Wood workers who bothered to cast votes on election day chose either the Conservatives or the Liberals. These are the parties that passed the law that left workers wages at the bottom of the list of debts to be paid by bankrupt companies. First in line are the secured creditors. The banks, mortgage companies and anyone from whom Woods borrowed money and put up property as collateral.

Workers wages, vacation pay, severance pay and the like are unsecured. They have already earned the money, but they stand at the back of the line when it comes time to collect. The best they can expect is a one-time payout of $3,200, at most, from the federal government’s Wage Earner Protection Program. Most long-service employees are owed a whole bunch more than this.

Compare this to the wage protection fund put in place by the provincial NDP government in the early 1990s. All companies contributed to the fund. In the event of a corporate bankruptcy, workers who were owed back wages and severance pay would be paid from the fund. In full. No $3,200 cap. The government would then pursue the corporation for repayment. The workers and their families did not suffer an additional hardship on top of losing their jobs. The Conservative government of Mike Harris dismantled this fund and threw workers back to the back of the line.

As they contemplate a future without manufacturing jobs, the Wood workers should look at what they could have had and what they do have. Those of them who vote Conservative should know they put themselves on the slippery slope that has led them to where they are. Those who vote Liberal should wonder why the provincial government has done nothing to protect their earnings when their employer went belly-up.

All of them should vow to never make the same mistake again.

Downtown: the sum of connected bits

2009-11-17T16:57:00.000-08:00

(November 17) - A healthy body is a series of interconnected pieces that all depend on each other. As the old song sang, the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone. The liver connects to the heart. Feet are joined to the nose, often switching roles. It’s the same with a community. The connectivity becomes obvious when looking at Guelph’s stalled downtown redevelopment.

There were going to be two bookends to the downtown core: city hall to the south and the library to the north. They would be the pillars that hold everything between them together. The poles of a magnet that attracts business and people to St. George’s Square. The yang and the yin that pull us in. There are not enough clichés in the English language to do justice to the wonders we could have beheld.

Lots of people want to see a more pedestrian-friendly downtown. It’s a noble idea that requires a bigger and better transit system. It also needs parking garages where we can leave our cars while walking from one shop to another. Hence the Wilson Street Parkade. Baker Street redevelopment will bring a healthy mix of residences, offices, shops and a library. The city planners calculate that during construction, most of the Baker Street parking lot will be unusable. That’s one of the reasons they want to get Wilson Street done first. Another reason is the redesigned transit hub.

The garage on Wilson is tied, in some minds, to the GO train station that should come to Guelph in a few years. This linkage is a bit tenuous, though. It doesn’t seem wise to plunk the GO station downtown and use up valuable real estate for people to leave their cars while they leave town. If you look at a map of the GO system, most train stations are closer to the edge of town. Parking is right at the station, not a block and a half down the street. The York-Watson area seems a likelier commuter spot. Support for downtown redevelopment does not mean stuffing everything in, whether it fits or not. Parking in the core should be for the people who live, work or shop there.

Not everyone wants downtown to become a car-free and care-free pedestrian heaven. The Downtown Business Association wants to increase the traffic flow along Wyndham Street. They have compared numbers. In September 1993, 12,100 vehicles a day went through the Square. In October 1998, there were 8,300. By April of 2007 the daily total was 5,476.

They point to the traffic lights at the square as the cause of the drop. In 1998, the lights were changed to allow for all-way pedestrian crossings every time they cycled from green to red. This is known as a “pedestrian scramble” crossing. Guelph was well ahead of the curve when it was installed. Toronto set one up on the corner of Yonge and Dundas in 2008. A couple of weeks ago, London opened one in Oxford Circus, the very busy corner of Oxford and Regent Streets. About 32,000 people cross there every hour. Traffic stops every 90 seconds when all lights turn red. The world’s biggest is in Tokyo

Cars driving through town on Wyndham Street don’t put a penny’s worth of business into any of the stores. Pedestrians walking down the street do. Downtown businesses suffer from a lot of complex problems. The scramble in the square should be the least of their worries.

And what was that about the feet and nose switching roles? It happens every flu season when your nose runs and your feet smell.

Too many dead, and for what ?

2009-11-10T10:28:00.000-08:00

(November 10) - And it’s one, two, three what are we fighting for? Why are 2,200 fine young Canadian men and women still dodging bullets and land mines in southern Afghanistan?

Last August, Hamid Karzai declared himself the winner of an election that was exposed as fraudulent by United Nations observers. Ballot box stuffing, voter intimidation and corruption were rampant. The results were overturned. In any normal democracy, the candidate who benefited from, and possibly even encouraged and orchestrated, this outrage would be disqualified from future elections. Not there. Karzai was allowed to stand in a run-off election. His only opponent withdrew. The vote was cancelled.

Between the first and second failed elections, six more Canadian soldiers were killed. Two days later, an Afghan police officer shot and killed five British soldiers.

On Remembrance Day 2007, the Canadian death toll in this war was 72. Last year it was 98. This year, 133.

Tomorrow, as we stand for our moment of silence at 11 a. m., think about those 133 families. Parents, wives, children, brothers, and sisters all grieving. For what? To prop up a government that has no legitimacy? To secure a feudal society that prospers on the heroin trade?

Too many of our soldiers have lost their lives in that far-off land. It is time to stop and get out. The best support we can give our troops is to bring them home as quickly as possible.

The Canadian gun registry is all but dead. That is bad. Even worse is the feeble reasoning that led otherwise intelligent people to oppose it. Twelve were NDP MPs who ought to know better.

One, Charlie Angus, comes from a northern Ontario mining community. With his band The Grievous Angels, and a paper, Northern Miner, he fought strenuously for the safety of hard rock miners. He still does. I spoke to him on the phone a few times when I was at the Workers Health and Safety Centre in Toronto. I met him in 2004 when he came to support Phil Allt’s campaign. I thought he would have what it takes to stand up against the carnage of the gun lobby. I was wrong.

What was the worst of the foolishness? One example: the long gun registry makes criminals of honest hunters and farmers. It doesn’t.

Some farmers say they need rifles and shotguns. Maybe they do. They also need pickup trucks. They don’t object to registering the truck. Why not register the gun?

Another piece of nonsense –and some think they are being very profound when they say it –is that criminals won’t register their guns. Well, duh! No kidding. The second half of this half-thought is that the gun registry won’t stop gun crimes. What a shocking revelation.

Guess what? Laws against bank robbery don’t stop people from robbing banks. Laws against domestic violence don’t stop husbands from shooting wives when that’s where their insecurity takes them.

The gun registry was never intended to stop anything. It was designed, among other things, to let police know if there is a gun in the house when called to a domestic disturbance.

It was poorly managed. That is reason to fix it, not to scrap it. Frank Valeriote, our MP, voted to keep it. Good for him. Eight of his Liberal colleagues, 12 of my fellow New Democrats, and all the Conservatives voted to abolish it. Shame on them.

One tragedy is the erosion of gun control a month before the 20th anniversary of the Montreal massacre. A second tragedy is the triumph of false logic and shallow thinking. That, unfortunately, is the temper of our times.

Intercultural stew or multicultural pot luck?

2009-11-03T18:00:00.000-08:00

(November 03) - Not a lot of people have heard of John Gibbon. He died in 1952. During his lifetime he wrote several novels that nobody reads any more and a couple of history books, and he organized a lot of folk festivals. He led an interesting life that might well have eventually faded into the fog, except for one thing.

He wrote a book, in 1938, that had a profound impact on the future development of our country. It was Canadian Mosaic: the Making of a Northern Nation. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I never read it, and probably never will. That doesn’t matter. The concept, and the content, have become so much a part of the Canadian fabric that we all understand what it’s all about. It sets us apart from our neighbour south of the border.

Down there, they have what is known as the melting pot. They assimilate. We recognize the strength that comes from diversity. They want everyone to be the same. We want people to be themselves. People from all over the world have made a home in this country. They each bring their own cultural richness and all of us learn from each of us. Not many other countries value diversity the way we do.

It’s the difference between a stew and a potluck dinner. You can take all the food and throw it into a big pot and come up with something tasty and nourishing. The carrots, potatoes and peas are easy to tell apart, even though they’re in the same bowl. Or you can set several plates on the table and take something from each. It’s just as nourishing, but the taste sensations make the meal much more interesting.

Canadian Mosaic set the basis for our multicultural society. Frank Valeriote wants to shift the emphasis to intercultural. This claims to recognize the differences between cultural groups while somehow bringing them together.

Intercultural stew. Multicultural potluck.

The trouble with the stew? There is usually one ingredient that predominates.

When I first heard about the Hanlon Creek sod-turning last week, I thought it was not something I would have advised. When you have opponents who thrive on getting their picture in the paper, why hand it to them on a platter? It is what they want.

What should have been a rather mundane photo op for the politicians was bound to turn into a circus. As with most circuses, the clowns hid their faces behind masks and make-up.

There’s more to it, though. The sod turning isolated the LIMITS crew. They like to claim substantial community support. There is no indication of it. They haven’t taken a cue from the anti-Wal-Mart campaign and stood outside grocery stores in fair weather and foul collecting signatures on a petition. Well over 10,000 people signed up against Wal- Mart. Such opposition to the Hanlon development just does not exist.

The sod-turning showed this graphically. It showed the city politicians and staff to be united. It showed the noisy opponents to be few and immature. There are many other environmentalists around town who see what they believe to be flaws in the plan and are working reasonably to fix them. They are not saying, as is LIMITS, that no more ground will be broken.

So kudos to the mayor, councillors and staff for showing they have the vision to move our city forward and the courage to run a gauntlet of goons. Let’s all look forward to the day when we can settle our differences without spitting, cursing and poking sticks in each other’s eyes.

I used to be a chimney

2009-10-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-10-20T10:24:00.000-07:00

(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.

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

2009-10-13T16:36:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-10-06T16:40:00.000-07:00

(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.

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.

New library long overdue

2009-09-29T12:41:00.000-07:00

(September 29) - I don’t know that Norman McLeod has read every book in the library, but you’d have a hard time beating him in a literary trivia contest. He quotes with ease from most of the books he has read. But from now on, if he wants to borrow a book he’ll have to queue up at the checkout counter just like the rest of us.

He is wrapping up a long and illustrious career in the public library game. Last week was his last as Guelph’s chief librarian, a job he held with distinction for 32 years. He’s not gone completely. He’ll keep his foot in the door of the new east end branch until it is properly opened. Other than that, he’ll take some well-deserved rest and recuperation.

Kerry Hannah, the head of children’s services, is now the acting chief librarian.

Heading up Guelph’s public library system is not a job for a dilettante. In its 126-year history, only four people have done it. I doubt we’ll find a fifth person who can give us three more decades of dedication. Our library system has grown so much. When I moved to Guelph in 1971, it occupied a six-year-old building. There were two meeting rooms in the basement that community groups could use. Not any more. Every square foot of the building is now taken over for library use.

When McLeod arrived in 1977, he joined a growing library in a growing city. Both are still expanding, but they are running out of room. In fact, the main library building ran out of room to grow a few years ago.

We need a new building. Be clear about that. We don’t want a new downtown branch. We need one. Desperately. The building on Norfolk Street was designed to hold 80,000 books. There are more than a quarter of a million in it now. It circulated 267,000 books in 1965. By the end of August, the library system as a whole circulated 1,234,586 items. At this rate it will be almost two million by the end of the year.

Debate about the need for a new library should have ended three years ago. There has been a steady commitment from most of our councillors. Capital forecasts in years gone by even had construction slated to start next year, in 2010. If we don’t pay attention, it could start receding further into the future.

It was sad to hear some of the things that were said last week. A couple of councillors speculated that the recent discovery of a $2.7-million cash flow crisis could derail the library redevelopment.

You can freeze the building, but you can’t freeze what goes on inside it. Holding back library growth is as futile an endeavour as was King Canute’s attempt to hold back the tide. It can’t be done. In Guelph, library use is a family value that helps cement our community.

The recession won’t last forever. When it’s over, the need for a new library will still be with us. If anything, it will be bigger. So will the cost of redevelopment.

It has been a privilege to sit next to Norm McLeod during meetings of the Public Library Board. I’ll miss his dry, sometimes sarcastic, humour.

I won’t miss his reading recommendations. I followed them a couple of times. He has a wide range of interests, but an internal magnet draws him ever backwards into the world of potboilers and bodice rippers.

Even those authors have fans who are entitled to a library with room to expand. It’s an important goal. Don’t let it drift away.

Cash flow woes impacting Guelph

2009-09-22T14:09:00.000-07:00

(September 22) - It seems I am not the only person who thinks taxes have fallen too low. Last week, thousands of people in Toronto had a chance to vote against higher taxes but didn’t bother. Only about a third of the people who could vote in a provincial byelection bothered to do so. Of those, almost half chose to support the party that will bring us the Higher Sales Tax (HST).

Governments everywhere are starving for revenue. At the federal and provincial levels, they have no one to blame but themselves. Politicians have campaigned for several decades on promises to reduce taxes, their main source of revenue. They have always relied on the false wisdom that smaller government sets the entrepreneurial spirit free. Business will prosper and we’ll all be glad of it.

The exact opposite turned out to be the case. Smaller government brought us lower taxes. It also brought us globalization and deregulation. These latter two wonders brought a recession. The recession increased the need for government services. The need couldn’t be met because revenues are not there. We are trapped inside a vicious circle and there aren’t many ways out.

Guelph city council is grappling with the effects of the cash shortfall. The city bank account is about $2.7 million less than where it should be. This is the result of some catch-22 situations.

One is lower interest rates. Great if you are renewing your mortgage, but not so good if you need investment income.

Revenue from fines is also down. Some scofflaws are choosing to save money by not paying them. There’s another ironic thing about this. While the downtown urinals save the city from cleaning up unpleasant messes, they also eliminate lucrative fines. Every time one is used, a $240 ticket is flushed down the drain.

Another component of the cash flow problem related to the recession is an increased load on county social services. This could cost the city about $467,000. Where will the money come from?

The city is looking at some traditional solutions, such as renegotiating with suppliers or not filling staff vacancies.

What is not under consideration is taking another look at the free parking meters downtown. Giving away two free hours at every on-street parking spot was estimated, in 2007 when it started, to cost the city $685,000 a year. It could be a lot more than that. Every car that leaves a meter within the two-hour limit is replaced by another one that also parks free.

Before the city cuts any staff to recoup its $2.7-million shortage, it should report exactly how much money has not been fed into the parking meters.

The police used one of their Tasers a week ago while taking a man into custody. That should concern us all by itself, but there is one thing even more troubling.

It is the remarks by Police Chief Rob Davis, as quoted in last Friday’s Mercury: “This case was a perfect example of what the Taser was designed for, Davis said, adding the weapon was used to immediately immobilize the man without discharging a firearm.”

They were arresting a man “under the Mental Health Act” in the hall of an apartment building. The high-volt jolt didn’t immobilize him. The police had to shout at him that if he didn’t stop moving they’d do it again.

Then our chief of police tells us that if they hadn’t had a Taser with them, they would have shot him? What a foolish thing to say.

The police clearly need fewer Tasers and more training.

From strange to weird to bizarre

2009-09-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

(September 15) - The saga of the Hanlon Creek Business Park goes from strange to weird to bizarre. Construction has been put on hold until next spring because the city is committed to developing the site in the most environmentally responsible manner possible. They agreed they would not do any work on site during sensitive fish breeding seasons, and they are being true to their word.

They now have the strange task of proving a negative. They must prove there are no Jefferson salamanders in the creek beds and wetlands. If next spring rolls around and none have been found, opponents of the project will tell them to look again. You didn’t look everywhere, they will say. There could still be a stone left unturned somewhere out there. If there were no Jeffersons in the creek last October, they will say next April, there might be one now. Take another look.

It may be possible to prove a negative, if you have enough resources and the time needed to go back and make sure nothing changes. It would take more time than the city has available.

Other negatives are easier to prove. For example, you can easily show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there are still no jobs in the Hanlon Creek Business Park. That’s because, after all the time spent searching for salamanders, there is still no business park.

Last week, things went from strange to weird. Some of the protesters went to the Drexler residence and delivered a message. They say they just wanted to pass the time of day in pleasant conversation and explain that the business owner, much like everyone else in Guelph, would have a happier life if the land didn’t get developed.

The police say Drexler felt threatened and intimidated by the visitors. It’s tough to get into the middle of a “yes you did, no I didn’t” argument that may or may not be settled in court. One thing is clear, though. The protesters were making sure Drexler knew they know where to find his family when they want to.

I’ve known people in the building trades. If you could get a PhD in machismo, they’d all be doctors. Meet them at a construction site, a negotiating table or on a golf course and they can be fearless. None would have got where they did if they went all weak in the knee when confronted by the people who camped out by Hanlon Creek. Going to their homes puts their families at risk, and that’s another story.

Imagine the outrage that would result if a construction worker went to a protester’s home for a similar “chat.”

By week’s end it went from weird to bizarre. A couple of the protesters who tried to tune up the Drexlers turned themselves in to the police and spoke to the press. Both came from out of town. One, Julian Ichim, turns out to have been the Marxist-Leninist candidate in various provincial and federal elections in Kitchener and, most recently, Stratford.

There are legitimate fringe parties with programs and platforms that deserve to be heard. The M-Lers are not among them. They built their organization on the backs of progressive groups, moving in to disrupt, dominate and destroy. For as long as I have known them, about 40 years, they have been at the centre of the loonie left. There is no reason to suppose they occupy any different ground today.

If Guelph’s environmental groups have been infiltrated by them, we should all be worried. Nothing good will come of it. The honest environmentalists who care about the business park should think twice about where, and with whom, they are going.

Where are all the candidates?

2009-09-08T17:43:00.000-07:00

(September 08) - Suppose they called an election and nobody came. It sounds improbable, and couldn’t happen. Or could it? There doesn’t appear to be a lot of getting ready going on around town.

Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal leader, is starting to talk tough. He is threatening to stop propping up the Harper government. Does anyone believe him, after all the backing down he and his predecessor did? It appears as though none of the local political parties do.

Things are eerily quiet in the riding associations that will try to send Guelph MP Frank Valeriote back to his law practice. None even has a nomination meeting scheduled. None of the three major opposition candidates from last year’s election are running again. It is, when you think about it, quite astonishing that neither the Conservatives, the NDP nor the Greens have put someone forward to build name recognition and to position themselves as a credible challenger to Valeriote.

What we are going through now makes no sense to those who spend any time at all observing politics. We have been in a minority government situation since Oct. 14 of last year. In theory, the government could have fallen at any time since then. It would be a shock to the system if the Liberals nominated anyone but the incumbent Valeriote. Why don’t the other three have someone in place by now, building name recognition and support?

It is completely disingenuous for them all to say they are still fatigued from last year’s contest. We all remember the marathon byelection that turned into a general election at the last minute. Yes, it was a stretch. It placed a huge burden on everyone’s campaign resources. Out in the real world of politics, it shouldn’t take a year to recover.

A year ago, the local Conservatives wasted most of their energy fighting among themselves. That appears to be behind them now, but with Gloria Kovach pulling herself out of the mix, who do they have with any sort of plausibility? It would be a surprise to see Brent Barr step forward after the way the riding association humiliated him. We are more likely to see the two of them stepping forward for next year’s “nonpartisan” municipal election, one running for mayor and the other for council.

The NDP and the Greens have been playing their cards close to the vest over the past year. They each had an exceptional candidate in 2008. Neither wants to stand again, and both parties seem content to wait until the last moment to get someone in place.

The NDP has a search committee looking at available talent. They have a lot to look at. I’d like to see a candidate step forward from the labour movement. What with this recession and all, it would be good to hear someone speak out in defence of workers and their families.

There was a flurry of excitement a month or so ago when Elizabeth May announced she was considering Guelph as the next place to decline the opportunity to send her to Ottawa. Now she is looking at British Columbia instead. She hasn’t entirely given up on Guelph. She’s back in town on Thursday, speaking on campus. Guelph has lots of dedicated environmentalists who can carry the Green flag. One will step forward. You never know. One of the Hanlon Creek occupants might want to make change from inside the belly of the beast.

No matter how you look at it, we are in for a fascinating few weeks. Either Valeriote gets a free pass, or three good citizens will stand up and challenge him.

When unions win, we all win

2009-09-01T13:42:00.000-07:00

(September 01) - It used to be that the Labour Day weekend was the last day before school started. It was a day of great anticipation. Young people everywhere looked forward to the opportunity to meet new teachers and set sail for the new horizons opened up by increased knowledge. Not anymore.

The elementary and secondary schools went back to work this morning. As summer’s last holiday rolls around next weekend, they will already have three days of school work in their backpacks. Then there’s a four-day weekend before putting pencils to paper for the long haul.

Maybe now that the back-to- school sales are over, we can have a clearer view of the other significant meaning of next Monday. It is a day to reflect on the contribution made to society by workers and their unions. It is a day to say thank you for all they have done and all they will do to make all of our lives better. You’ll find a lot of union members at Riverside Park on Labour Day, hosting the annual picnic. There is usually good corn, cheap hot dogs, fine music, lots of information about community groups, a couple of speeches and a load of fun for the whole family.

There is an old slogan that promoted unions as the people who brought you the weekend. It was true. They did that and more. Our parents and grandparents sacrificed much to fight for the 40-hour work week, pensions, sick pay, health and safety, and a lot more.

These benefits began as collective agreement provisions and quickly became part of our social fabric. Gains made by unions spread and became the standard for all workers. They are now being taken away. The recession is being used as a hammer to beat down organized labour.

I have said it before and I will say it again: when our unions are strong, our society is strong. When unions win, we all win. The corollary is also true. When unions lose, we all lose.

The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) estimates that over half a million jobs have been lost in Canada this year. An Aug. 7 article in the Globe and Mail had it at 414,000. Either way, a lot of families are tightening their belts. Most of them live in Ontario. Many are in Guelph and used to work for Linamar. Last year at this time, the company announced large job cuts that hit machine operators and salaried professionals alike. They are still suffering. A couple of weeks ago the company announced losses of $48 million and a 40 per cent decline in sales.

Companies like Linamar don’t like to pass their profits down, but they love to share their losses.

The EI program doesn’t have enough money. Several years ago, when times were relatively good, the program generated a surplus of over $50 billion dollars. The Liberal government of the day diverted it into general revenue and used it to finance corporate tax cuts. Now that workers need it, the money is gone. Even though Ontario is bearing the brunt of the recession, workers here are treated more harshly than in other provinces. We have to put in more qualifying hours, and we receive fewer benefit weeks. It is a system that must be reformed and restored to its original purpose.

As we celebrate another Labour Day, spare a thought for the men and women who make the products and provide the services we all enjoy. Manufacturing workers are an endangered species these days. Who among us will speak out in their defence?

Other than their unions, I mean.

It's all about the spin

2009-08-25T17:30:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-08-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

(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.

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

2009-08-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-08-04T19:41:00.000-07:00

(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.

Charles James Pickersgill (1919 - 2009)

2009-07-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

My July 21 column, which was written on July 17, spoke of my father's health and how the years are catching up on him. Sadly, he passed away at about 5:00 am on Friday July 24. Instead of a July 28 column, I offer the following obituary which speaks quite inadequately of 90 years worth of interesting living.

PICKERSGILL, Charles James on 24 July, 2009, peacefully at Stratford General Hospital in his 91st year.

Charles was born in the London borough of Shoreditch, U.K. on May 4, 1919, the son of Charles and Annie (Chizlett) Pickersgill.

At the age of 14 he began training as a restaurant waiter and worked in the merchant marine as a steward on the Cunard Line and the White Line.

He joined the Royal Navy in 1939. During the war years he served as a telegrapher on HMS Hood from May 1940 until December 1940. He also served on HMS La Capricieuse and HMS Mermaid.

Following the war he worked as a radio mechanic and a radar technician. He moved to Canada with his family in 1957. His work took him through Canadian and American air bases in France, Germany and northern Canada where he helped install the Distant Early Warning System (DEW Line). For a time he maintained the radar system from the depths of the NORAD "bunker" in North Bay.

After retiring from ITT Canada in Guelph he volunteered with L'Arche Stratford, the CNIB, and at Woodland Towers in Stratford where he lived since 2002.

Charles was a member of Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church, Stratford, the Royal Canadian Naval Association and New Democratic Party.

He enjoyed travelling extensively with his wife, Marjorie, whom he married on June 9, 1943 in Scotland.

He was an avid Scrabble player and a strong advocate for peace and social justice.

Dear father of Edward Pickersgill of Guelph, Alan Pickersgill and spouse Lynne Hulley of Guelph, Ronald Pickersgill of London, Ont., and James Pickersgill and spouse Jane Ashmore of Cobourg.

He is also survived by 16 grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; one sister, Joan Sanderson of London, U.K.; and several nephews, nieces and friends throughout England, Scotland and Canada. He touched many lives during his journey on our planet.

Predeceased by his sister, Daisy Thompson on September 23, 1972; his grandson, Ruairi Ashmore on April 27, 1997; and his wife, Marjorie Mary (Brennan) on December 2, 2002.

Sincere thanks are owed to the dedicated support staff at Woodland Towers, the nursing staff in the palliative care ward of Stratford General, Dr. Wayne Parsons and several other doctors at the hospital.

Relatives and friends will be received at the Heinbuck Funeral Home, 156 Albert St, Stratford on Sunday from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m.

The funeral mass will be celebrated at Immaculate Conception Church, Stratford, on Monday, July 27, 2009 at 10 a.m. followed by interment at Avondale Cemetery, Stratford. Rev. Father Dick Bester will officiate. Parish prayers will be said at the funeral home on Sunday at 6:45 p.m.

Memorial donations may be made through the funeral home to the charity of your choice.

More than bricks and mortar

2009-07-21T18:00:00.000-07:00

(July 21) - It’s always good to keep things. On a big picture, think about the Mitchell farm house. It used to be on Paisley Street. Now it’s gone. Armel knocked it over. The best we can do now is describe it to future generations.

They won’t ever see for themselves what it looked like, or the place it held in the development of our community. It was John Lennon who wrote that you’ll never know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re coming from.

Heritage is more than bricks and mortar. It isn’t just abstract history. It is personal. It is important that we preserve and marvel at the pieces of history we uncover. Some take us by complete surprise. Let me backtrack here and explain what I’m thinking about.

My dad recently had his 90th birthday. It was on May 4, the day after Pete Seeger had his 90th. In the couple of months since then, he started to feel his age. Things happen to your body and mind after they’ve worked for nine decades. There’s not much you can do to stop it. He’s still on the green side of the ground, and that alone is worthy of celebration.

My younger brother and I are getting ready to exercise powers of attorney and make sure things flow smoothly when they start flowing. As part of this, I went through his boxes and drawers and briefcases last Friday. I was sorting out the financial bits and pieces of his life in 2009. It was an endeavour tailor-made for running off on tangents. While looking for something else, you find photos of events you had forgotten to remember. You get lost, for a while, in the memories. Then you get back to separating Bell bills from Visa statements, prescription receipts from rent receipts.

Suddenly you get blind-sided by a treasure trove of things you didn’t think could be kept this long: a document holder with priceless links to youth and a journey from the east end of London to the heart of Ontario.

On April 2, 1933, a month before his 14th birthday, he was enrolled in the London County Council Trade Scholarships for Boys. His father had to sign an agreement that if the apprenticeship was unsuccessful he would pay “an amount equivalent to the sum expended by the Council in connection with the maintenance, education and training of my son … or the sum of (five pounds), whichever be the less.”

The documents track his progress through the Westminster Technical Institute School of Cookery and Waiting, through his navy years and his work contracts. A record of active naval service shows him on HMS Hood from May 15 until Dec. 22, 1940. Hood went down in May 1941 with three survivors from a crew of 1,415.

I found his employment offer for the job that brought us to Canada in 1957. While working for BOAC at London airport, he successfully applied for a job posting with Aircraft Industries of Canada Ltd. The employment contract was for $1.75 per hour and benefits as covered by the collective agreement with Local 4575 of the United Steelworkers of America. He signed it in England in February 1957 and sailed for Canada in March. We followed in August.

Serendipity is the accidental discovery of something that brings new meaning to completely unrelated events.

It is what makes searches fun. I was looking for bank statements and found my father’s youth.

Heritage isn’t only bricks and mortar. It’s also flesh and blood. We don’t just remember it, we breathe it.

Pissoirs one of many options

2009-07-14T13:26:00.000-07:00

(July 14) - It looks as though we will soon have a trial run of late night pissoirs. That’s a good thing. We’ll never know how well they work unless we give them a good go.

If the thousands of revellers spilling out of the big box bars behave themselves, everything will flow smoothly. It isn’t too big of an if, is it? Those gentlemen are world famous all over town for their behaviour. When all the open air stalls are in use, they will politely line up and wait their turn.

This discussion of places to go has had its benefits. It got us all thinking outside the box. Every problem can have several different solutions. The most obvious ones got ruled out first. This would start with the bar stool tax. A set charge for every licensed spot. The bar owners are not thrilled with this idea. They have a notion they already pay enough property tax. So we keep on looking.

Another idea was to put public washrooms in an empty store. This would have the added advantage of being relatively gender neutral. When some can stand while others sit, no one’s human rights are threatened. But the police don’t much like this idea. You never know what’s going on behind the closed doors of a public washroom. So we keep on looking.

If the pissoirs fail, there is still at least one more way. Most of the bar washrooms have coin vending machines. They dispense various personal items that might be of use for those who, as we used to say when I was a lot younger, hope to get lucky at closing time. Things like combs and colognes and other items.

Some enterprising entrepreneur could add new machines. Drop in a couple of toonies and out pops a pair of Depends. Problem solved.

They might even become the trendy fashion statement for responsible revellers.

Tim Hortons is telling us lately that they can recycle their used coffee cups and lids. They say they’ll be gathering them up in Guelph before the end of the year. They send them to Turtle Island Recycling just north of Toronto. The people in Guelph who are frustrated by the three-stream sorting system are always happy to hear anything that questions its integrity.

The city says the cups can’t be recycled. They have a layer of a thin plastic film that keeps the paper from going soggy when the hot coffee is poured in.

If Tim says it can, and the city says it can’t, a lot of people quickly believe Tim. No further questions asked. Or answered.

The city’s website doesn’t help clear up the confusion. It contains a detailed sorting list for the wet-dry-plus program that says paper coffee cups go in the blue bag and plastic cup lids go into the clear bag.

It is hard to picture Tim Hortons as environmental leaders. If they were, they would give away their used coffee grinds for use in back yard compost bins. Or they would stop double cupping hot drinks and start using paper sleeves like everyone else. Or they would abandon their roll up the rim litter creation project.

These days, everyone wants to project a clean green image. In a world where perception always trumps reality, a good marketing campaign will create this image for anyone willing to pay the bill. They give us carbon neutral cellphones, environmentally friendly sports utility vehicles, litter free coffee shops.

If reality was anything like the public relations image, the world would be in great shape. We wouldn’t be grinding our way down the slope to the infamous tipping point.

Election rhetoric about to heat up

2009-07-07T16:09:00.001-07:00

(July 07) - I can feel the next Guelph municipal election shaping up just over the horizon. We still can’t see everyone, but we are starting to hear them. We have just six more months until nominations open and serious campaigning begins. Ten months after that we’ll be voting.

The Guelph Civic League recently released its annual council report card for 2008. It contained some surprises, and no politician did better than 86.7 per cent.

Ian Findlay of Ward 2 and Leanne Piper of Ward 5 tied for this first-place score.

Gloria Kovach wasn’t paying attention in class. She was concentrating on getting a job in Ottawa and ended the year with 35.7 per cent. All things considered, she might be proud of this result. It will solidify her support among the folk in town who want to bring back the old council.

Christine Billings was neither here nor there with a lackluster 42.9.

Watch out for a lot of strident, hysterical rhetoric coming your way in the next 18 months. It has started already.

The Farbridge opponents pretended to be outraged when city council delegated authority over some infrastructure projects to the city’s CAO. They want special council meetings every time a decision needs making.

What they don’t say is that Hans Loewig can deal only with projects already approved by council and is bound by standard tendering practices. Everything is above board. He must still work with other senior staff members who must countersign all decisions.

There will be a lot of building going on over the next year or two as the Conservatives steal a page from the socialist hymn book and spend their way out of the recession.

City council will take the money and fix up the transit terminal, the fire station and a load of roads.

Their opponents will spend their time building mountains out of molehills.

I did a bit of thinking last week.

I was getting ready for Canada Day and my mind brought me back to our centennial year. Two of our most skilled politicians had top jobs in Parliament at the same time. Lester Pearson led the Liberal Party and Tommy Douglas headed up the NDP. A few years ago, when CBC listeners chose Douglas as the greatest Canadian, Pearson was a close runner-up.

Pearson and our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, have one thing in common: they are the only two in our history to have led two consecutive minority governments without ever winning a majority. The difference is that Pearson knew how to make minority government work.

During his tenure, with Douglas holding the balance of power, we got Unemployment Insurance, the Canada Pension Plan, The Medical Care Act, a national student loan service, the 40-hour workweek, legislated vacation time and a national minimum wage.

Harper’s minority governments have been marked by contempt for other leaders and a bullying, confrontational style that has accomplished nothing of lasting value. He gets away with it because he serves without an effective Official Opposition.

Pearson had one other distinction. He is the only Canadian individual to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He got it in 1957 for developing United Nations Peacekeeping Forces in the Middle East.

How times have changed in half a decade.

Back then, we were known around the world as mediators, a country willing to stand between warring armies and keep them apart. We knew how to settle differences peacefully. Now, we are participants in a futile war halfway around the world. We have sent brave young men and women to kill and to be killed.

Too many come back wounded, emotionally scarred or psychologically damaged.

Pearson and Douglas would roll over in their graves if they saw where Jean Chretien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper have taken the country.

Making Guelph a Better Place

2009-07-03T18:15:00.000-07:00

(July 03) - Like many others in this wonderful city, I came from a distant land. I am Canadian by choice, not by birth. All my children and my granddaughter are Canadian by birth. All but my oldest son were born in Guelph General Hospital.

Whether we were born here or traveled here, our diversity defines us. It makes us interesting. In school I was taught that Canada had two founding nations, the English and the French. It was a lie. There was a third, if you lump all the aboriginal nations into one.

Be that as it may, the original people and the European invaders have since been joined by families from every country in the world. Whether we have been here for ten years or ten thousand years, we celebrated our 142nd birthday on Wednesday.

Canada had its 100th birthday 10 years after my family stepped off a ship and onto a Quebec City dock. In the centennial year we were excited young people in an exciting young country. We were entranced by Expo 67, mesmerized by the music, galvanized by the politics. Then, we marched for peace in Vietnam. Today it’s Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then, we organized food co-ops and worker co-ops. Today I belong to, shop in, or work at, some of the co-ops in Guelph: Meridian Credit Union, Co-operator’s Insurance, Cole Road Housing Co-op, Planet Bean, the Natural Burial Co-operative. There are lots more available: five other housing co-ops, a couple of other credit unions, a bunch of child care co-ops, Guelph Campus Co-op, Gay-Lea Dairy, Fire Fly Energy, Genex and many more.

I had never heard of Guelph 42 years ago. It entered my consciousness in 1968 when ITT, the company my father worked for, abandoned Montreal to come here. I followed in 1971 with a wife and a 14-month old baby.

I had heard of Lester Pearson, the centennial Prime Minister. He has a little known connection to Guelph. He is the only Canadian politician to ever play semi-pro baseball for the Guelph Maple Leafs, a forerunner of the Guelph Royals in the old Canadian League. The Royals Wikipedia entry doesn’t mention Pearson’s time with the team, but he was here for at least the 1917 season. He’s in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, but not the Guelph Sports Hall. Are our standards higher, or is our Hall overdue for a correction?

When I made my way down the 401 to Guelph, it was a bustling city of 60,000. An early memory is trying to catch a bus to campus. I walked to the Square, sat on a bench and waited. And waited. It was a cold February Sunday morning and it was long time before someone came along to tell me I’m not in Montreal any more. You want to know how long ago that was? The public library had so much space there were two community meeting rooms in the basement.

Guelph was a good place to live in 1971 and a better place today. What makes it so? The people, the history, the public institutions, the community involvement. There were always three legs to our economic stool: public sector, manufacturing and co-operatives. The public sector has been eroded by too many acts of privatization. Manufacturing has been hammered by free trade and globalization.

The co-operatives continue to thrive. They have done for a long time.

Samuel Carter, the mayor of Guelph in 1913 – 14 was president of the Workingman's Co-operative Association of Guelph. He was also the first president of the Canadian Co-operative Association.

We have come full circle with our present mayor who also has strong community roots and brings a co-operative style of governance to city hall.

What makes Guelph a better place? We all do.

May running here will liven up the election

2009-06-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-06-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-06-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-06-09T18:00:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-06-02T18:19:00.000-07:00

(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?

Slugs in Ottawa, slugs in the garden

2009-05-26T19:02:00.000-07:00

(May 26) - I am an avid gardener in the way Brian Mulroney is an avid truth teller. We do our best, but it doesn’t always work out as we hoped.

The difference is in the consequences. They are always there when I fall down. If I sprinkle grass seed where periwinkle would have been happier, I wake up the next morning to a blooming field of dandelions. He forgets he got an envelope full of thousand-dollar bills, and no worries. That’s Brian all over, we say.

It’s quite understandable. If I was distracted by unifying Germany, ending apartheid and implementing the GST I’d have never even thought about the periwinkle option for the front yard.

Saving the garden and saving the world are two of the most challenging activities you can be involved in. I know, because I’ve tried them both. The hard part about saving the world is finding more than half a dozen people to sit down and listen to you at the same time.

The hard part about saving the garden is everything. It’s a lot easier to get rid of the slugs in Ottawa than the ones on your front lawn. That’s doubly true when you’re the sort of person who’d rather have a cruddy lawn than a neighbour with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

I used to think the mark of a successful gardener was getting through Victoria Day without having the fruits of your labour done in by frost.

This year, the May 24 was a horrible experience for people and plants. It was cold. It was damp. It was a misery, but nothing I planted was hurt by the neo-winter weather. The main reason for this is that I hadn’t planted anything. Perennials that turn a scornful eye at February blizzards couldn’t care less about a miserable day in May.

I am on a gardening mission. The aim is to enter a horticultural heaven where lawn mowers are as welcome as Karlheinz Schreiber at a Conservative convention.

Several paths lead to this goal. The ones I’m exploring are made of stone. Dry stacked walls. Flagstone paths. Gravel trails. They define garden areas, separated by judiciously planted ground cover.

Books by Lois Hole and other experts help us choose what to plant and where. It appears we can walk on a spread of wooly thyme as comfortably as we can on an expanse of lush lawn.

A lot of people are rushing to the conclusion that those who want to walk on a lawn fit for a putting stroke should go to the country club and pay their green fees.

In his poem Mending Wall, Robert Frost said “before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence.”

Walls don’t separate, they join. There are dry stack walls in Europe that have stood for thousands of years. Look over a landscape and see how they link one field to another. Get up close and see how changing vegetation and unchanging stone come together in perfect harmony.

The easy part about this approach to gardening is that I don’t have to do it myself. There are talented stone workers in town who are happy to do it for me. Of course, they want to be paid for their labour, and that’s only fair.

The thing that’s not fair is the deep distinction between me and Brian Mulroney. When I suffer the consequences of unsuccessful gardening, the cost comes out of my bank account.

When it happens to a former Prime Minister, everyone pays the bill but him.

Man of letters pens his memoir

2009-05-19T19:55:00.000-07:00

(May 19) - Anyone who has even a nodding acquaintance with Guelph’s two newspapers will know Don Ewing. He is a frequent and fluent writer of letters to the editor. They are always short, terse and to the point. Now that his 92nd birthday is behind him, Ewing has expanded his writing to a book of memoirs.

As I Recall is a reminiscence of a life full of optimism and hope. Ewing tells his tale in 110 chapters. Like his letters, they are brief, averaging about five pages each.

He has always been a man of deep conviction. During the Second World War he registered as a conscientious objector and went to work fighting forest fires in British Columbia. Japanese families on the west coast were taken away from their communities and transported to prison camps in the interior. Ewing became aware that their children suffered from a severe shortage of qualified teachers. He offered himself for the job, and spent the last three years of the war teaching in an internment camp.

Ewing’s passions have always been for his family, his music, his church and his political party. He has served them all with an unbroken loyalty.

He was a United Church elder when the Wellington County Separate School Board hired him as their supervisor of music education in 1964. He held this job until his retirement.

I have known Don for many years through our mutual involvement in the local NDP riding association. While we haven’t always agreed about everything, I have always admired his grit and determination. Browse through his memoirs and you will see that his principles have not wavered an inch since he formed them.

It is the sort of book that you will browse, rather than read. You won’t start on page one and stick with it until you arrive at page 515. It is, strangely, the perfect book for the Internet age. Strange, because nearly all the tales he tells happened well before computers invaded our homes.

When Ewing cut his political teeth, he didn’t use a Facebook group to stay in touch with his friends. He would send them a letter, or call them on the phone. He didn’t need Twitter when he was organizing convention delegates to support a candidate or a cause.

So think Wikipedia. If you’re anything like me, you love it. Look something up, get part way through it, see a link to something else and follow it to a new revelation. Before you know it, you’re a few hours older and a few years smarter. Ewing’s book is like that. It’s not a smooth chronological thread. In Chapter 45 he tells some anecdotes about his time with the local CCF and NDP. In Chapter 57 he talks about getting the job in Guelph and eventually moving here. That’s how the book goes, and you’ll find yourself flipping backwards and forwards and sometimes sideways. You can find out about the houses he’s lived in, the cars he’s owned, the pianos he’s played, the books that inspired him and the people who shaped him.

It has been a remarkable life, and he recalls it in an often humorous and always interesting manner. We can help him celebrate it on the afternoon of May 31. That’s when he’s having his book launch at The Bookshelf downtown. You can buy a copy and he’ll sign it. You can meet his family. You can chat with himself. When you’ve done all that, you can spend time chatting with some of the people who’ve known him. Most have had pretty interesting lives of their own.

Money needed to start process

2009-05-12T18:39:00.000-07:00

(May 12) - Recession busting infrastructure money is coming to Guelph. Some is aimed at upgrading the housing in which some of our poorest community members live. It is still uncertain how much is coming, but it is on the way.

Wellington County Housing Services provides an umbrella under which families occupy almost 3,000 homes. Ownership ranges from co-ops to private nonprofits to county-owned housing. The county is the service manager, overseeing several housing providers. On April 20, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing wrote to service managers across Ontario to say that the provincial budget allocated $704 million for social housing renovation and retrofit projects. Wellington County will get a share of this money.

Housing providers were asked to submit a list of projects they are ready to move forward on. This had to be done last week, and the work, if approved, has to start in June and be finished by next March. Two of the criteria to be used in choosing which projects will get money are enhanced energy efficiency and reduced operating costs. The importance of these can’t be overstated. Most, but not all, of the families living in those 3,000 homes are receiving rent-geared-to-income subsidies. This money comes directly from the county’s tax base. The less it costs to operate the system, the lower the strain on you.

There has not been much new social housing built in Ontario in the past 15 years. Most of it is getting old and tired. Even the new housing is approaching 20 years old. Furnaces are starting to break down. The ones that were put in were generally bottom of the line construction grade units. No high efficiency furnaces were put into low income housing. Now they are coming to the end of their natural life expectancy. They will need to be replaced. By the end of this year, all new furnaces sold in Ontario must be at least 90 per cent efficient. These are more expensive, of course.

There is a similar situation with home appliances. All of the co-ops and nonprofits provide at least a fridge and stove. The fridges that were made 20 years ago were not energy efficient and are starting to break down. It is better to replace them with Energy Star models, but here’s the Catch 22: the upfront capital replacement money isn’t there, but the cost of keeping them running is a huge burden on operating budgets. There are rebates available, and there is a payback time. These are geared more towards private homeowners, and the process for getting rebates is complicated. The first step is an energy audit, then the energy upgrades are done, then a follow up audit, then the rebates come. This must all be done within an 18-month window.

I’ll give one example from the housing co-op where I work. It has 82 townhouses. At about $3,500 each, before rebates, the cost of installing a high efficiency furnace in each one is over $300,000 after taxes. Rebates of around $1,000 per furnace would drop this to about $220,000. Add in the cost of upgrading attic insulation, fixing draughty windows and doors, and buying more efficient appliances and you are looking at big dollars. It’s easy enough to say there is a 10-to 15-year payback time. The trick is finding the money to kick-start the process.

A system designed for private home owners breaks down when it is applied to multi-residential social housing complexes. Families who live in them shouldn’t have to wait for a recession before being included in the movement to reduce global warming.

Keeping things in perspective

2009-05-05T15:46:00.000-07:00

(May 05) - Brangelina can’t be expected to have twins every time the world needs a bit of a distraction. The supermarket tabloids don’t have enough paper and ink to sustain it. Rogue asteroids bearing down on the planet are sometimes good for taking our minds off other problems. They are, fortunately, a distant distraction. There’s limited value in a threat we can’t see coming. An old-fashioned plague is always good for the system.

We obsess about our health. Those who are reasonably well want to stay that way. The others worry about exposure to anything that might make them worse. The mere mention of the word pandemic strikes fear in the hearts of both the hale and the frail. For good reason. New diseases are emerging with alarming frequency. A few years ago it was SARS. Then it was avian flu. Then listeriosis. Now swine flu.

The precautionary principle demands that we can’t simply mention that no one in Guelph has come down with swine flu. We always have to tack on the word “yet”. Health officials are waiting nervously for the first case to hit town.

The media loves it. Newspapers and television networks are weary of talking about the recession, the implosion of the auto industry and wars around the globe. Swine flu brought a chance to talk about something new, and they seized the opportunity with gusto. As I write this, the CBC website banner headline reads “number of confirmed swine flu cases in Canada now at 83.” You have to read down to the sixth paragraph to find out the cases are all mild.

It also gave governments the chance to look like they are doing something. While they issue dire warnings about a pandemic, they hope people will stop asking them about withering pension plans. There isn’t much they can say or do, though. The best they could think of at the start of the outbreak was to tell us to stay away from Mexico City. As the kids say these days, “well, duh!”

I would feel better if they used this illness to examine the effects of deregulation. The entire food chain, from production to processing to purchasing, is monopolized by a few large corporations. The treatment of animals on factory farms might be a good place for governments to look. Instead of that, they knuckled under to industry pressure to stop calling it swine flu. The sale of pork products might drop. It never struck me as a wise idea to rely on large corporations to police themselves. It’s a poor substitute for legal regulations. Now we can see why.

I’m not a doctor, but I used to watch Marcus Welby. Now I watch House. This training tells me the threat of disease is always serious, but we should try to keep it in perspective. A lot more people will probably die this year from regular flu than from this new strain.

It is always a good idea to be cautious and reduce your exposure to germs. Wash your hands regularly. Sneeze into your elbow. Follow standard hygienic practices. Watch what you eat. As much as possible, buy meat that was raised and slaughtered locally. Organically grown fruits and vegetables are always healthier than those that are trucked in from far and wide. The amount of preservatives and pesticides they carry will do you more harm than any number of trips to Mexico City.

Above all, stay calm. If you feel feverish, don’t assume the worst. Don’t rush into Emergency. Go to your doctor and take a few days off school or work. This too will pass.

A frantic race to the bottom

2009-04-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

(April 28) - In 2007, 111 workers died from sudden, traumatic injuries in Ontario workplaces. Another 375 passed away after suffering a work-related disease. Those are the people whose claims were approved by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB). More than a quarter of a million had injury claims approved by the WSIB, with more than 80,000 of them requiring time off work to recover.

That’s a worker killed every three days. Almost 700 injured every day, 221 seriously enough qualify for lost time pay. Thousands more suffer silently from repetitive strain injuries but are unable to prove they were caused at work.

It happens every year. According to the 2007 WSIB Annual Report, 5,086 workers were killed by their work since 1998.

It is, to put it gently, a shameful disgrace.

Today is the national day of mourning for workers killed or injured on the job. Once again, the Guelph & District Labour Council has organized an annual memorial service for 5 p. m. in Goldie Mill Park. They’ve been doing this for more than 20 years now, and they could be doing it for another 20. There is no sign the carnage is stopping. If anything, it could get worse.

When we get through this economic crisis, people will get back to work. If things keep going the way they are, though, the workplaces will be lacking a key component of occupational health and safety programs: a strong union. I worked in the field for long enough to understand one truth. Unionized workplaces have much more effective joint health and safety committees than nonunion places. There is greater compliance with the law and regulations, and more efficient channels of communication.

The stronger the union, the safer the workers.

This recession is being used for a purpose unlike any that went before it. Unions are under attack. It is happening primarily in the automotive industry, and a frightening number of people are standing on the sidelines cheering it on. Under the guise of bailing out GM and Chrysler, both the U. S. and Canadian governments are demanding that workers take a massive reduction in their standard of living.

The Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), along with the other unions in the public and private sectors, set standards that generally raised the bar for everyone. If wages and benefits go down in the manufacturing sector, they will go down everywhere.

The CAW is taking a beating, and you should not be happy about it. Every concession that is wrung out of them will trickle down. Toyota set its wages at a level where they thought the union could be kept out. Everything the Chrysler workers give back will be taken away from Toyota and Linamar workers.

We are in a frantic race to the bottom, and no one will win.

When we reflect on the purpose of the day of mourning, we should reflect on the fate of the people who will return to their jobs with wounded unions. When a company like Chrysler seeks to increase its competitive position, it isn’t just about wages. It’s also about reducing the work rules it must abide by. Health and safety programs will be eroded.

A couple of years from now, we will still be gathering at Goldie Mill Park on the afternoon of April 28. Our unions will still be trying to recover the ground they’ve lost. The financial institutions that caused the mess will continue to prosper. The workers who did not cause it will continue to suffer. Five hundred will die every year.

Those among us who think auto workers are overpaid will find themselves worse off than they’ve ever been.

Uncontrolled growth Guelph’s real problem

2009-04-21T18:00:00.000-07:00

(April 21) - There is no sense crying over spilled milk. You just have to mop it up, stop it from damaging the floor too badly and make sure the next jug doesn’t spill as well.

The Hanlon Creek Business Park is spilled milk. The jug was dropped 30 years ago. That we didn’t notice the mess until recently says more about the past than the present or the future.

Back then, the environment wasn’t the passionate concern it is today. A lot of people cared, but not as much as now. The milk spilled when no one was looking. We can’t be Erica and go back in time to steady the jug. The damage has been done. We can limit the impact. We can’t prevent it.

It is not all bad anyway. The jobs that will be attracted to the area tomorrow will make a healthier contribution to our city than the jobs that are leaving today. We can save the salamanders while we put supper on the table. We just need to pay attention to several things at the same time.

Smart growth looks at three measures of community health – environmental, social and economic.

All are equally important. Where would Guelph be today if people had surrounded that maple tree and prevented John Galt from swinging his axe in 1827? Or, after the downtown core was full, would development of the Exhibition Park neighbourhood have been considered sprawl? Would protection of wetlands and water tables have stopped the development of Dufferin Street?

The problem is not growth. Uncontrolled growth is. The scale and the rate at which it happens is scaring the bejeebers out of us, and so it should. The development industry has taken control of the process. It has effectively eliminated the checks and balances on greed. The people need to take the process back and democratically manage the impact of growth. If we don’t, we will lose both the salamanders and our ability to put supper on the table.

While our attention is focused on the business park, we run the risk of not noticing another jug teetering on the edge of the shelf. If this one falls, the mess will be mighty. A cloverleafed Hanlon Expressway is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

In a way, Mike Salisbury was correct. Changes to it are inevitable. Lise Burcher also got it right when she said doing nothing is not an option.

Yes, the Hanlon is already there and yes, it was never properly finished. It will not be improved by compounding the mistakes made when it was built.

As surely as death follows life, a cloverleaf at Clair Road will make it inevitable that another will be built at Woodlawn Road. If you don’t believe me, wait 20 years and have another look. Or go over to Kitchener now and drive down the Conestoga Parkway. That’s what we’re looking at with the Hanlon. If we're not careful, the two will be joined one day.

Yes, the Hanlon needs to be improved. We can’t let it sit forever as a frustrating strip of pavement. But what is our community definition of improvement? I don’t believe it can be found in the Ministry of Transportation plans. A decision will be made at the city council meeting next week. It might set in motion a new chain of inevitable future decisions that will be out of our control. Or it might put the jug back on the shelf until we rethink the design of the kitchen.

When it was discussed at the community development committee last month, Karl Wettstein wondered if we want a paradigm shift.

I’ll say yes.

Taking the heat for spring snow

2009-04-14T17:59:00.000-07:00

(April 14) - I need to apologize to all my friends and neighbours. It was my fault.

A little over a week ago, Sunday was a lovely day. Nice and warm. The sort of day people get out for a walk, wearing sweaters or light jackets. Some even wearing shorts. You could take your socks off and put your sandals on.

There was a great couple of weeks before it. Balmy spring weather. The day before had been miserable, mind you. An awful wind was howling all night. A wake-up wind. It was still going in the morning when we went to market.

It was the wind that is absolutely horrible when blowing, but quickly forgotten when it stops. Like a toothache, the worse it is the better you feel when it’s over.

The wind did stop. No fear and loathing at three in the morning. No more branches dropping on the lawn. No windows rattling. I felt something like the Liberal caucus after the leader was dumped. Apprehensive, but hopeful. Then day broke and the sun shone. Like a federal Conservative, I stepped out the back door far enough to feel which way the wind was blowing. It wasn’t. Great, I thought, that wasn’t so bad.

I cooked up a good breakfast of fried potatoes, fried sausages, fried eggs and Heinz baked beans. With toast and strawberry jam. And Planet Bean coffee. There’s nothing like it to get the day moving. This isn’t like a proper Scottish breakfast. They fry the eggs in last week’s bacon grease and toss in a sizable chunk of blood pudding. There’s sound logic to this. The Scots start their day secure in the confidence that it doesn’t matter what happens next. No one can treat them worse than they just treated themselves.

They say everyone has to believe in something, and I believe in breakfast. A full plate on a Sunday morning is tough to beat. It gives you the strength to carry on. The resolve to get things done. So I did.

By early afternoon, Lynne and I were ready for a good walk. It wasn’t the vigorous, heart pumping walk of the aerobic enthusiast. It was a purposeful stroll up one street and down another. Through a park. Down a hill, leaving us with the need to go up another to get back to where we were.

This is where we felt like the New Democrats. We members are well used to it by now. It’s how our caucus members must have felt after the coalition fell apart. That was when they played the role of the anxious groom who couldn’t get to the altar quickly enough. They waited around until it became obvious the blushing bride had backed out. Pushed down a hill, they are still climbing back to where they were.

Lynne and I made it up our hill just fine. We stopped to talk with friends who were out doing yard work. One could point with pride to the several flowers already in bloom, and called them all by name. I am always impressed by someone who can tell the difference between a crocus and a snowdrop. I usually group them as yellow ones and purple ones.

All that yard work inspired me. When we got home, I thought I should tidy up the outside a bit. I gathered the shovels and put them in the shed. I carried the bucket of ice melt into the basement. I had my supper. I watched some television. I checked my e-mail. I read my library book. I went to sleep.

We all know what we woke up to the next morning.

Sorry.

Carcinogens banned at home are sent abroad

2009-04-07T17:05:00.000-07:00

(April 07) - Over the next few weeks, you will have lots of opportunity to buy daffodils. Some will be real, some artificial. Some will be in the form of lapel pins. April is daffodil month and people will be knocking on your door asking you to buy some. This is not because of the arrival of spring and the showers that bring May flowers. It’s because of cancer.

The Canadian Cancer Society sends its volunteers out every April to raise money for research into this horrible disease. A lot of this money is still directed to the ambitious goal of discovering a cure. It would be nice if this were to happen, but very unlikely. A cure for cancer is the holy grail of scientific and medical research. One might be out there, so it’s certainly worth a look.

The main emphasis has to be on prevention. Cancer doesn’t just happen without a cause. It happens after something enters the body that doesn’t belong there. Quite frequently this is tobacco smoke. The odd thing about this is that tobacco smoke is the most easily avoidable carcinogen out there. Most of the other ones sneak up while you’re not looking. They are in the air and in the water. If you’re not careful, they could be in your food.

Beginning on April 22, more than 250 chemical pesticide products will be banned in Ontario. This is the positive result of a long campaign by environmentalists. It will prevent exposure to a lot of toxins and carcinogens. The lawn care industry lobbied against this quite strongly, but lush green lawns are going out of fashion. Our communities will be better places without these chemicals. Parents won’t have to be as fearful when their children play outside. There are still risks to be aware of, but they will be significantly reduced this summer. Even dogs will be happier when they don’t have to get their noses up close to freshly sprayed weed killer.

Even without these products, there are still a lot of cancer causing substances all around us. Canadian unions have spent years campaigning for the elimination of carcinogens from workplaces. The Canadian Labour Congress estimates that about 80 per cent of all cancers have environmental causes. They have a particular stake in the issue because of the wide prevalence of occupational cancer. The substances causing it drift out of workplaces to become environmental causes.

One of the worst is asbestos. It has been thoroughly banned everywhere in the country, yet Canada continues to export it to developing countries. Asbestos mining is a big industry in Quebec, and 96 per cent of it is sent overseas. The federal government is a large financial supporter of something called the Chrysotile Institute. What is that, you ask? It used to be called the Asbestos Institute, and it spreads the fiction that asbestos can be used safely in places like Thailand and Indonesia.

An editorial in the October 2008 edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal said: “For several years, Canada has led a ferocious diplomatic opposition” to banning asbestos. “Not a single western democracy supports Canada’s position,” they say, “so Canada has made allies of a few less picky countries including Iran, Russia and Zimbabwe.”

When the cancer society volunteers come knocking on your door this month, buy a daffodil to show your support. For every one you buy, match it with a message to Frank Valeriote. Tell him you want our government to support an international ban on the mining and use of asbestos. We can’t pretend we want to eliminate cancer if we continue to ship it overseas.

The good, the bad and the ugly

2009-03-31T15:40:00.000-07:00

(March 31) - Last week we were treated to the good, the bad and the ugly of municipal politics.

The good. The city is engaging in a lot of public consultation these days. Much more than we became used to in days of old. There were two meetings last week about the Natural Heritage Strategy. I went to the one on Tuesday. A couple of hundred other people also took the time to go. The room at the Holiday Inn was packed. The Wednesday meeting was just as full, I am told. Then on Thursday the Guelph Civic League held a meeting to discuss the development of the Hanlon Creek Business Park. The hall at Norfolk Street United Church was jammed.

There are more coming. Tonight at the West End Community Centre there is a consultation about how Guelph is going to grow. There is another on the same subject next Saturday afternoon at the Italian- Canadian Club. As long as the politicians listen to the citizens, all this consultation is a welcome step forward in our democratic process.

The bad. There were a lot of developers at the natural heritage meetings who chose to leave the room after the city made its presentation but before the feedback portion got underway. It is safe to say they don’t like it. It is too bad that many chose not to contribute thoughtful ideas in the small group discussions. They could have taken half an hour to share their perspective with the rest of us. Some did, most didn’t.

The strategy itself is shaping up as a useful tool to regulate and control development in environmentally sensitive areas. It provides for buffer zones around woodlots, wetlands and wildlife habitats. There are a lot of ambiguities in it, and more than a few loopholes. Some will give the city the flexibility to assess some proposals on an individual basis. Others will give developers a hook to hang onto if they choose to run to the Ontario Municipal Board. The city should close as many of these holes as possible. Then, after the strategy is finalized, they should use it and defend it. They must be willing to resist any challenges with whatever resources it takes.

The ugly came out on Thursday. The Guelph Civic League billed its meeting as a “conversation.” It became more of a confrontation. The degree of hostility directed at city council and staff was disconcerting. The Hanlon Creek Business Park has landed front and centre on the environmental radar screen. There are always legitimate concerns about any project of this magnitude. We always need to watch over the process and keep the impact of the development as low as possible.

It is nearly impossible to keep the process flowing smoothly when inquiring minds become closed minds.

There may be limits to growth.

There should be no limits to civility.

Speaking of ugly, the provincial government has given up any pretense of fighting poverty. The budget last week missed a golden opportunity to help the most needy. The Liberals still refuse to end the clawback of the federal child tax benefit from families on welfare and ODSP.

Premier McGuinty is now speculating that the minimum wage increase scheduled for next year could be postponed. Yet he holds steadily onto the idea that corporate tax cuts will save the economy. After more than 20 years of experimentation, this should be declared a failure.

Someone once said that “no one is exempt from talking nonsense; the misfortune is to do it solemnly.” McGuinty suffers this misfortune.

Ending poverty is expensive. So is bailing out corporations. Given a choice, which one should we take?

Tough solutions are the easy way out

2009-03-24T12:29:00.000-07:00

(March 24) - University curriculum is not a popularity contest.

When Nicolaus Copernicus enrolled at Krakow Academy 500 years ago, astronomy wasn’t a big deal. Most people who thought about it knew the sun revolved around the Earth. It was obvious. All you had to do was stand in the back yard and look up. The sun came into view in the east and disappeared in the west. There was no need to take out a student loan to figure that out.

There weren’t an awful lot of people studying astronomy in 1491. Copernicus signed up for mathematics and went on to study law and medicine. Along the way he met a professor who lit him up. Young Nicolaus was infected with astronomy fever and never recovered. Fifty-two years later he published a book that changed the world. Maybe it didn’t change it so much as stop it from standing still. That was when people started to realize the Earth moves around the sun.

If Krakow Academy rooted out programs with low enrollment, astronomy would have been done like dinner. The professor who put the stars in young Copernicus’s eyes would have been shuffled off to teach something else. Fortunately for them, capitalism wasn’t invented yet. The world wasn’t in the opening months of a recession. Krakow Academy wasn’t being administered by people who believed that tough times demand tough solutions. They didn’t think they should keep only the popular programs and ditch the ones with low enrollment.

Now here we are, 518 years later and what has changed? The university curriculum is turning into a popularity contest. In a message on the University of Guelph web-site, president Alastair Summerlee says they will be “eliminating courses, majors and programs with lower enrolments.” At the same time, they have “the overarching goal of preserving quality and programs that are strengths of the institution and differentiate Guelph from other universities.”

All of a sudden the women’s studies program isn’t popular enough for the University of Guelph. It is about to fall on the sword of the recession. So far it is the only one mentioned as a candidate for the chopping block. It’s hard to see how this is going to save enough money to let them beef up the agricultural college.

The courses offered in the program are from the history, sociology, philosophy, English literature and other departments. Students will still register for Dr. McKenzie’s political science course on Women, Justice and Public Policy. It’s just that a few of them won’t be able to say they majored in Women’s Studies. They’ll take the same courses, from the same professors, and pay the banks the same exorbitant interest on their loans. They’ll just have to tell people they took a History BA with a lot of this, that and the other thing about women.

It is not good enough for the university to adopt the language of the private financial sector. Looking for tough solutions for tough times is the easy way out. There are a lot of bright minds down on that stretch of Gordon Street. They ought to be looking for creative solutions. A recession is the wrong time to cut back on programs. Funding should be provided for the university to bring in its fair share of the newly unemployed and start training them for new opportunities.

There is one thing they should not do. They shouldn’t single out women’s studies as the only endangered species on campus. They shouldn’t poke a stick in the ghost of Simone De Beauvoir’s eye.

Who knows? One day a young Nikki Copernicus might make the radical discovery that the Earth does not revolve around the son.

Decisions today impact life tomorrow

2009-03-17T13:17:00.000-07:00

(March 17) - We have to pay attention. Decisions are being made today that will affect the health and prosperity of our city for a long time to come. They are not being done in secret anymore. It all happens out in the open with lots of notice. We shouldn’t wait until the process is locked in before we stand up and voice our opinions.

The Hanlon Creek Business Park is a good case in point. The deterioration of that part of Guelph did not begin with this council. Nor with the former one. It began with a provincial decision to build the expressway. It was supposed to have rerouted Highway 6 around the city and relieved traffic congestion. It did neither. It cuts like a knife through the heart of the Hanlon Creek watershed.

We should have demanded better then. We didn’t, and it is there. It has been there for over 30 years and isn’t going away. Industry began locating along its southern flanks, and the city developed a plan to attract more. What we see there now is the logical outcome of our failure to challenge a decision four decades ago.

The city’s website has aerial photos of the land to be developed. It looks like a beautiful part of our landscape. Plans for the area have been in the works since 1993. It has been studied to death. The Ward 2 website operated by Councillors Ian Findlay and Vicki Beard has a staff report detailing all this. Doing more studies will afflict the city with paralysis by analysis.

The significant environmental features of the area can be preserved. I am reasonably confident that with the depth of environmental awareness around city hall, this will be done.

While we are focusing attention on what is, for all intents and purposes, a done deal, other decisions are being made. They will have equally bad consequences in another decade or two.

Two of these are the so-called “upgrade” of the Hanlon Expressway and construction of a super highway connecting Guelph to Waterloo and Brampton. Cloverleaf overpasses will have a much deeper impact on Hanlon Creek than the regulated development of a business park will ever have.

A lot of heat was generated by the decision to expropriate three buildings to make way for a new library. What about the land the province will expropriate to make way for the overpasses and the new Highway 7? Where is the heat over that?

It is all part of the same picture. We have a voice in how it is painted. The city is developing a natural heritage strategy which “aims to identify Guelph’s significant natural areas and ensure their long-term protection and enhancement.” It’s all part of a process to integrate the natural heritage system into the city’s official plan update. Public consultation meetings are scheduled for March 24 and 25 at the Scottsdale Holiday Inn. Attending one of them should not be all you do for your city. It should be part of a long-term commitment we all make to preserve Guelph as a good place to live.

Twenty years from now, this recession will be part of our history. People will work in the Hanlon Creek Business Park. They might be able to ride their bikes to work, or take the bus, or drive an electric car. Or they might have to navigate their way through a network of divided highways. These choices are being made now and we should pay attention to them.

The crazy Kentucky cross builder I talked about last week got one thing right. If we go to hell, it will be our own fault.

It’s time to move on public transit

2009-03-10T16:43:00.000-07:00

(March 10) - Fifty per cent off the price of a Hummer. So read a sign on the roof of a dealer near an on-ramp to the interstate in Knoxville, Tenn.

Lynne and I were down there at the end of February, visiting her sister. The weather was a bit warmer than here, but the economy is every bit as cold. When I pointed to the Hummer sign, Nancy shrugged her shoulders. A couple of months ago, she told me, another SUV dealer had a similar sale. Buy one and get a second for one cent.

They still can’t sell the beasts.

This isn’t a bad news story. It would be if people bought them at the reduced rate. That would mean the only reason Hummers were not selling is because it costs too much to get them off the lot. In truth, it costs too much to keep them off the lot.

The problem is not the sticker price. It has nothing to do with the wages and benefits earned by the workers who build them. This is the case not just for Hummers. It also applies to all the other vehicles that people are not buying. As the chief economist for the Canadian Auto Workers explained recently, they could all work for nothing and nothing would change.

The good news is that more people in more places are thinking about the carbon costs as much as the dollar costs. When the economy turns around, as it surely will one day, people will start buying cars again. The appetite for monster vehicles like Hummers will disappear, but the public will feast on fuel-efficient ways of getting around.

Governments that want to kick-start the economy with infrastructure investments should look and learn. Now is the perfect time to develop better public transit.

It was a pleasant trip. We got home to the news that the downtown graffiti artists were back at work. Last Friday I took a walk along the path behind the River Run. Some graffiti had been erased from the rear of the building. One of the information plaques about the ecology of the Speed River was spray-painted with a denunciation of racist white history.

It really is idiotic. It reminded me of the strangest exhibit on display at the Museum of Appalachia just north of Knoxville. It’s a collection of huge white crosses Henry Harrison Mayes made and erected at the side of major highways from 1917 until he died in 1986. He was a Kentucky coal miner on a peculiar mission. He put up thousands of them, painted with messages like “get right with God” or “if you go to Hell it’s your own fault.”

His goal was to put at least one in every country of the world. He donated three to NASA with a request to bring them to the Moon, Mars and Jupiter. It was the sort of in-your-face foolishness that has little to do with any meaningful understanding of spirituality. If anything, it should embarrass those people who want religion to be taken seriously.

The Guelph graffiti artist is the Henry Harrison Mayes of protest politics. The messages are on the same level of intellectual clarity.

One that I saw said “evict the police.” Others apparently called on us to kill the police and their families. Others protested the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver and Whistler.

None of it bears any resemblance to effective political protest. It is more like immature adolescent rebellion.

That it is imposed on our public spaces anonymously and under the cover of darkness makes it all doubly pathetic.

Women have ways to go despite their great strides

2009-03-03T18:50:00.000-08:00

(March 3) - There are 2,754 units of non-profit social housing in Wellington County. More than half are occupied by single-mother families. Next Sunday is International Women’s Day, a good time to reflect on the social issues that confront women. You should also think how governments, for all their fine words and platitudes, are doing next to nothing to address the issues that keep thousands of women and their children living in poverty.

Many feminists, female and male, like to point to the achievements won in the 98 years since Women’s Day was first proclaimed. There have been many. Glass ceilings have been smashed. Women have broken into the professions. Here in Guelph we readily elect women to high political offices. The chief executive officer of the largest employer in town is a woman. Progress has been made.

In spite of the great strides, there is still a lot of ground to be made up by all women.

Good affordable housing is part of the picture. Less than 3,000 houses spread over a population greater than two hundred thousand is not much. It barely dents the need. Social housing supported by Wellington County consists of four of the six housing co-ops in town, several non-profits, and about 1,200 units owned and operated by Guelph and Wellington Housing Corporation.

Nearly all the families in these homes are supported by rent-geared-to-income subsidies. The co-ops are a nice exception. They are mixed-income communities where some families pay full market rent and others receive subsidies. Even in co-ops, the majority of homes are led by single mothers.

Those who are fortunate enough to receive a subsidy pay around 30 per cent of their income on shelter. Thousands of others are not so lucky. Many who rent privately pay well over half their income for inadequate housing. Many others are stuck in abusive domestic situations from which they can’t afford to escape.

The recent federal budget promised $2 billion over two years for affordable housing investment. Half will go to badly needed repairs to run-down social housing projects. The other half will go towards housing for aboriginals, seniors and people with disabilities. This is also desperately needed. There is no money for new homes for low income families and nothing to help people stuck renting a slum from a private landlord. Almost all the budget money is tied to the negotiation of cost sharing agreements with the provinces.

The need for quality public housing has been ignored for too long. It will take a major commitment on the part of government to fix it. If they are serious about fighting poverty, they have to make that commitment now. They can find billions of dollars to bail out struggling corporations. They should be able to find billions more to bail out struggling families.

The United Nations adopted a theme for the 2009 Women’s Day. It is, once again, centred on ending violence against women and girls. Ten years ago the theme was much the same. Then it was about building a world free of violence against women. Why does it keep coming back? Why does the world dedicate itself over and over again to a goal it seems incapable of meeting?

The answer is not hard to find. Too many women are not given the tools and resources they need to make their own choices. A lot of very dedicated women work at Wellington County Housing Services. They do good work with limited resources. If it were up to them, there wouldn’t be any under-housed families. That there are is an insult to all of society.

Next Sunday, International Women’s Day comes around for the 98th time. Thank your favourite woman for the things she does and relieve her of the burdens she carries. Don’t just give her a hug. Give her a future.

Healthy libraries make healthy communities

2009-02-24T14:52:00.000-08:00

(February 24) - Libraries are destinations. Places where people go so they can say they went there. This used to be the stuff of museums and art galleries. You would get on the bus, go into the city and make a day of it. The museum, the gallery, the library are magnets. They draw you in and, if they are properly situated and designed, they keep bringing you back. They are people places and there is nothing quite like them for livening up a downtown.

We came another big step closer to completing the puzzle of downtown revitalization last week. Council approved the specific location and general design of the new central library building. With two “destination” buildings anchoring the northern and southern edges of the downtown, there is great promise for the prosperity of the shops between them.

A friend sent me a link to a very interesting website that explains all this very well. It is the Project for Public Places . It describes itself as a “non-profit organization dedicated to creating and sustaining public places that build communities.” Just wandering through the website will give you an education in the intelligent design of community spaces. The common element in all the designs is people. If a downtown does not attract people, it will never thrive.

Despite my serious misgivings about where the planning priorities were lining up in the centre of Guelph, it is making sense now. There will be a transportation hub, parking, green space and healthy businesses. The ingredients are lining up well.

The timing is even right. There will be a chorus of people saying the library is too expensive for the hard economic times we are in. I disagree. The sooner we can get the shovels in the ground, the sooner we can start getting more Guelphites working. The post office building was built as a public works project in the dirty thirties. Now we can’t imagine downtown without it.

Approval of the project ran into some turbulence because of its potential impact on the Family Thrift Store. This business has a lot of street support. Friends of the store mounted a fast Facebook campaign and rallied to its defence. Council wisely decided that the fate of the public library can’t depend on the survival of a used goods shop. If its services are really needed it will find a home somewhere else.

The question of building ownership is still up in the air. There are at least three choices available. The poorest alternative would be to turn the project over to a private developer and lease back the space. The former design options showed a building complex housing the library, a parking garage, and commercial and residential space. An argument could have been made for a type of co-operative ownership model. Now that the library will be in its own building at the north end of Baker Street, there is no good reason for ownership to be anything other than public.

The Public Library Board, of which I am a member, has owned the building and its contents for more than 100 years. This is a fine tradition that should not stop just because we are entering a recession.

It is generally acknowledged that the cause of this economic meltdown was a drive to more and more uncontrolled globalization. The way out will be through regulated regionalization. The people who brought us to the brink of financial disaster dismiss this scornfully as protectionism. It is a mystery why anybody would continue listening to them. There is nothing wrong with protecting the communities in which we live, work and raise our families. It is the sensible thing to do.

As they say on the Public Spaces website, “libraries are now being included in downtown revitalization projects and other urban and suburban development plans.” It’s been going on across North America for the past 10 years or so. Library spending has a healthy return on investment. The return is partially economic, but it has a much wider impact.

Healthy libraries make healthy communities. Last week city council moved Guelph towards the right side of the curve. Let’s stay there.

Natural landscape part of our heritage

2009-02-17T17:01:00.000-08:00

(February 17) - People in Guelph sure do like their old buildings. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the Loretto Convent. Some people stopped me on the street wanting to know how I could even consider demolishing it. I should make it clear that I am all in favour of keeping the old building in an upright position. The debate over what use is made of it is over. Money has been acquired, plans for its conversion are afoot and work has begun.

We are now in Heritage Week, as good an opportunity as we can get for taking stock of what we have and what we want to keep. Yesterday used to be called Heritage Day. That was because February 15 is the anniversary of the adoption of the Canadian flag. When Ontario declared the third Monday of February as a statutory holiday last year, the Liberals chose to call it Family Day instead. It’s not surprising they turned their backs on Heritage Day. They don’t like being reminded of their dismal record of protecting historic buildings like the Mitchell farm house.

That never to be forgotten old building became a symbol and a rallying cry. Whenever a stone structure is about to be turned into a pile of rubble, the call goes out. We reach for our placards and mill about, chanting “Remember the Mitchell!” And so we should. It’s worth being careful when deciding the future of our past. Once it is torn down, it doesn’t come back. That’s another lesson we learned from the Mitchell house. Be very, very skeptical when a developer promises to number and store all the stones so a building can be reassembled somewhere else. In fact, be more than skeptical. Don’t believe it. It isn’t going to happen.

Which gets us back to the convent. It has been saved, and it will become the new civic museum. The diocese wanted to demolish it. The upkeep was too expensive. The public wanted to save it. We saw the beauty of the shell, but not the asbestos, lead, mould and other toxic material inside. The museum needed a bigger home, and the convent needed an occupant. A host of needs converged and the convent building became a suitable answer for all of them.

It wasn’t a win-win. What we have up on Catholic Hill is far from a marriage made in heaven. The museum was never the best possible use for the convent building, but it quickly became the only possible use.

There is another aspect of preservation to which we need to pay equal attention. Our natural heritage. The rivers and forests and wetlands. The hills and valleys. The rivers. All these features define our geography and our culture. Whether we deal with a physical building or an open landscape, we have to balance what we have with what we want. We want our city to be a healthy place for our children. It also has to be a welcoming place for the new families who will move here.

The city is developing an environmental inventory. It will map the significant, and the sensitive, environmental features within the city. It should, and will, be used as a guide for future development of areas such as Hanlon Creek. The business park had a long gestation period. It has been studied, and studied again. The city needs it. It might help preserve another part of Guelph’s disappearing heritage –having a job to go to. The buildings will go on top of land that once gave life to trees and other vegetation and animals. There is wetland down there that needs preserving just as much as the finest farmhouse or the classiest convent.

An understanding of the ecological features of our urban landscape is essential to measuring the impact of growth. Development isn’t always bad. Uncontrolled development is. Guelph isn’t breaking new ground. We are moving back to reclaim the Smart Guelph commitment to social, environmental and economic health.

As we move through Heritage Week, give a lot of thought to our limestone buildings and our farmhouses. Also think about our landscape. Any city that can get excited about an unheated cobbler’s shed ought to get downright passionate about the fish in Hanlon Creek.

Plastic brings the world into focus

2009-02-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

(February 10) - It’s a squeaky, creaking old world out there. You don’t notice it until you start hearing it properly. I am now. I am into my second week as a hearing aid wearer. I’m a long way from deaf, but I was a long way from blind when I started wearing glasses. Now it’s not just the sights that are in focus. The noise is, too.

What noise there is! I didn’t realize how creaky a hardwood floor can be. Or what a racket is made folding a sheet of paper. The other day I was coming out of Planet Bean’s Grange Plaza store and nearly jumped out of my skin. A snow plow sounded like it was bearing down on me. It was halfway across the parking lot. Then there was the Farmers’ Market. It used to be that hundreds of people could shop there in relative peace and quiet. Now they bellow at each other. All at the same time.

On the second day I had the things in my ear, I was in a library board committee meeting. I thought I should apologize for speaking so loudly, that I was trying to adjust to them. The other people said no, I was actually talking more quietly than usual. I thought I was shouting. That’s what it’s like walking around with a microphone and speaker stuffed in each ear.

When hearing starts to go, it is usually the higher frequency sounds that become inaudible first. It seems to happen so gradually that you fail to notice it. When vision starts to go, you do notice. The world starts getting a little bit blurry. Then a lot. You’d have to be blind not to see it.

With hearing loss, you don’t think it’s you at first. It is other people who start mumbling. Many men don’t hear their wives. Some of them can’t.

We learn to compensate and get on with it. Then we have a life altering experience. Like cataract surgery. I have been there as well. With mine, the world became so cloudy it was like looking through a glass coated with Vaseline. With a plastic lens I could see more clearly than I had since I was a child. It was great. Like most people, I wished I could have done it sooner.

Now with a pair of souped-up, computer-driven gizmos in my ears I hear better than I could in years. I could always hear something. Now I hear everything. Life is better with plastic eyes and ears.

With music, you start losing the high notes. It’s so gradual you don’t notice, but when you miss them, you miss a lot. Think about Jimi Hendrix. Even though he’s almost 40 years dead, he’s sounding the way he should all over again. He’s the man who showed the world how a guitar should sound. Listen to him again for the first time. Do it without those little bud-type ear phones. They’re not that good to begin with, and totally incompatible with hearing aids. Get proper ones and Jimi will come back to life for you.

Most of us wear glasses these days. Some just for reading, some just for driving. Some for everything. We don’t think of ourselves as visually impaired. We don’t worry that by putting on a pair of glasses we make a spectacle of ourselves.

A lot of people who should wear hearing aids don’t. There is a stigma to hearing impairment. Shouldn’t be, but there it is. It’s considered a disability, and who wants one of them?

Glasses have become so socially acceptable that they are fashion statements. Not so with hearing aids. They’re not cool. You’ll never hear someone open a conversation by saying, “Wow, I love your hearing aids. They suit your hair and put a creak in your ear.” They’re more likely to pretend they don’t notice. Or look pityingly at you and ask when did you have to start wearing them.

Glasses and hearing aids do the same thing. They bring the world into focus. They help you to sort out what you want to see and hear. One prevents you from walking into brick walls, the other from sound walls. There is no shame in wearing either.

Eye-glazing issue impacts all of us

2009-02-03T17:15:00.000-08:00

(February 03) - Like a band of Detroit auto executives going to Washington, the Guelph land developers went to Carden St. last week. They sang from the same karaoke disc. It was a hurting song, the kind that used to bring tears to the eyes of hardened politicians. The fiddles were crying, the pedal steels were wailing. Sadly, for them at least, everyone on the dance floor had heard the song once too often. Enough tears didn’t flow from enough eyes. The boys had their hands out, but all they went home with was a fistful of Kleenex.

What got them excited enough to show up at city hall? The very thing that would ordinarily put the rest of us to sleep. Development charges. The city wanted to increase them. The home builders wanted to freeze them. As it turned out, council had the good sense to tell them no. A freeze would have cost all of us money. Possibly as much as $20 million over five years.

This is roughly how it works. Developers buy land as cheaply as they can get it and sit on it for a while, until there are enough people coming to live here that more homes need to be built. The developers build the houses, sell them at a tidy profit, and move on to wherever they have more empty land to speculate with. Everyone is happy. Families have homes, developers have profits, and the city has an expanded tax base. Life is good.

The fly in the ointment, though, is that the city has to run storm water drains, waste water drains, clean water pipes, and other mundane things to the places where people want to live. That costs money. Under the routine rules of city life, it is paid for through development charges. It’s a cost recovery arrangement. The home builders pay and pass the cost over to the home buyers. Everyone is still happy. Life is still good.

The other fly in the ointment is that developers are never content with being happy. They always want to be happier, which is what they would be if they didn’t have to pay higher development charges. They would prefer to have the city eat the cost and spit it out into the bottomless property tax bucket. The cost could have been as high as $4 million a year if development keeps going like gangbusters. It could have been as low as $1 million a year if everything slows to a crawl. Either way, there would have been a cost. Nine of the 11 councillors and one mayor in attendance had the gumption to say no. Life is still good. Everyone is still happy except for a few home builders.

There was some freezing in the air. Industrial development charges were frozen for two years. Increases will be phased in over the following three. At the high end, this could run us up a bill of a little over one and a half million per year. Or it could be as low as $400,000. The councilors did some arithmetic and looked at all the jobs going south. They don’t want them going any further south than the emerging Hanlon Business Park. Without industrial development, there will never be a need for new housing. Council made a compromise, but it seems to have been a wise one.

It didn’t happen without some peculiar political positioning. The motion to freeze the industrial charges was made by Maggie Laidlaw. She has often been stereotyped as an anti-business maverick. Her motion passed unanimously. Then Karl Wettstein moved to freeze residential development rates. He likes us to see him as a friend of the hard done by tax payer. Yet there he was leading the charge for the option that would have cost us the most money. It didn’t pass. Then Bob Bell went over the top by moving a motion to freeze everything on the table. Take the full $4 million a year and hand it off to the home builders. It didn’t pass either, but isn’t he the one who recently had his knickers in a knot because the province pulled a $1.5 million grant out of the city’s budget?

Life is always good. Sometimes it’s also fun.

Send some spam next time

2009-01-27T16:21:00.000-08:00

(January 27) - It’s getting a little silly out there. Maybe a bit more than a little. Last Wednesday evening I got one of those irritating long distance phone calls. You know the type. You probably get them as well, from one marketer or another. It is often either Rogers or Bell offering a free something that will cost money sooner or later. Usually sooner. Or it could be a deal on new windows. Or a wonderful ocean cruise if you act right now.

It wasn’t any of them. It was Gilles Bisson. He was talking about the historic moment we’re living through – it was the day after the Obama inauguration, after all – and I could help create another historic moment by electing him to replace Howard Hampton.

I’ve met Bisson a few times. He comes from northern Ontario and is the MPP for Timmins - James Bay. He’s been in Guelph several times to help with campaigns on a variety of issues.

He’s a very nice guy. Sincere, hard working and all the rest of it. If he was a convent I’d run a glass staircase up his side and keep him around forever. But he’s not a convent and he’s not Barack Obama.

He’s not the only one scrambling to ride the Obama bump. Ikea unleashed a new advertising campaign last week. It tells Americans to embrace change and to start it with domestic reform. They even rented presidential looking limousines and drove around Washington with Ikea boxes strapped to the roof. Pepsi got in the act as well. They plastered Washington with billboards saying “joy” and “hope”. They put the round Pepsi symbol where the ‘o’ should be.

Bisson is more like Ikea than he’s like Obama. He’s safe, comfortable, and accessible. He’s reliable. Steady and sturdy. If you were going to go out and buy a dining room table, you’d tell the sales clerk to bring you one that’s built like Bisson. It’s strength would be that it is just like every other table you’ve ever had. It would do its job and you’d get more than your money’s worth.

You wouldn’t invite your friends over so they could all admire the table. They’d enjoy a meal while being generally aware that if the table wasn’t there, the food would be in an awful mess all over the floor.

The message itself was just one of the things that annoyed me. I confess I didn’t listen to the whole thing. It might have changed as it went on. Not likely, but maybe. I should also disclose that the other annoyance was the call itself. I don’t react well to these things. A taped automatic message at supper time is not a direct route to the warm and fuzzy side of my heart. Sending spam is marginally more effective.

The most annoying thing is that Bisson does not need to jump onto the Obama bandwagon. He has his own strengths that have served him well over the years. Being new is not one of them. If Ontario New Democrats embrace Bisson, they’ll be reaching for a comfortable sweater to keep out the winds of change.

Four people are running for Hampton’s job. They’ll be at Norfolk United Church on February 10. The voting is in March. Three are men, aged 51, 57 and 60. Bisson is the youngest.

If they want to pin their hopes on Obamania, they might note that he is 47 years old. Andrea Horwath, the only woman in the running, is 45. She worked as a community development worker before winning elections. Not that it matters, but isn’t that how himself earned a pay cheque before Chicago sent him to Washington? Of the four Ontario candidates, which one looks the most like Barack Obama?

If I were recording a telephone message to blast across the province, I’d think things through ahead of time. The New Democratic Party of Ontario has only ever had, from the day of its birth, white men in suits as leaders. If the thing we want is historic change, which of these four candidates should we think about?

But then, if I were sending out telemarketing messages, I’d make sure to lose my number. I can’t stand the things.

Nip and tuck keeping the old convent alive

2009-01-20T17:37:00.000-08:00

(January 20) - Sometimes, saving old buildings becomes a lot like refusing to sign a DNR for your ailing granny. A lot of emotional sentiment gets in the way. Nostalgic memories make you want to keep her around forever, but sometime you can’t. The realities of her condition might outweigh memories of better days. I wonder if we are reaching that point with the Loretto Convent.

It is not always nice to acknowledge, but there comes a time when today trumps yesterday. Just as clearly, there will come a time when tomorrow will trump today. The convent is a heritage building with a lot of cultural and historic value. No question about that. It has been standing on the hill for more than 150 years. It hasn’t been used as a girl’s boarding school since 1924. Nuns continued living in the convent until 1996. The building has stood empty since then.

A task force set up by the city to look at future uses for the site issued a report in 2005. It said the convent building is “the oldest existing school building in Guelph and is recognized as an excellent example of a mid-nineteenth century limestone building. It was originally a classically proportioned three-storey building lying on a north-south access. In 1872, a substantial stone chapel was added to the north, and two additional floors and the mansard roof were added by the local architect, George Bruce, in 1896.”

It is certainly a building that deserves to be preserved. Granny still looks good when we see her in the visitors’ sitting room at the nursing home. Not as strong as she used to be, but not hooked up to the heart machine yet.

What we are seeing now is that it is difficult to breathe new life into her. Converting the convent to a museum is proving to be as controversial as the original decision to preserve it.

It has to be upgraded to modern building codes. It has to conform to the city’s accessibility guidelines. It must meet the LEED environmental standards for green buildings.

It can all be done. Not easily, given her age and condition, but possible.

When she gets out of surgery, she won’t look exactly like the granny we remember. She’ll forever have a big glass staircase up the side to make room for two exit doors on each floor. The building code requires them. Then there’s the elevator from Norfolk Street to satisfy the accessibility guidelines.

These seem to be the two most contentious issues to come out of a public meeting last week. The architects have a good record of updating heritage buildings. The new challenges the convent is throwing at them mean bringing it in at budget could be nip and tuck. She won’t be as stately and grand when she starts her new life.

There’s another wrinkle. Apparently there are two outside toilets on the north side of the building. These might be incorporated into the final design. I expect these are somehow deemed to be part of the cultural heritage of the site. So is the treatment of girls in Catholic boarding schools and the refusal to educate them in sciences. It is not a heritage worth preserving.

The council house my family lived in near London airport was built in 1948. It had an outdoor toilet near the back door. The last time I was there, most public housing had transferred to private ownership. When they were renovated, the “privies” were the first things to go.

Some memories are not worth hanging onto.

I don’t mind keeping granny on life support if that’s what the family chooses to do.

But let’s not complain about how she looks when she’s on it.

By the time you read this, the Bush presidency will be over. Can intellectual shallowness and faulty logic follow him into the dustbin of history? In his final farewell, he pointed with pride to the fact that America has gone seven years without a foreign terrorist attack on its soil. He didn’t mention that before he showed up they went 225 years without one.

Let’s hope the change Obama brings can usher in a more peaceful and just future for the world.

Tax cutting not right solution

2009-01-13T19:27:00.000-08:00

(January 13) - You can’t build your happiness on the unhappiness of others. This is a frequently repeated line in a video we rented over the holidays. Married Life is sort of a Woody Allen and Alfred Hitchcock hybrid. It takes the best of both and melds them into a pretty good movie. The sentiment is a bit ironic in the context of the story. A man plans to leave his wife for a younger woman, but doesn’t want her to be sad and lonely afterwards. He decides to murder her rather than make her life a misery.

Think about this while we get back into tax-cutting season. The federal government is threatening to bring down the mother of all budgets. It will run a deficit while cutting taxes again. Barack Obama hasn’t moved into the White House yet, but he is already signalling more of the same down there. He projects a budget with a deficit in the gazillions of dollars and tax cuts of about $300 billion.

The world economy is a mess. The crisis was not caused by high taxes, and it will not be fixed by lowering them. If cutting taxes was key to a healthy economy, ours would be as fit as a fiddle. Governments across the world have been doing it for so long they forget how to do anything else.

What is the result? We have seen it over and over and over again. As revenue goes down, programs and services are cut. Without the money to do its job properly, the role of government itself is reduced. There is less regulation of important economic sectors such as banking, communications and transportation. Without effective oversight, the greedy become greedier. They are not held accountable for the consequences of their avarice.

We’re on a runaway train. Our leaders should have seen the precipice rushing at us. Maybe they did. They didn’t do anything about it. They simply cut more taxes and gave millions to the people who drive the train. Now they are going to do it again. It has been said that a mark of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. If that is the case, our economic system has gone well and truly nuts.

Tax cuts benefit people who can easily afford to pay them. They hurt those who can least afford it. Those who think their lives will be better if they pay as little as possible into the public purse should remember one thing. They can’t build their happiness on the unhappiness of others.

At the municipal level, there is nowhere left to go. Tax cutting is not an option. Deficit budgeting is not an option. To maintain services at the levels we need, taxes have to increase. When expected sources of revenue dry up, there is no room to manoeuvre.

We saw this happen when the city learned it would no longer qualify for an annual provincial government grant. The money was to help cover the cost of services downloaded from the province. When it dried up, there were only two options left. Raise property taxes even more or cut services.

Coun. Bob Bell was quick off the mark with a call to cut services. This type of knee-jerk reaction just keeps us going on the same calamitous journey. It will not help bring the runaway train under control.

What we need is politicians at all levels of government to step forward with the courage and vision to say enough is enough. We have taken the easy way out for far too long and it’s not doing us any good. It is time we got back to a level where our government has the resources needed to run the country properly.

We like to whine about them, but taxes are not evil. They are the price of admission to civil society. If we value our community, we must be willing to pay the cost of keeping it together. To make it strong, we have to protect the weak. We must look after those who were damaged in the rush to the bottom.

None of us will be happy if we’re all casualties of the train wreck.

Fitting name for city hall

2009-01-06T12:08:00.000-08:00

(January 06) - The new city hall will open soon. Coincidentally, council just approved a new policy for naming parks and public buildings. A process has been set to commemorate an individual’s "outstanding achievement, distinctive service or significant community contribution." The timing is just about perfect. We can correct an oversight that has gone on for far too long. When it finally opens its doors, the new building should be named the Carl Hamilton Civic Administration Centre.

There are very few people in Guelph who can match Hamilton’s record of service to the community. He was first elected to city council in 1970 and served continuously until health considerations prompted his retirement in 1993. Only Norm Jary and Ken Hammill put in more years on council. Jary’s years were spent mostly as mayor. Hammill sat with Hamilton on Council. He is now continuing his good work through the Friends of Guelph. They are raising money to fund a public space in front of the new building.

Carl Hamilton passed away seven years ago, on Feb. 10, 2002. He was a lawyer with a deep commitment to social justice. He was an environmentalist long before most people could spell the word. He cared about our city and the people who live here. His was a steady voice of reason and moderation in the years when developers came to council with an overblown sense of entitlement.

From 1958 to 1961, Hamilton was the National Secretary of the CCF. During the 1970s he ran as the NDP candidate in three provincial elections, coming a strong second to Harry Worton in the last two of them. He was respected and trusted by all who knew him, even if they sat down at different political tables.

In September 2003, a year and a half after he died, Wellington County installed a bench in his memory in the courtyard across from the entrance to the Crown Attorney’s office. We are still waiting for the city he served so well to give him the recognition he deserves. This wait should be over in 2009. Making it happen should be our community New Year’s resolution.

The first step in the new naming procedure is public input. The new naming committee will receive suggestions from citizens, and will make recommendations to council. If you agree that Carl Hamilton should be commemorated in this way, go to the city website, look up the e-mail addresses of your councillors, and send them a message of support. You can send a copy to me at pickersgill.letters@gmail.com.

Development is about to pick up on the east side of Guelph. People bought homes in the area with an expectation they’d soon have a grocery store close by. Some have waited 10 years. If things go according to plan, they will have a new branch library by September. This will kick-start commercial development. Loblaws owns land on Watson and has been putting off building a grocery store for years. It will happen sooner or later.

When it does, we will have to pay attention or it could go horribly wrong. If we’re not careful, it could mirror the ghastly mess that landed on the west end. The area around the corner of Imperial and Paisley has all the aesthetic charm of Hespeler Road in Cambridge. It doesn’t have to happen again. The staff in our planning department could adopt a New Year’s resolution to make the east side of Guelph a "gaudy sign free zone."

While I enjoy thinking up resolutions for other people, I avoid them for myself. It just sets me up for failure. It makes more sense to adopt an achievable goal for the year. Start with a realistic self-evaluation and make it measurable and possible. That’s what distinguishes a goal from a dream. I could set a goal to run a 25k marathon this year, but I know it won’t happen. So my goal for 2009 is a bit more modest. Before the year is out I want to step onto my Wii Fit balance board without it groaning and saying I’m obese. About 20 or 30 pounds should do it.

Coping with Christmas chaos

2008-12-30T17:00:00.000-08:00

(December 30) - It is great to be Canadian at Christmas. No matter how we celebrate, there is a common thread of community and family, of sharing and generosity.

We love to go home for Christmas. Sometimes that means staying right where you are. Sometimes home is thousands of kilometres away. This year, getting families together in Canada was more of a challenge than usual.

It took our son 26 hours, door to door, to get from Whistler to Guelph. It could have been longer, and for some people it was. His flight was scheduled to arrive in Toronto at about midnight on the 23rd. It didn’t. It was two hours late getting out of Vancouver. When we saw the delay, we asked Red Car to get him.

Given the weather and short notice they couldn’t make any promises. They weren’t sure when the plane would arrive, nor that there would be a van in the airport when it did. So off we went to get him ourselves.

The roads were awful, and top speed on the 401 was about 50 kilometres per hour. I spent about 10 years commuting up and down that highway. It was about as bad as I’ve seen it, but still passable. We found ourselves behind a truck whose driver didn’t seem to harbour fantasies about running the Indy 500. We stayed comfortably behind it for most of the trip.

At about 1:45 a. m. we pulled into the parking garage at Terminal 3 and found our way to arrivals area B. Flights were landing. People came out of the baggage gathering area and into the arms of waiting friends and relatives. It was hard to say who looked the most tired, those who were waiting or those who were waited for. There’s not an awful lot to do in a situation like that. You make pleasant small talk while standing and staring at the monitors.

We concentrated on WestJet flight 626 which was listed as delayed, arriving at 2:13 a. m. We began to suspect things were going wrong when it still said this at 2:45. About five minutes later a change flashed onto the screen. The flight had been diverted. Mild oaths rumbled through the crowd. We didn’t know where it had been sent. In a moment of wild optimism we thought maybe it went to Breslau.

At that time of night there was no one from WestJet to be found. There was nothing to be done but head back home. We were still in the parking garage when our son called. The plane had circled over Toronto a few times, then peeled off and went to Montreal. It was landing there by the time the airport monitor message changed.

All the WestJet "customer service" agents must have been comfortably tucked away in their beds, because there were none on the job in either Toronto or Montreal.

We made it home a little after four, and Red Car dropped him in our driveway 12 hours later. About 24 hours later we had 19 people for Christmas dinner. One from Scotland, one from Prince George, one from Whistler, one from Vancouver, one from Stratford, four from London and the rest from Guelph.

All’s well that ends well, and our Christmas did. A lot of other Canadians weren’t so fortunate.

One thing still rankles, though. The people who run the airports and airlines like to hide behind a mask of helplessness, saying they are unable to control the weather. That’s all well and good, but they can control service levels.

They have cut back to the point where service is barely adequate in good times, when everything is running smoothly. Throw in the uncertainties of a good old-fashioned Canadian winter and they can’t cope with the chaos. Three planes, from Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton, were diverted to Montreal in the wee hours of the morning and no one was around to explain anything to anyone.

When this all catches up to them and people stop paying good money for poor service, you can bet what will happen. The airline will rush to Ottawa, cap in hand, begging for bail-out money.

They’ll probably get it.

Handing out Christmas gifts

2008-12-23T11:31:00.000-08:00

(December 22) - It is Christmas and I have something good to say about the Prime Minister. Not a tongue-in-cheek thing, and not a back-handed compliment disguising a thinly veiled insult. Nope. It is an honest-to-goodness point of agreement: an elected Senate. An idea whose time has come.

The one we have now was constructed to mirror the British House of Lords. They have lifetime appointed peerages; we have lifetime appointed senators. Or close to lifetime. They get pushed out at age 75.

Unelected men and women uphold or overturn decisions made by elected men and women. They act on behalf of the person who heads the family that rules the Commonwealth. This person got there not by merit but by selective breeding.

I have something for the PM’s Christmas stocking: a poultice to cleanse the carbuncle of monarchy from the buttock of our body politic. We need to rid ourselves of appointed senators and governors-general. There is a lot wrong with politics south of the border, but two elected houses isn’t part of it. Because it’s Christmas, I’ll pledge to help Harper get this done if he asks me to.

There’s something for Jack’s stocking as well. He’s the only national leader who’s ever set foot inside my house. I put some eggs on to boil and made him a chopped egg sandwich.

I can offer him a copy of Poker For Dummies. If he had this on his bookshelf a month ago, he might be Minister of the Environment today. Instead, he took a look at the cards he’d been dealt, laid them on the table and stood up looking like the cat that ate the canary. He was reaching over to rake in the winnings when he noticed a royal flush in his opponent’s hand. Always keep the cards close to your vest until the other player is forced to fold.

Santa Claus and his reindeer might stop at Liz Sandals’ place on Thursday morning and give her a lift to Mexico and Jamaica. They could drop her off with the families of labourers sent home by Rol-Land Farms. She’ll see first-hand the poverty they endure and the health problems they develop from pesticide exposure and poor working conditions. When she gets home she can return the gift.

Workers on factory farms now have the right to unionize. She could convince her provincial and federal colleagues to stop the quick and easy deportations of men and women who choose to exercise that right.

When the Christmas sleigh gets to Carden Street, Santa could reach into his sack and pull out a team of lawyers. They will help our mayor launch a legal challenge to Murphy’s Law. This is the one that says whatever can go wrong will go wrong at the worst possible time. It bedevils our city.

The penny wise but pound foolish council we voted out of office two years ago got the new city hall off to a very bad start. To save money, they fired the original architect and hired one whose project costs quickly mushroomed. Then they hired a construction company with very little experience on projects this size. The ground was custom designed for Murphy.

Now he’s at it again. Several years ago, Mike Harris downloaded a pile of social services to municipalities. Most went to Wellington County, but the city picks up three-quarters of the county’s bill. The McGuinty government has begun the process of taking back this responsibility. It should have removed some financial burden from the city’s shoulders.

Last week council adopted next year’s budget. Then they found out the province didn’t just take back the social programs. They also took back an operating grant. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of one and a half million dollars.

All the arithmetic hasn’t been done yet, but it looks as though there will be a net negative savings. That’s the modern way of saying we could lose our shirt. Murphy’s taking it.

To all of you good readers, whatever you celebrate, do it peacefully. Spend some quiet time with the people who are close to you and give a stranger a gift of kindness.

Empower parents to end child poverty

2008-12-16T17:30:00.000-08:00

(December 16) - Child poverty is a relative thing. If the kids’ relatives weren’t so broke, they wouldn’t be poor. This is such a simple concept, you’d think any politician could grasp it. They don’t seem to, because poverty endures.

Last week the Ontario government released another poverty reduction strategy. It hopes to reduce child poverty by 25 per cent in five years. It is an ambitious plan with about as much hope for success as every other they’ve trotted out in the last 20 years.

It’s been 19 years since the federal government passed a unanimous resolution to eliminate child poverty by the end of the last century. The kids living in poverty today were not even born then. They will grow up and have their own children, most of whom will also live in poverty. It’s a tough cycle to break out of. Some people will, many won’t. Some willpower and determination is involved, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

Poverty isn’t a behaviour problem or a character flaw. It is a financial black hole that can trap families for several generations. Family poverty is the real issue that politicians must come to grips with. You can’t do a thing about child poverty unless you empower parents to go beyond the basic ability to provide the bare necessities of life.

It’s about to get worse. Most automobile makers, whether North American, European or Asian, are in a mess. General Motors is shutting down for the month of January. Probably into February as well. When assembly lines stop, parts plants grind to a halt. A lot more people will be put out of work before this is over. Losing your job is one of the first steps on the slippery slope to poverty.

Another awful thing happened last week. The Supreme Court ruled that it was unlawful, but allowable, for the Canadian government to use the massive EI surplus for general revenue purposes. The insurance premiums were paid by workers and employers into what you might call a rainy day fund. It is storming out there now, but the $54-billion umbrella is missing. In case anyone wants to help search for it, it was last seen while Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin were supposed to be guarding it.

At the same time as this is going on, we see the demands that accompany any public assistance to the auto industry. On both sides of the border, government loans are conditional on the companies closing plants, laying off workers, and cutting the wages and benefits of those who remain. So on the one hand we have the federal and provincial governments saying they want to end poverty. On the other hand, they advocate public policy that will increase poverty.

So what should they do? For a start, a provincial poverty reduction strategy should stop clawing back a portion of the national child tax benefit from families receiving Ontario Works payments. They should also reinstate the winter clothing allowance. They should raise the minimum wage and the Ontario Child Benefit now, instead of waiting until 2010- 11. The only way to end poverty is to put more spending power into poor people’s pockets.

The feds should immediately put the pilfered EI surplus back where unemployed workers can get at it. If they give the Big Three auto companies the $7 billion they are asking for, it should not be a loan. It should be a purchase. The condition of sale should be that they start designing and building cars that are not reliant on fossil fuel. Put the internal combustion engine into a museum. Get the workers busy assembling buses, trains and rapid transit that will not destroy the planet. Then, a few years from now the government can sell the companies back to the private sector at a tidy profit.

There don’t seem to be many politicians working in Ottawa who have much more than a passing acquaintance with long-range visions. Most can barely plan their way out of the next political mess. We’ll have to wait another election or two before the people in Ottawa and Toronto wake up to reality.

Meanwhile, when you get your layoff notice, don’t think of it as a pink slip. Think of it as a Christmas greeting from Stephen Harper and Dalton McGuinty.

Such a parcel of rogues

2008-12-09T10:38:00.000-08:00

(December 09) - An unusual word found it’s way onto the tip of the public tongue last week. Prorogue. Used effectively in a game of Scrabble, it can earn a skilled player as many as 92 points. The opponent may become demoralized, but can still play.

Used effectively in a game of politics, it can earn a skilled player much more. It brings to mind the familiar Scrabble player’s gambit of knocking the table over and spilling the tiles across the floor. It stops the game while the players argue about who was ahead when the crisis erupted.

Argue is just what the players will do for the next two months. If you think the attack ads during the election campaign were overwhelming, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the man who knocked the table over, has been spreading a blanket of befuddlement over the entire process. When he wasn’t telling half-truths last week, he was telling outright lies. Expect a lot more of the same over the Christmas season.

Sadly, Harper is not our only source of confusion. Frank Valeriote has appeared confused for the past week. In his first major test since the election, he has not looked strong. He was for the Liberal-NDP coalition. Then he was against it. Then he was for it again. Now that Paul Martin is gone, is Frank contending for the Mr. Dithers title? It looks as though he deserves it.

There was a small rally in favour of the coalition in St. George’s Square last Saturday. It wasn’t a huge crowd, and Valeriote’s absence was noted by those who did show up. He should have been there. During the election campaign, he claimed to be in favour of uniting Liberal, NDP and Green voters to stop Harper. That is what the coalition was all about. When it came time to stand and be counted, he was absent.

The opposition continues to circle around Harper. He slipped through their net once and could do it again. He pledged to use every legal means available to prevent the Liberals and NDP from forming the next government.

As I see it, the only thing he has left up his sleeve is to present a budget and then, if the Liberals still have the stomach to oppose him, ask the Governor General for a new election.

She might refuse, but not likely. She is the Queen’s representative, and the Queen is our head of state. Only on very rare occasions does the Queen refuse to do as the Prime Minister tells her. For 800 years our democracy has evolved by taking power away from the palace and putting it into parliament. For the past half century, since the days of Pierre Trudeau, Canadian power has been shifting away from Parliament and into the Prime Minister’s Office.

The coalition government would have been constitutionally and democratically acceptable. It could have brought sound and stable government to Ottawa. It is shameful that Harper and his cabinet members used inflammatory language describing it as an anti-democratic coup, and all the other lies he cooked up.

Last October the Canadian people elected 308 members of Parliament. We did not elect the prime minister. In our parliamentary democracy we don’t do that. The job goes to the leader of the party with the most seats. If the party changes leader, we get a new prime minister. To keep the job in a minority government, he or she needs support from members of other parties.

Harper lost that support, so he loses the job. The next chance should go to another leader who commands the support of the majority of MPs. Nothing undemocratic about it. Nothing about the last election would have been overturned.

We might still get the coalition at the end of January. I think we should, but I also think we won’t. Michael Ignatieff, Stéphane Dion’s sudden successor, doesn’t like the idea. It is obvious that Valeriote is not keen on it either.

Last week, the opposition lined up on the platform and watched the train leave the station without them. They are unlikely to get a second chance. It looks now as though many of them don’t even want one.

It all brings us back to the word of the week. In 1791, Rabbie Burns wrote about a "parcel of rogues in a nation ". There’s a bunch of them in Ottawa, and Harper is the pro.

It’s time to spend on infrastructure

2008-12-02T18:31:00.000-08:00

(December 2) - The layoffs are still coming at us, fast and furious. Last week Linamar called out another couple of hundred people who used to have jobs. Their work is not going south this time. The economy below the border is in worse shape than ours. Linamar jobs are melting in the same puddle as the automobile industry.

Love it or hate it, this is the industry that brought relative prosperity to hundreds of thousands of families in southern Ontario. Many of them right here in Guelph. From Guelph Products to Linamar, Guelph workers make parts for cars. They make them for Chrysler, for Ford, for GM. They make them for Toyota and Honda. Wherever cars are assembled in Ontario, it’s a good bet that parts made right here go into them.

Linamar is the second largest automobile parts producer in Canada, second only to Magna. They are suffering now because General Motors and its cousins are suffering. There is a general perception that the American car companies are in trouble because they kept building cars no one wanted to buy. This is a simplistic truth that doesn’t reflect a complicated reality. Too many people south of the border couldn’t afford to buy the cars. They were overextended by a financial system that could not sustain itself.

What should the government do about it? Should it provide money to bail out the auto industry? The very idea makes a lot of people howl with rage. Many of them applauded last May when the province gave Linamar $2 million to develop solar powered electric lawn mowers.

Why can we give public money to create new jobs, but not to protect old ones?

Simply giving cash to the corporations is not the answer. What we need is an infrastructure renewal program that will create jobs and bring some purchasing power back to Canadian families.

Spend some money rebuilding concrete bridges and parking garages. They are starting to fall apart after forty years of being splashed with slush and rock salt. Give money to the cities to repair roads, sewer lines and other necessities.

Invest in public transit and new forms of personal transportation. Autoworkers can assemble electric cars if someone will pay them to do it. Federal regulators should end the foolish ban on them.

Co-ops and other non-profit housing projects across the country are in desperate need of repair, but they don’t have the money to do it. Start a program to upgrade existing housing stock and build new homes.

Loosen the EI system to help unemployed workers. Negotiate fair trade agreements that protect Canadian jobs while helping workers in foreign countries. When the economy gets going again, buy the things your neighbour helps to make. Look for the Made in Canada label.

This is the sort of stimulus the economy needs. Barack Obama seems to recognize it and has promised to go big when he takes office. Our government is keeping its head in the sand. It’s not that last week’s economic statement failed to address the crisis. It didn’t even make an attempt. In the face of the worst financial crisis in modern times, the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister are paralyzed. They don’t know what to do, so they do nothing. They hope the future will fix itself. It never does.

Stephen Harper, well known as a control freak, is losing his grip. By this time next week, we might see a government that more accurately reflects the will of the people. Sixty-two per cent voted against the Conservatives, but we still found ourselves under their rule. Most Canadians outside Quebec had either the Liberals or the NDP as their first choice. The two parties might now form a coalition. It could be the best hope we have of surviving this recession with the least possible damage.

One of two possible side effects will come out of these very strange two weeks. Stéphane Dion could escape becoming only the second Liberal leader who failed to become Prime Minister. Or Stephen Harper will be forced to mend his ways. To survive as Prime Minister he will have to negotiate with the opposition parties and stop making every vote an all or nothing vote of confidence. Can he do it?

One way or another, there’s hope for the country after all.

When good jobs migrate stateside

2008-11-25T19:02:00.000-08:00

(November 25) - For 15 years, ending about 18 years ago, I worked as a maintenance millwright in a Kitchener factory. It wasn’t a bad job, all things considered. The people were good, the pay wasn’t bad.

It was noisy, and dirty, and dangerous from time to time. A lot of people lost fingers, two men lost arms, and one man lost a leg. Actually, they weren't really lost. They were usually misplaced in the jaws of a punch press. Lost is a polite euphemism for crushed.

At least nobody died, unless you count all the welders who came down with cancer.

We made outdoor power equipment. All summer we’d turn out snow blowers. All winter we’d make lawn mowers. We’d also make tillers and garden tractors. When we weren’t making them, we’d make steering columns for General Motors and other parts for Ford.

When workers went home at the end of the shift, they were tired. When they retired, they were worn out. They earned their pay and they earned their pensions. They provided good lives for their families. Mortgages were paid, groceries were bought, vacations were taken, kids were put through school, college, university.

It could be a hard life, but it was a good one. It’s over now. The factory is closed. Only a small service department stayed open.

The end of October was the end of MTD’s production in Kitchener. They sold the punch presses, took out the assembly lines, dismantled the paint booths, and sent the jobs south. Over 500 worked there when times were good.

In the middle of October I banked my first pension cheque. Not a huge one, but for the rest of my life I’ll get it in the monthly mail. If Lynne keeps going after I’m gone, she’ll get it for her life. What a wonderful world we work in.

MTD is not the only manufacturing plant to go belly up in this area. There have been lots. Too many. Each closure put working families out of work and onto pogey. Fifty here, a hundred there. Add them up and before you know it you have a lot of people. Find them and you will find the human face of the financial meltdown. You don’t need to look very far, because they are your neighbours. Your neighbour’s neighbour is you.

All things financial might be melting today, but the thaw didn’t start yesterday. It all began when the dollar started rising. The loonie didn’t start soaring because the Canadian economy was strong all by itself. It was because the American economy was tanking. But the stronger dollar took away the competitive edge enjoyed by Canadian branch plants of American corporations.

Twenty years ago the prevailing wisdom was that if the dollar stayed at about seventy cents, jobs were reasonably secure. Sure enough, when we went over ninety cents and started dancing with parity, jobs began their southern journey. Bargain hunters flooded the Buffalo outlet malls and came home to find a pink slip in the pay envelope.

Now that the dollar is settling to a more comfortable balance, the jobs are not coming back. That should worry us all. When good jobs go down, bad ones become the best available.

People shake their heads and go tut tut when union jobs are lost. They priced themselves out of the market, say those very jealous observers. It’s their own fault, we are told, because they didn’t build the things people want to buy.

I have never heard of a factory where the owner lets the workers decide what they will make. Management rights are not up for sharing. Had MTD asked, we might have told them to make electric lawn mowers instead of the noisy carbon guzzling gasoline beasts. We were never asked. Anyway, the company made lots of electric mowers, but not in Canada. They came up from Cleveland.

We lament about the dwindling middle class, but what is it? The middle class is composed mostly of unionized workers, people with incomes that don’t get them into the Swiss banks but do keep them out of the food banks. They are the people who elevate the living conditions of our community while placing checks and balances on our employers.

We need them and we’ll be sorry when they are finally done away with.

Council at the half-way mark

2008-11-18T19:42:00.000-08:00

(November 18) - Building a city is a lot like building a dry stone wall. It requires piecing together a lot of parts that look like they don’t fit. You choose the right rocks for the moment. Examine them closely. Chip at them for a while. Place smaller stones to steady the bigger ones. Then move to the next section.

A well made stone wall will stand for thousands of years without being held together with mortar. If it needs repair, a section can be carefully taken down and rebuilt without affecting the rest.

It is in perfect balance. Each stone leans on all the others and gets its strength from the whole.

Looking at it this way, we can see our mayor as stonemason. She leads a crew composed of a mix of experienced, skilled workers and some keen second year apprentices.

They appear to be working together quite efficiently. We are at the halfway point of this council’s four year term and it is going relatively well. Not perfectly, but a lot better than a lot of people thought it would.

They say the devil is in the details. If something goes wrong, it is because of something so small it was easily missed. By the same token, when things go right it is because someone looked after the little things. They were put in the proper order in such a way that you barely notice them. You’d know if they weren’t there.

Look at some of the things Council has done. Take the failed Hydro merger for one thing. I never thought joining up with Hamilton was a good idea and still don’t. Some of the councillors saw it as a solid building block for the Community Energy Plan. This plan has been one of Guelph’s best kept secrets. If successful, it will substantially reduce the city’s carbon footprint over the next 25 years. The window of opportunity for mergers is still open. Another one will come along that is better balanced.

Another well kept secret is the development of a natural heritage inventory. We have a good handle now on our structural heritage. We will do better in the future at protecting buildings like the Mitchell farm house. Now we are mapping out the locally significant natural habitats: the wetlands and other ecosystems that must be preserved as we grow.

A healthy city still needs healthy tadpoles.

Then there is parking. I often lament the extent to which an environmentally conscious council is fixated on cars. Their story is that if you want a healthy downtown where people live and shop, you have to stack the cars off to the side somewhere. Then you can build the efficient public transit system that will get more people around in fewer cars.

The mayor has a blog on the city’s web site. In one posting she speculates that maybe, sometime in the not too distant future, we’ll be able to turn the parking garages into apartment buildings.

We need this clarity of vision.

Don’t forget about our children. Sound planning is always about their future. Two items in this year’s budget are particularly important to them. The police want additional money for a new officer to fight child pornography. The library wants additional money for a new worker to program activities in all the branches. Two solid rocks in the same wall. We need both to protect and develop the physical and intellectual safety of children.

Healthy children grow into healthy adults.

This council is doing a commendable job of cobbling together a good city inhabited by a diverse population. There are many different points of view at play and all deserve to be heard and considered.

One good thing about local government is that it is accessible. You can find your councillors, and you can talk to them. If you wonder why they are doing something, just ask. They are never far away.

There is still room for improvement. Council needs to do a better job of communicating its vision and agenda. It must take active leadership. If councillors know where they want to go, they should do more to tell us why and how.

A good stonemason will tell you a wall does not divide. It defines. It sets the landscape and leads the eye to distant horizons.

War game marketing offensive, insensitive

2008-11-11T20:08:00.000-08:00

(November 11) - When introducing new products, timing can be everything. Most people in the marketing and communications game understand this. Some don’t. There are people in the electronic games business who don’t get it. Neither do some of the folk at Blockbuster headquarters.

Last week I got an e-mail from Blockbuster saying they would stay open past midnight on the morning of November 7 to celebrate the release of a new Xbox game. Actually, it wasn’t so much to celebrate the game as to sell it. Anyone who showed up to buy Gears of War 2 between 12 and 12:30 a.m. qualified for a free download of the Gold-Plated Hammerburst Assault Rifle. They didn’t sweeten the incentive by throwing in a Hammer of Dawn for customers showing up with a poppy in a lapel. The Hammer of Dawn “can wipe out anything from small Locust squads to entire city blocks.”

All of this was happening just four days before the rest of us observe Remembrance Day.

Okay. I know it’s a game. I have never played it, and I expect to live out the rest of my life without having done so. I don’t think it should be banned. I have never advocated censoring things just because I don’t like them. I would sooner see them languish on store shelves until they are removed because no one would buy them. The introduction of this particular plaything just four days before Remembrance Day strikes me as just a tad offensive and hugely insensitive.

There is never a good time to promote fantasies about war and killing. Never a good time to pretend that wiping out an entire city block could be a good idea. It isn’t. Never has been, never will be. We know this because it has been done in the real world. It was done in Guernica, Spain; London, England; Dresden, Germany; Warsaw, Poland; Hiroshima, Japan; My Lai, Vietnam; Baghdad, Iraq. The list is staggering in its enormity.

There is never a good time to pretend that war is an acceptable way to settle political differences. The violence is pitiless. The suffering is borderless. The victims have no country. Soldiers lie buried in the same earth. Sailors drowned in the same oceans. Bomber pilots descended from the same skies. Nothing is settled. The victors take the spoils. The vanquished lick their wounds, gather their strength and get ready to resume the fight. By the time the city block is rebuilt, someone is getting ready to wipe it out all over again.

On the same day as Blockbuster sent out the poorly timed e-mail, the names of 68,000 Canadians who died in World War One began appearing on public buildings in seven Canadian cities. The names of all the men and women ion the armed services known to have died in action are projected onto the buildings during the dark hours of night. It took seven nights to do them all. It ended at daybreak this morning.

The artists who designed the project chose WW1 because this is the 90th anniversary of its ending. If they projected the names of all the Canadians who have died in all the wars since then, we might have seen close to a month of Remembrance Days. Then add in all those killed on all sides of the conflicts and imagine how long it would take. Gather up the names of all the civilians who died – the collateral damage, as they are so callously dismissed – and project them onto a war memorial wall. How long would it take?

There would be no end to it. The remembrance would never stop. Nor should it. When we remember, we don’t just think about those who died. Many come home in coffins, many more come home on stretchers. Brave men and women who will learn to adjust to a life without legs.

Last year at this time, the Canadian death toll in Afghanistan was 72. Today it is 98. One quarter of all our military deaths over there happened in the last year. What will it be when we put on our poppies next year?

There has never been a successful war because it is, in its essence, a failure. It is well past time to come up with a better way.

A parking lot budget

2008-11-04T13:12:00.000-08:00

(November 04) - What would you prefer? Two hours of free parking downtown, or two and a half new police constables patrolling downtown?

Over the course of a year, both options cost you about the same amount of money. Fortunately, they are not mutually exclusive, and you'll probably get both free parking and more policing. The comparison gives an idea of the juggling city councillors have to do at this time of year.

They have to weigh apples against oranges. The final budget has to balance the good of the community against the ability of citizens to pay for it.

Last week, the council committees took a look at the budget submissions coming from the various boards, commissions and agencies and anyone else who lives on the municipal purse. In another month, at the beginning of December, council will meet on two consecutive nights and adopt the budget for 2009.

Requests range from an extra police officer to fight child pornography to an extra library worker to program children's activities. Both are needed.

It's safe to predict downtown shoppers will keep their free parking. It breathed too much new life into the downtown. It is nearly impossible to put a dollar value to that, but I expect it would measure up favourably against the lost parking revenue.

This is not the only way in which parking is dominating the budget. A huge sack of money is being set aside to build a parking garage on Wilson Street. Another bundle is going towards the redevelopment of the Baker Street parking lot. Some consultants even want to carve out a new street from Wyndham to Baker.

In many ways it's a parking lot budget.

How strangely counterintuitive that the greenest council we've ever had must devote so much attention to making room for cars downtown. Why not put the parked cars in the lots and turn Wyndham Street into a pedestrian mall? It would be a lot more pleasant, but would still come with a price tag.

Speaking of cars, only a complete idiot would pull out a cellphone and send a text message while driving. The very thought of it makes me shiver. Just try it and see the result. You'll either rear-end the car in front of you or, even worse, make so many spelling mistakes the message will be incomprehensible. It is about to be outlawed.

As is often said, they can outlaw the act but not the stupidity that causes it.

It will also become an offense to talk on a cellphone while driving. Some people even wanted to ban the use of hands-free phones, but enforcement would be too difficult.

They say talking on the phone is too distracting. What about talking to your spouse while driving? Can't that take your attention away from the road? What about pre-pubescent kids in the back seat? Did you ever hear the noise they can make?

Instead of you driving them to Granny's, they drive you to distraction. Am I the only person who ever pulled onto the soft shoulder and yelled at them to stop their nonsense or get out and walk? Compared to this, talking on a cellphone can be relaxing.

No one wants to ban driving with family. Or while listening to the radio. Or while conversing with a passenger. Everyone wants to ban driving while conversing on the phone.

In the words of a song I recall from half a century ago: keep your mind on your driving, keep your hands on the wheel and keep your filthy eyes on the road ahead (I'm having fun, sitting in the back seat, kissing and a-hugging with Fred).

There's a story about two priests who argued about smoking and praying. They agreed to ask the bishop to resolve it. One asked if he could smoke while he prayed and was told no. When praying, you must give it your full attention. The other asked if he could pray while he smoked and was told yes. It's always good to say a prayer.

It's getting to be the same with driving. Should we drive while we think? Can we think while we drive?

Or should we just take the easy way out and move closer to a complete ban on thinking and driving.

Two-party Canada is not the way to go

2008-10-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

(October 28) - In the days and weeks following the federal election, there has been talk of getting Canada back into the two-party world. Frank Valeriote, the winner of a multi-party vote, wants to "unite the left." What this means is that he wants the NDP and the Green parties to pack their bags and get out of his house.

The Liberal Party has never even pretended to be 'left,' but now wants to own it. Valeriote was talking this way during the campaign, increasingly frantically as voting day drew closer. He was sweating because he had lost faith in the innate futility of the Kovach campaign.

The United States is the only major country left with a two-party system. American deep thinker Noam Chomsky says it has only one - the Business Party - with two competing factions, the Democrats and the Republicans. He's right. The rest of the world has more parties than you'll find in a university residence.

Most people have come to understand that our electoral system is no longer suited to the modern political environment. It will have to change, but we can't move forward by going backwards.

We will never get Canada back to a two-party system. Nor should we try. If it ever did happen that the NDP merged with the Liberal Party, someone somewhere would organize another democratic socialist party to take its place. Thousands of Canadians would support it, because it is always better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.

There is a better way. It's called proportional representation, and its time has come. We need to give it a serious look on the national level. It can then filter down to the provinces.

If Valeriote wants to make a name for himself, he should take up this cause. Rather than trying to eliminate parties, he should find a way to include them.

There has always been a double standard. If you want to find out how much a worker is paid, you don't have to look very far. If she is part of the shrinking number of unionized workers, look in her collective agreement. Wage rates are set out in black and white.

For most non-union workers these days, take a look in the Employment Standards Act. That's where the minimum wage is set.

It is not so easy to find executive salary levels. These are supposed to be a big secret. It's a confidential matter between the person who signs the front of the cheque and the person who endorses the back.

There is usually a correlation. The bigger the secret, the bigger the salary. If the depth of the greed became generally known, there could be discontent on the loading dock. The men and women who produce the wealth that funds the salaries might want a bigger share of the pie. When the public complains about the cost of things, they might focus on executive compensation rather than hourly wages. Maybe then the workers wouldn't take the blame when factories move to Mexico.

In the private sector, CEOs can make out like bandits and hide the evidence. It can't happen down at city hall.

Councillors' salaries are public knowledge, as are the wages of CUPE members. Middle to upper management compensation is easily found. A quick Google search found that former director of finance David Kennedy was paid $136,000 in 2006. He left in 2007 with a severance package of 2.5 years salary.

Most of us who plod through the working world will get the minimum severances set out in the Employment Standards Act if our workplace shuts down. This makes Kennedy's settlement look overwhelmingly generous. It isn't.

Two years is fairly standard for a person at Kennedy's level with 25 years service. The extra six months indicates the parting of the ways was not mutually agreeable at the start, but became so as negotiations went on.

Don't blame Kennedy for looking after his own future. Blame your employer for not adequately looking after yours. If you can't make that stick, blame yourself for not joining a union.

It's not Kennedy's fault we live in a society with such a wide discrepancy in entitlements. It's our own fault for allowing it to continue.

Election Result: A little bit of good news, a whole lot of bad

2008-10-21T10:22:00.000-07:00

(October 21) - First things first. About two-thirds of the adult population of Guelph should be patted on the back. They are the ones who got out of the house and made their way to a ballot box last week. Our 66 per cent turnout was a lot better than the national average of 59.

Something about this most recent run didn't capture the public's attention, though. By the time our candidates were finished with their two laps around the campaign track, many spectators were looking somewhere else. We went down from the 2006 numbers of 70 per cent locally and 65 per cent across the country.

That was the good news. There was a lot of bad news to share around. All four parties felt some.

Start with the winner. Frank Valeriote took this election with the lowest amount of support ever received by a victorious Liberal. His 32 per cent was nothing to start anyone dancing in the street. Frank Gauthier got the same when he lost to Bill Winegard in 1988. Valeriote shouldn't feel too complacent about his success.

There were equal amounts of good and bad for the Conservatives. After going through all the agony and controversy of dumping their first candidate in favour of Gloria Kovach, they barely shifted their support. In 2006, Brent Barr got 29.8 per cent support. Last week Kovach got 29.2.

Hardly worth all the bitterness, was it?

The good news for the locals was that disgruntled Tories started singing "my party right or wrong" as they rallied to the cause. The bad news was that even with a strong central campaign they couldn't bump their numbers. If they couldn't grab the brass ring last week, when will they?

The NDP used to own third place in this town. Now they've had two consecutive fourth place finishes, counting the 2007 provincial election. This despite the fact that Tom King was a strong candidate who carried their flag with dignity and passion.

There was never any doubt in my mind, or his mind, or the campaign workers' minds, that he stood firmly on the side of the people. The trouble is there was a lot of doubt in the people's minds.

This conundrum has bedevilled the NDP in Guelph since long before the Maple Leafs last won a Stanley Cup. Their best showing was 31 per cent in 1965 when John Harney came second to Alf Hales.

When the dust from this double campaign settles, they'll have to sit down and figure out what keeps going wrong for them. It wasn't the candidate. It wasn't the leader. It wasn't the campaign workers. So what was it? Why did people in 37 other communities like the NDP, but we didn't?

The hardest blow of all was suffered by the Green Party. They were the only one of the four parties to increase their support, and they did it substantially.

The Liberals went down by six per cent and still won. The Greens went up by 12.4 and came third. Go figure. I doubt there were many Green candidates who did better than Mike Nagy's 21 per cent. Their national average was just under seven. Elizabeth May got about 32, but that number is badly skewed because the Liberals didn't run against her. The national result was skewed even worse because we don't have proportional representation.

Another local statistic is either good or bad, depending on how you look at it. The combined support for the Liberals and Conservatives has steadily dropped since 2004 from 71 to 61 per cent. The combined support for the NDP and Greens has gone up by the same 10 points.

Would Nagy have won the byelection, had we been allowed to have it? We will never know. Looking at last Tuesday's results, it wasn't out of the question.

A lot of Conservative voters wouldn't have felt the need to rally around Kovach.

The fear factor wouldn't have bumped up Valeriote's weak numbers.

King's support was growing right up until just before the torpedo hit.

Nagy was enjoying the support of the people who were deserting Kovach.

If we had gone to a vote on Sept. 8, either King or Nagy could have been an MP. And if my aunt had wheels, she could have been a bus.

Planting trees and ideas

2008-10-14T17:45:00.000-07:00

(October 14) - Henry Kock is alive. He came back to us on September 30 with the release of his book Growing Trees From Seed. It’s the sort of book you can take down from the shelf and browse every so often. When you do, it’s almost like bringing Henry into your home for a chat.

If you wanted to know how to look after plants, there was never a better person to ask. He could take the complex bits and pieces of horticulture and make you understand the parts you need to know.

The secrets of trees are secret no longer. We will think of them differently after hearing Kock say: “No other living organism has the ability to stand through blistering heat or violent winter storms without the option of running for cover.”

Trees shade us from the sun, protect us from the wind, prevent soil erosion, and produce our oxygen. They are well worth the time it takes to get to know them better.

I don’t know that many of us will actually go out and find a seed, germinate it in a shallow tray and plant it in the back yard. Some will. Most of us have a family member who has helped a child plant a new tree beside a new home. We have probably all pulled out the tiny maple stems that sprout in the lawn where the helicopters land. Kock helps us understand the how and the why of it all.

His book also challenges some popular beliefs. For one thing, I always thought there was no better friend of the soil than the common earthworm. Apparently not. According to Kock, “they do a huge amount of damage by dragging undecomposed organic material into the soil, where it does not belong.”

Who would have thought it? Birds eat the worms, and pick up seeds from over here and drop them over there, and the forests – when left reasonably alone – prosper and evolve.

Want to know a bit more about native species of vegetation? Kock will start you thinking about it. He says native plant species are those “that were growing in North America prior to colonial times.”

This is just like Guelph. If your grandparents didn’t go to GCVI you’re a newcomer.

The introduction of new people to a city can be very healthy. The introduction of new vegetation to a forest can be quite the opposite. Sometimes the result will be fairly benign, but it’s always a risky business. Henry will tell you why.

Any kind of study of the natural world will show you how deeply connected everything is. It’s not as simple as the fact that trees need birds and birds need trees. There’s an awful lot of other stuff going on, much of it underground and mulch of it above. A healthy environment needs all its component parts to be equally healthy. You can’t put a compact fluorescent bulb in your porch light and chemical pesticides on your lawn and pretend you’re helping.

As I recall Kock, he saw all these connections quite clearly. Even the links between the environment, social justice, peace and economic justice. None will flourish unless they all do. That’s why I found it sad to see that the publishers, Firefly Books, chose to have the book printed in China.

It isn’t that long ago that major colour print jobs like this would be done in some of the specialty printing houses here. There are printers in and around Guelph who could have done it as well, or better.

The economic harm of job loss was felt by Kock as deeply as the environmental harm caused by poorly regulated Chinese industries and the carbon cost of transporting finished books to Canadian stores.

I expect he would have greeted this contradiction with a sardonic smile and a resolve to move forward and make the best of the world as we find it. Nothing is ever changed by wishful thinking. Everything is changed by carefully planting both trees and ideas.

Three of Kock’s colleagues, Paul Aird, John Ambrose and Gerry Waldron are to be thanked for taking an almost complete book and pulling it together so well. It’s a grand testimony to Henry’s life, available for $45 at fine bookstores all over downtown Guelph.

Engaging constituents could have tilted merger call

2008-10-07T20:57:00.000-07:00

(October 7) - Fine just the way it is. That is the ironic title of Annie Proulx's latest book of short stories. It is a line in one of the more powerful stories in the collection, Tits-Up in a Ditch. That's where you'll find her country after eight years of George W. Bush. The more you read her work, and the closer you examine where she's coming from, you'll see it. America is anything but fine.

Last week I found myself with not much to do on Monday night. I had cataract surgery in the morning. In the evening I had a patch on my left eye and time on my hands. I spent it watching the city council meeting where they decided not to fold Guelph Hydro in with Horizon Utilities. It was a long meeting at the end of a long process. All our councillors behaved as maturely as we should expect. They asked intelligent questions of the delegations. All but one gave an explanation of why they were voting the way they were.

It was a complicated issue. I was never comfortable with the merger, mostly because it seemed that Guelph was a small fish being swallowed by a bigger one.

Horizon was swimming around Ontario making a meal of any smaller utilities it came across. In addition to this, Hamilton is generally perceived as being a dirty place that turned Lake Ontario into a dirty pond. It looked like a bad fit. Safer to go north or west and find a pool where the other fish are about the same size, or smaller.

It seems many of us think Guelph is fine just the way it is and we don't need any help from the likes of Hamilton. The trouble is that it's not true. It is true enough that we don't need help from the likes of Hamilton. It's not true that Guelph is just fine the way it is. We're not tits-up in a ditch, but we're not fine.

All cities in Ontario are creatures of the province, accountable to the government through the Ontario Municipal Act. We are not entirely in charge of our own destiny. There are things council can decide, and things it can't. When the provincial government adopted the Places to Grow regulations, Guelph was assigned a growth target. Our council recognized the target was unsustainable and succeeded in having it lowered. They could not eliminate it. The province wants fewer electrical utilities. It was not ordering us to merge with Horizon, but one day down the road we won't be able to avoid a merger with someone else.

The debate showed Guelph is a very engaged community. The leaders of the hydro board acknowledged as much last Monday. If citizens are to use this engagement wisely, we need to be constantly aware of who does what. When should we lobby city hall, when should we go to Queen's Park and when should we call Ottawa. When the issues are as complex as they were in the hydro merger, the city should ensure we have enough facts to formulate a valid opinion.

Even without seeing the famously secret business case, there were lots of issues open for public debate. Control, ownership, economies of scale, basic premises, service levels, emergency preparedness. Surely councillors had an understanding of these, and an opinion on them, before last Monday's meeting. Even before the mayor issued her position in a memorandum on the Thursday prior. Everyone in town was debating it for a long time. At least, everyone but the people who had access to the background information and who would make the final decision. They should have been engaging their constituents more directly in the conversation. They should have been explaining as well as listening. They should not be the only politicians in the country who are too timid to advocate for the positions they hold.

There was one other big disappointment for me. The union representing the hydro workers spoke against the merger last July, then again on Monday. What attempts were made to bring the union on board? If the union and the Hydro Board had each spoken in favour, it may well have been approved. We cannot have a progressive community without involving working people and their unions in its development.

When America hits the wall, we can't be far behind

2008-09-30T13:42:00.000-07:00

(September 30) - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They sound like a pair of villains on an episode of Dukes of Hazzard. Roscoe P. Coltrane would have had them behind bars in about 45 minutes.

Maybe he should have. Fannie and Freddie have become symbolic of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that cost thousands of Americans their homes. It is fitting that George Bush’s term of office is ending in a disaster of his own making.

He drained the treasury, pumping all its money into Iraqi oil wells - a foolhardy adventure from the start. When it all began six and a half years ago, many people predicted this Gulf war would ruin the American economy. No one thought it would also bring down the world financial order.

It would be fun to tell George that he made his own bed and now must lie in it. The trouble is that our own Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has been anxious to try out the same mattress that Bush found so comfortable.

Both countries are going into elections at about the same time. Both have conservative ideologues in power. Both are spending a lot of money on controversial wars. The Americans are hitting the economic wall now. We can’t be far behind.

Time might be on our side. There is a chance we will get some regime change up here before crisis turns into disaster. Election results might be close in the land below the border, but odds are they will turn to Barack Obama as their President. If we can believe the opinion polls, Canadians will do just the opposite. Stephen Harper appears to be holding his lead and heading for another minority government. The Liberal campaign is hitting the panic buttons.

A leader of a Canadian federal political party must be able to communicate clearly and effectively in both official languages. Stephen Harper can do it. Jack Layton can do it. Stéphane Dion can not. He makes Jean Chrétien appear fluently bilingual.

If Harper is looking good to a lot of Canadians, it is only because Dion is looking so bad. We still haven’t managed to free ourselves of the tired old notion that the country can only be run by Conservatives or Liberals.

Maybe it used to be true, but not any more.

It’s a good thing I enjoy my job. I might be working at it a few years longer than I had planned. It all depends on how well my RRSPs survive Fannie Mae’s shenanigans.

The curious thing is that a lot of the American melt down resulted from financial institutions lending money they didn’t have so that people could buy homes they can’t afford.

There is a much more effective way to support the right of families to live in decent, affordable homes. It’s called co-operative housing. There are six in Guelph.

Co-ops are mixed income communities owned and operated by the members who live in them. The first two housing co-ops in Guelph were started under a federal housing program that was ended by Brian Mulroney. The next four were started under a provincial program that was ended by Mike Harris. None have been started since.

Instead of putting money into an expanded housing program that would include both co-operatives and non-profits, our banks and credit companies have been selling the dream of private ownership. Forty-year mortgages with no down payment turned the dream into a nightmare for a lot of families. By the time the debt is paid down, the home owners will have given the bank about three times what they thought they were buying the house for, if they manage to keep it. These loans are a risky business. By the middle of October, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) will stop insuring them.

There are a lot worse ways to spend your days than managing a co-operative housing community. The rewards are plenty, and the aggravations melt away quickly enough.

The only thing wrong with Guelph housing co-ops is that there are not enough of them. If you run into the election candidates in the next two weeks, ask them why this is and what they plan to do about it.

Selling Guelph Hydro, poor planning and ineffective civil disobedience

2008-09-23T19:03:00.000-07:00

(September 23) - I am not sure what is larger, a myriad or a plethora. Whichever it is, that's how many things are happening around town that merit our attention.

Next Monday, city council will make the big decision about the sale of Guelph Hydro to Horizon Utilities. It is being touted as a merger, but it isn't. It's a buyout, pure and simple.

It has been difficult for citizens to get enough facts about the proposal to know whether or not it's a good deal. Property deals are always concluded behind closed doors, and usually there's nothing wrong with that. We have a good council, and they could normally be trusted to do the right thing.

In this case though, we need a little bit of transparency. Last Friday the city posted some information on its website. A press release said it has received agreement from the consulting firm "to allow it to release a summary of its analysis of a business case concerning the proposed merger."

Unfortunately, the documentation contains next to no information that would help us understand anything.

The only thing we learn from it is that Guelph will come out the other end with about 24 per cent ownership of the merged company. Hamilton will have about 60, and St. Catharines will have 16.

The documents also say "the business case is fair and reasonable from a financial point of view." None of the background information that led to this conclusion is released.

An assertion of a conclusion is not an analysis of a business case.

We should be getting more than we've been given. The Guelph chapter of the Council of Canadians did an extensive analysis that concluded the deal is a bad one.

There is no compelling reason for the city to sell the utility.

Last week, our council relented on a prior decision and voted to allow an expansion at the Wal-Mart mall. This was not a surprise to anyone. Apparently there was nothing in the city's official plan to prevent it.

Most councillors obviously thought it more prudent to step back from this battle and move forward to other issues. They don't want to take a chance on another Ontario Municipal Board appeal.

It has been said in our other paper that this decision was based on sound planning principles. Nonsense. It wasn't. It was based on a realization that the flawed official plan adopted by the previous council couldn't stop the expansion.

As things stand, commercial development is not driven by the needs and wants of the people in Guelph. It is driven by the corporate interests of the developers.

We are about half way through this council’s four year term. Two years ago, our citizens stood up and tossed out a council that had a blind and misguided allegiance to the developers. It is about time council takes a good hard look at the official plan and the commercial policy review. Our planning processes need to be brought back under our control.

To their credit, Ward 1 councillors Bell and Farrelly appear to understand. They voted against the Wal-Mart proposal because it will further delay development in the east end.

Speaking of bad planning, there were the kids who blocked the Hanlon on the morning of Sept. 2. A week later they posted an anonymous message on an anarchist website claiming they did it in solidarity with Native land claims.

They actually don't have a clue about anarchism or civil disobedience. Their version of "anarchism" has all the maturity of a self-indulgent libertarian.

Anarchism isn't just rejection of authority. Life isn't that simple.

Ayn Rand was a capitalist anarchist, believing in the triumph of the individual. Emma Goldman was a communist anarchist, believing that collectives flourish best when they are not restrained by central governments. Each had the courage of her convictions. Those who toss burning tires onto the Hanlon and run away do not.

Effective civil disobedience can't be anonymous.

When Mahatma Gandhi challenged British imperialism, he did it openly. He invited arrest so he could challenge unjust laws in court. Martin Luther King was the same way. So was Henry Morgentaler.

They knew you don't change anything by slinking around and breaking laws under cover of darkness and then evading responsibility in the light of day.

Save dwindling downtown retail space

2008-09-16T18:20:00.000-07:00

(September 16) - The library has had a very happy 125th birthday. Celebrations began with an open house in the main branch last February and wrapped up on Saturday with a family barbecue at the West End Branch. It was a good year to serve on its Board.

The party might be over, but the challenges haven’t gone away. We still need to settle on locations for a new east side branch and the new downtown main branch. Decisions on both will be made soon. If you can pull yourselves away from the daily thrills of the election campaign, there is still time to make your views known.

People living to the east of Victoria should be making the most noise. They bought new homes in new subdivisions on the promise that they wouldn’t wait too long for somewhere to shop. Many have been there for more than five years and the Big Bear store at the corner of Starwood and Grange is still the only game in town. For serious groceries they have to drive to either Food Basics or Zehrs on Eramosa. There are other good specialty shops such as Angelino’s or Boxed Meat, but nothing closer to where they live.

The east end library branch could well be the catalyst for further development. The sooner it can be located and built, the better it will be for the thousands of people living there. When the supermarket chains see them feeding their minds, they will quickly move in to help them feed their stomachs.

The downtown branch could still be the source of controversy. The location for it is fixed. It will go in the Baker St. parking lot and will be a major piece of the downtown redevelopment puzzle. What we don’t know yet is exactly where it will be placed. A consultant is recommending three different scenarios, with one as the obvious favourite. It would see the demolition of all the buildings between the old post office building laneway and Ragin’ Caygeon’s cowboy saloon. Part of this would make room for a new street running from Wyndham to Baker St. The rest would make room for the new library building.

A healthy downtown should have a good mix of retail, residential and institutional uses. If the consultant’s plan is adopted, we will lose some retail and residential from the main downtown street and be left with an institutional mall. On the one side of Wyndham, we’ll have the Community Health Centre, the library and Wellington County housing services in a line broken only by the saloon. On the other side the predominant uses are the government offices in the old Wellington Hotel and the County’s Ontario Works offices.

That we would have trouble keeping stores downtown was predicted in the debates about big box shopping nodes. We shouldn’t make it worse by kicking over the buildings we still have. We’d be demolishing apartments to make way for city centre condos. Remember the heritage fuss that arose over the old shoe repair shop on Alice St. The owner was prevented from tearing it down to build a garage. Take that fuss, multiply it by a downtown block and imagine the result.

People in Guelph are understandably nervous about losing old buildings. There’s not many left. They should be taken down only as a matter of last resort. That is not the case here. There are alternative choices that make a lot more sense. According to its web site, Ragin’ Caygeon’s is only open four hours a week. It sits on a site that used to house the Odeon Cinema. Several uses before that it was the Royal Opera House.

Instead of demolishing buildings, why not acquire this property and renovate it for a library that extends to the rear into the parking lot? It could be a variation of the concept that would have been used if the city had bought the post office. The cultural heritage of this spot will be preserved and continued. Downtown retail and residential uses will be preserved and continued. The new library will attract new retail tenants. It is a win-win solution.

You don’t revitalize the downtown by removing an important part of it.

Missed byelection a shot in the foot

2008-09-09T17:11:00.000-07:00

(September 09) - A couple of strategic problems were solved last week. To do it, a couple of people had to shoot a lot of other people in the foot. The Prime Minister did it to Guelph voters. Elizabeth May did it to her Guelph candidate.

Instead of voting yesterday, we have to wait another month and a half. When we do, it will be in a completely changed environment.

Stephen Harper looked at recent polling data that likely reflected numbers released by the CBC last Thursday. He saw himself rising while the his Guelph campaign was tanking. A predicted disastrous showing by Gloria Kovach would have slowed any momentum he may have had. So he pulled the political switch we thought he eliminated with his fixed election date legislation.

On the day before our by-election, he cancelled it. He shot us in the foot in a blatant attempt to save his own skin. He should be ashamed of himself. We shouldn’t be embarrassed to tell him that when the time comes.

There is one guaranteed outcome from Harper’s self-serving manipulation. The Liberals will reach into their tool box and pull out their strategic voting hammer. They want to hit you on the head with it so frequently that you won’t be able to see and think straight on election day.

Don’t let it happen. Guelph is not going to contribute our seat to a Harper government. Kovach is still carrying too much baggage from the Barr fiasco. Combine that with other things such as her foolish answer when The Mercury asked about compensation for Stephen Truscott, and you’ll see she just doesn’t have the goods. The proof, they say, is in the pudding.

Elizabeth May bought herself a ticket to the televised leaders’ debates last week, and the price was Mike Nagy. The ticket came in the form of Blair Wilson, a former Liberal MP from a wealthy British Columbia riding that stretches from North Vancouver up to the Whistler Mall. It is where the gods of conspicuous consumption live. Traditionally Reform Conservative country, the Green Party manages to get between six and nine per cent.

Wilson is now Canada’s first Green MP, May will go on TV, and Nagy’s legs are cut out from under him. It’s all part of their smooth evolution from environmental movement to political party.

The favourite argument for giving Nagy a by-election vote was that we would make history without fear of changing the complexion of the federal government. It was in his brochures. It was in his answers to Tribune questions. It was in letters to the editor from his supporters. Now it is gone.

We will make as much, or maybe more, history and have the same impact on government by being the first North American riding to elect a Marijuana Party candidate.

If making history is our prime consideration, we could elect Guelph’s first NDP MP. That would have some impact by altering the balance of power on Parliament Hill.

We are not making history, though. We are making government. That involves taking a cold hard look at policy. A leading issue in the by-election was the environment. The CBC poll put all four parties relatively even on this question.

Some thought it strange that the Conservatives could get 20 per cent approval for their environmental policy when they clearly don’t have one.

It makes sense, though. The number reflects the Canadians who don’t care if the ice cap melts as long as they don’t have to pay more taxes.

They are out there, but we shouldn’t let them run the country.

Eat locally, eat healthily

2008-09-02T18:05:00.000-07:00

(September 02) - Go to the farmer’s market. You can get most of the food you need, and it won’t kill you.

The country has been shocked lately by an outbreak of a mysterious bacteria called listeriosis. It’s killing people across Canada, making a lot more very sick and thousands more very worried.

I don’t blame Stephen Harper for this health catastrophe. I don’t even blame Mike Harris even though he’s the proud author of nearly everything that ails this city. It wasn’t just them. They had help. The social forces that propelled them into positions of power also brought these new health risks. These forces brought us deregulation and centralization. The food inspection system suffered when government funding and taxes declined.

Competition within the meat processing industry is a thing of the past. A huge amount of the sliced meats sold across the country originates in one Toronto factory. Whether on sale at Zehrs on Imperial Road or Safeway in Saskatoon, whether it’s a sub sandwich in Guelph or a pre-packaged sandwich in Moncton, odds are the meat was shipped from the Maple Leaf plant in Toronto. When you read the list of recalled brands, you see some Schneider’s and some Burns. Both were once competitors of Maple Leaf.

The free enterprise economic model pretends to thrive on competition, but it really drives to end it.

Economies of scale have led to centralized production facilities, giant retail outlets and food treated with enough chemicals to allow it to travel across the country and around the world. Go into any supermarket today and look at how many apples on display come from South Africa or China. This while orchards across southern Ontario are weighed down with fresh fruit.

If you want to eat healthily, eat locally. You can do that if you shop at the market every Saturday morning. The eggs are fresh, the meat is clean, the fruit and vegetables are tasty, and the prices are good.

It doesn’t matter what you want to know, there is always someone in Guelph with the answer. A couple of weeks ago, I wondered about the 1957 general election. The rest of the country voted on June 10. Wellington South, our riding name at the time, voted on July 15.

A loyal reader, Walt Atkinson, called to say the Liberal candidate, Henry Hosking, died on June 3 while the campaign was still underway.

He’s buried in Rockwood cemetery.

Candidates don’t die on the job very often. When one does, the election has to be set aside to allow the affected Party time to regroup and nominate someone else.

This very rare event sparks some interesting what ifs. Hosking was running for re-election as an incumbent. He was first elected in 1949, succeeding another Liberal, Robert Gladstone, who had been the MP from 1935 until 1949. Alf Hales had run for the Conservatives in 1953, but lost to Hosking. They were up against each other for the second time in 1957 when tragedy struck the Hosking family.

Probability suggests that Hosking would have beaten Hales again. Twenty-two years of Liberal incumbency would have been tough to overturn. But the delay allowed voters here a chance to watch the rest of the country elect a Conservative minority government on June 10. Wellington South went Conservative on July 15, and Hales held it through thick and thin until his retirement 17 years later.

Now we can only speculate on the different story that might have been written into Guelph’s history book if Hosking had lived another few weeks or months.

Why is the PM a no-show?

2008-08-26T17:34:00.000-07:00

(August 26) - Prime Minister Stephen Harper came close, but he didn’t quite get here. He managed to get to Kitchener, where he flipped some burgers at a Conservative riding association event, but no further.

He didn’t drive down Highway 7 and into the only by-election being held west of the Quebec border. Gloria Kovach had to excuse herself from the Action Read all-candidate debate to go over to Kitchener to get her picture taken with her leader.

She was quoted in the local press as saying if Harper was to visit here during a by-election, her campaign "would be left to shoulder the costs associated with security.”

This is an odd thing for her to say for a couple of reasons. It sounded as if the local campaign was making an end run around election financing rules. If he comes here, the locals pay. If she goes there, the taxpayers pay.

As it turns out, she was wrong. I asked Elections Canada about it. I sent the query through their web site on Wednesday evening, and got a phone call back from a man in Ottawa on Thursday morning.

No, he said, the security and other costs associated with his visit would not be considered a campaign expense. Not for the Prime Minister nor any other party leader. He suggested that if I wanted to know why Harper didn’t come to Guelph, I “should direct the question to the Prime Minister’s Office.”

Kovach was obviously poorly informed on this important matter. So we are left to wonder why hers is the only party leader to avoid the Guelph by-election. I didn’t have a chance to ask the PMO directly, but a visiting MP from Alberta supplied another possible answer.

Brian Jean, a Conservative, said it was because the Prime Minister doesn’t want to influence the outcome of the by-election. This is more nonsense. It is the job of party leaders to influence elections. Stéphane Dion is doing it. So are Elizabeth May and Jack Layton. Are we to conclude that the Conservatives know his influence will only be negative?

Two of the issues in this by-election are accountability and the environment. These put three albatrosses around Gloria Kovach’s neck. The combined weight of Stephen Harper, John Baird and Brent Barr will stop her from leaving her city council desk.

I used to have a Facebook account, but gave it up.

Among other things, I came to view it as the Wal-Mart of the Internet. Big, greedy, domineering, arrogant and evil. All the same adjectives apply. The difference between them is that you can easily get away from Wal-Mart. There are other places to shop. It seems harder to get away from Facebook if you want to bring an issues based campaign to the Internet.

All four of the major local campaigns are trying to steer us towards a Facebook account. It’s hard to find Frank Valeriote’s Facebook thing. The other three have links from their websites, but you have to do a bit of Googling to find his.

For what it’s worth – and I think that’s not very much – each of their Facebook pages keeps track of the number of “supporters” or “friends” they have. As of last Friday morning, the numbers were: Kovach 171, Valeriote 275, Nagy 424, King 854. That’s likely more a measure of the demographic of their support than the depth.

As far as I can tell, it’s impossible to know how many of these are real people who live in Guelph. I just hope more than 1724 people vote on September 8.

Let the Winner Win

2008-08-19T17:00:00.000-07:00

(August 19) - If you’re enjoying this political banquet of a by-election, don’t leave the table too quickly. There could be a second helping waiting in the kitchen. If you are full, though, I have a challenge to make that could please all but the most obese political gluttons.

All the clever people in the big city newspapers are predicting a general election as early as October. It all depends on what we do here, and what some other people in similar circumstances do in Quebec. If anyone but Gloria Kovach wins on September 8, Stéphane Dion could find the spine to defeat the government. If she wins, the Liberal brain trust will go back into hibernation. We’ll have the Harper government around our necks until October 2009.

But she isn’t going to win. If things keep going the way they seem to be going, she will be lucky to come in fourth. Regardless of where she places, one of the other three is going to come first. If you have one of their lawn signs in front of your house, don’t pull it out too quickly. You might need it again.

So here’s the challenge. The decision made by the people of Guelph in September is not likely to change in October. The winner of the by-election should work for more than just a month or two before reapplying for the job. The four local riding associations should meet together soon, well before election day. Even before the advance polls open. They should hammer out an agreement that three of them will not field a candidate if the next general election is called in 2008. If we get through Christmas without one, then everything goes back to normal.

The whole country is watching us during this by-election. We should have a chance to rest and recuperate and watch them from a distance while they make their choices. This would obviously set a precedent, but it wouldn’t be the first time Guelph sat one out.

In 1957, when Alf Hales was first elected, the general election was on June 10. The election in Wellington South – our riding name at the time – was deferred to July 15. It would be interesting to hear from some of our local historians about why this happened.

Could we sit another one out? Should we? Maybe, if it comes up too quickly. The local Greens are campaigning with an eye to a quick turn around. They are telling us it won’t change the national political make up if Nagy wins. We can get back to normal behaviour when we wake up the morning after.

They say we’ll make history and be the talk of the western world if we elect North America’s first Green MP. It doesn’t have to be a lasting commitment. A brief flirtation will keep them happy. It only needs to endure until the next televised leader’s debate. A vote for Nagy is a vote to put Elizabeth May on television.

You don’t have to be Green to be green. Everyone has a position on the environment. The Liberals have their carbon tax. The NDP have their Kyoto Bill. The Greens have their ideas. The Conservatives have John Baird. You have a choice.

Killings Hit Close to Home

2008-08-12T19:53:00.000-07:00

(August 12) - The National Rifle Association should be declared a terrorist organization. All its members should be rounded up and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. Ordinarily, I couldn’t care less what the American government does about American organizations. Times are changing. The idiots recently struck close to home, hitting right inside my comfort zone.

A couple of weeks ago, a shotgun wielding whacko went into a Unitarian Church in Knoxville Tennessee and killed two people and injured seven others. It was right in the middle of a children’s musical performance. The gunman carried his shotgun in a guitar case, and people thought he was part of the event. Until he started blasting into the pews.

His reason for doing it? The Unitarian Church approves of same sex marriages, while he doesn’t. My sister-in-law Nancy lives in Knoxville and attends the Unitarian Church with her partner Dawn and their two children. In 2003 they were married in Guelph. Thirty-something years ago Nancy was a vice-president of the Central Students’ Association at the University.

They weren’t at that performance a couple of Sundays ago. She and Dawn had scored tickets to take their kids to something at Dollywood. Otherwise, they would have been. They were close friends with one of the two people who was killed. She happened to be sitting in one of the pews he pointed the gun at. A man was killed when he stood up to shield some others.

Both dead people were heterosexuals. They were killed in an open assault on the rights of gays and lesbians. If that’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is. Any politician who continues to oppose stricter gun controls should not be elected. Anywhere. Ever.

The Make Poverty History coalition has set up shop in Guelph for the by-election. They were a bit slow getting here, with their first local organizing meeting coming on the Tuesday after the writ was dropped. Better late than never, though. They want to raise issues of poverty and urge you to vote for the party that pledges to end it. Who wouldn’t sign this pledge in the heat of an election campaign? What candidate will say publicly that poverty should continue?

Don’t worry about what they say. Worry about what they do. Or don’t do. Between the two of them, the Liberals and Conservatives have been governing Canada for the past 140 years. If they wanted to end poverty, they could have done it by now. If we keep rotating the two of them in and out of power for another 140 years they still won’t get it done.

You would think the federal Liberals could coordinate things a bit better with their provincial cousins. The federals say they will shift taxes and increase the National Child Tax Benefit by $350 per child. Yet the provincials continue to claw back half this benefit from single mothers on welfare. On top of that, they just cancelled the back to school clothing allowances for poor families.

Ironically, the Make Poverty History organizing meetings keep conflicting with the campaign commitments of the very people most likely to support its goals. The first one was at the same time as Jack Layton was in town to kick off the Tom King campaign. The second was last night, when Elizabeth May was here to boost Mike Nagy’s chances.

Who will tax greed?

2008-08-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

(August 5) - A couple of Fridays ago, my wife and I went around the north west corner of the city putting up signs. The by-election had just been called, and we are a couple of real keeners when it comes to democracy. We’re not the only ones. There were volunteers from all four parties out, all doing the same thing. It was quite a pleasant and congenial experience, except for those moments when we had to pound in wooden stakes with a mini-sledge.

Whenever we’d run across other sign planters, there’d be a round of well wishing and we’d all get on our way. Some in little cars, some in big cars, but all in cars.

No one was carrying large signs in the back of a Smart Car. I didn’t see anyone using the trunk of a high end hybrid. All had fairly ordinary vehicles that run on high priced gasoline. That started me thinking. We love to bash cars and the carbon tire tracks they leave everywhere, but we can’t get away from them. So I thought I’d ask each of the four candidates for their position on the price of gas and if they intend to do anything about the excessive profit taking by the oil companies.

I sent an e-mail before work on a Monday morning. It went out at 8:45. At 9:02 I got an answer back from Anna Muselius for the Liberal campaign. I think at first she was a bit suspicious about what I was up to. I assured her that this column wouldn’t be used as a campaign tool, and she promised to get back with an answer. By the end of the week I still hadn’t heard from any of the other three.

That’s not surprising. I used to be a campaign manager, and perpetual suspicion is a job requirement. It should also be an essential part of the voter’s mind set. If not suspicion, then certainly skepticism.

There are two things you must always remember about politics.

The first is that you will never encounter a political party with which you agree one hundred per cent. Judge them on balance and go with the one you agree with more often than not. I forget what the second thing is.

Maybe a by-election isn’t the time for it, but I’d like to hear a political party say it’s time to tax greed. Oil companies. Banks. Credit cards. Cell phones. Retail ruffians. All act with a “king of the sandbox” arrogance. They think they can get away with anything because no one is tough enough to stop them. Someone needs to take them out behind the barn and kick them in the profits.

I don’t know about you, but I sorely miss David Lewis and his railing against corporate welfare bums. Politicians need to get some fire back into their bellies. John Diefenbaker had it. Pierre Trudeau had it. Tommy Douglas had it. Who now will rage against the machine?

This election is a tough one to predict. Just about any one could win it. There’s no sense saying that everyone is a winner if they get their point of view across. It’s not true.

Playing olitics is like playing darts. Coming second isn’t good enough. So I’ll say to all the candidates what Lynne and I said to the other sign planters on the other side of the Hanlon two Fridays ago: good luck.

It doesn’t mean much, unless you’re an astrological numerologist, but this is the second time there’s been an election on the day next to my birthday. The last one was on September 6 1990. We can all remember who won that one.

When your Wii becomes WEEE

2008-07-29T13:10:00.000-07:00

(July 29) - A couple of weeks ago, techno-freaks across Canada lined up overnight hoping to buy the latest overpriced cellphone. Although some Guelphites managed to get an iPhone, it's hard to say how many. They are sold only at Rogers Wireless stores. A call to the stores only told me there were some in stock on July 11, but none on July 18. They wouldn't say how many. A woman at the Stone Road Mall store told me Apple doesn't want that information divulged. Mystique needs mystery to work.

Two things are certain, though. All the people who bought an iPhone already had another cellphone. None of them are still using the old one. That's the way it is with electronic gadgetry, isn't it? It doesn't matter if it's a cellphone, a video game console or a computer. No sooner do you carry one out the front door than a better one is unloaded at the back of the store. There is probably no other industry where planned obsolescence is so consciously and deliberately designed into things.

There are some charities that happily take discarded cellphones. They refurbish them and either sell them to raise funds or donate them to women's shelters. Abused women should never be far away from a direct line to help. If you don't want your old cellphone, there are lots of people who do. Incredibly, a lot of phones still end up in the clear waste bag for shipment to a landfill somewhere. It's the same with old DVD players, video game consoles and computers. This stuff is generally classified as "waste electric and electronic equipment" or WEEE. It's also known as e-waste.

It shouldn't go to landfill, and it doesn't have to. Next Monday, Aug. 4, is John Galt Day. The city is opening the Waste Resource Innovation Centre for another one of their eco days. You can bring out any of your old electronic gadgetry. No televisions, toasters or coffee makers, but lots of the plug-and-play toys you've acquired over the years. Check the city's website to see exactly what you can drop off. It will all be properly taken apart and either reused, recycled or safely disposed. It is all a part of what we call Extended Consumer Responsibility. When you buy something, it is yours to use while it is good and to make sure it doesn't damage the environment when you don't want it anymore.

Of all the electronic waste out there, computers are the worst. The Basel Action Network is an organization dedicated to monitoring the international trade in toxic material. They estimate that a pile of 500 computers contains 717 kilograms of lead, 1.36 kilograms of cadmium, 863 grams of chromium and 287 grams of mercury. Many of the places that buy second hand electronic equipment end up reselling them for export. Most of it ends up at Guiyu in China or Bangalore in India. Stories of pollution and disease are horrendous. Four villages in China have been literally turned into toxic waste dumps. Their drinking water has to be trucked in from over 30 kilometres away.

Bill Shields, a supervisor in Guelph's solid waste resources department, assured me that none of the e-waste taken by the city leaves the country. It is sent to Renewed Computer Technology in St. Catharines. Do yourself a favour and look this company up on the Internet at www.rcto.ca. You'll be impressed at the work they do training young people in information technology programs and in providing computers for schools.

Next April, stores in Ontario will start charging "eco fees" on televisions and computers. It will be about $10 on a television and as much as $13 on computers. We started paying similar fees on paints and solvents at the beginning of July. They help finance municipal collection programs.

If these fees do what they are supposed to do, they will remind you that ownership lasts right through to the final disposition of the things you buy. You can send them to landfill, you can send them to China or you can take them to Dunlop Drive.

The latter option is the one that keeps the "responsibility" in Extended Consumer Responsibility. It helps you, it helps the city and it helps the planet.

Responsible product use and disposal is up to you

2008-07-22T10:54:00.000-07:00

(July 22) - All sales are final. That's the way it is with paint. It doesn't matter where you buy it. If you get too much, and have half a gallon of Yew Green left over, don't try returning it. No one who sells it wants it back.

Well over 10 per cent of all paint sold never touches a brush or a roller or a wall. It stays in the can on basement floors and garage shelves all over Guelph, indeed throughout Ontario and across Canada. It is, by far, the largest component of the household hazardous waste mountain. It makes putting out a house fire one of the most dangerous tasks undertaken by firefighters. This isn't because of the heat or the collapsing roofs. It is because of the smoke. The chemical soup of waste material stored in the home is a major cause of the workplace cancers they risk falling victim to.

You shouldn't keep it. You can't return it. You can never throw it out. So what can you do? Give it to the city. Load it into the trunk and drive it out to the Waste Resource Innovation Centre. That's the place we used to call the Wet-Dry. Still do, more often than not. Drop the paint off.

One day you'll be painting the kid's bedroom and who cares what colour it will be? It won't matter, because the little dear isn't going to like it anyway. Drive back out to Dunlop Drive and pick up some paint someone else left there. The city will charge you exactly what they paid you when you dropped off your old paint. Nothing.

This exchange program was reinstated at the beginning of the month, at about the same time as new "eco fees" started appearing on paint store sales invoices. An extra 10 cents a litre helps fund municipal recycling programs. Similar fees are charged on motor oil, solvents, antifreeze and other hazardous material.

The "eco fees" go to a group called Stewardship Ontario, which uses them to fund municipal collection depots. The paint used to be sent on a long journey, at the end of which it would be used as a fuel additive. Soon, it will go to Hotz Environmental Services in Hamilton. It will be blended and reprocessed as second grade paint.

It's not exactly extended producer responsibility (EPR), but it will do until the real thing comes along.

EPR was born in Germany about 15 years ago. At first, it required producers to take back and reuse, or recycle, the packaging in which they ship and sell their products. It has grown over the years to a requirement that manufacturers are responsible for the final disposal of the things they make. With EPR, when your Intrepid is about to give up the ghost, you don't limp it out to a scrap yard. You bring it back to Chrysler and they reuse some bits, recycle others and safely dispose of the rest.

EPR gives the research and development folk an incentive to design the product with an eye on its eventual disposition. They don't necessarily build things to last longer. In fact, they build them to last shorter. They don't want them sitting in landfills for the next 500 years. In 2006 an article in the Harvard Environmental Law Review called it "planning the funeral at the birth." An excellent definition of EPR.

If we had this in Ontario, the companies that make the paint would have to take it back for safe disposal. We don't have it, and they don't have to do it. What we have instead could be called Extended Consumer Responsibility. When you buy something, you agree to be accountable for its proper use and disposal.

Think about an apple, but not the computer type. You eat an Ida Red and put the core in the compost bin. Nothing goes to waste.

It gets more complicated with more complex products, but the principles remain the same.

In a couple of weeks, on John Galt Day, the city will take many of your old electronics off your hands. They are having another Eco Day on Dunlop Drive.

Next week we'll have a look at what happens when your Wii becomes WEEE.

Deja vu all over again

2008-07-15T13:49:00.000-07:00

(July 15) - They have no one to blame but themselves. Last week, the Wal-Mart development team came to Guelph city council and shot themselves in the foot. I was there to speak against the application, and I saw it happen. They wanted approval to expand their store by 65,000 square feet, and to add other retail stores across the road from Woodlawn Cemetery. Then they talked themselves right out of it.

Before cheering too loudly - or grieving too sorrowfully, depending on whose side you're on - word came out last Friday that the self-inflicted wounds were not fatal. Staff will get back into negotiations with the developer and council will have another look at it in the middle of September. We should still take a look at what happened last week.

The developers got on Vicki Beard's wrong side when they refused to harvest rainwater to irrigate the plants. They got under Mike Salisbury's skin when they fudged and fuddled over a second floor on buildings near the streets. Several councillors, including Ian Findlay and Leanne Piper, wanted reassurance that new buildings would meet environmental efficiency and design standards. They couldn't get it. The Wal-Mart Wallies wouldn't even consider a green roof.

This raised the question about holding the Wal-Mart developers to a higher standard than others. If council didn't ask the Great Canadian Superstore to meet higher environmental standards in the south end, should they ask Wal-Mart to meet them in the north?

The short answer is yes, they should. To do otherwise would be extremely unfair to future generations. If we missed an opportunity in the past, we have not given it up for ever and always. Just because we failed to score a goal early does not mean we concede the game.

What happened yesterday shouldn't become the fixed benchmark for all our tomorrows. All developers should be required to build to the highest standards in effect when the shovels hit the dirt. Council's demands should keep pace with changing and improving building technologies.

The legendary Wal-Mart arrogance was in full summer bloom last week. During the epic 10-year-long Ontario Municipal Board battle that preceded their arrival in Guelph, they consistently denied they had plans to anchor a super centre.

Yet the paint was barely dry on their sign before they announced plans to expand. For several months they have had signs on their property announcing new stores that were "coming soon." They take it for granted that their sheer size will roll over anyone who gets in their way.

We should be proud to have city councillors who do not automatically ask how high whenever Sam Walton tells them to jump.

There was one other very important difference between last week's meeting and one at the Italian Canadian Club four or five years ago. The large room at the ICC was packed, with dozens of delegates speaking out against putting Wal-Mart into that location.

At the end of the meeting, only three councillors gave any explanation at all for why they would vote the way they did. Those were Cathy Downer, Lise Burcher and Maggie Laidlaw. The other 10 mutely raised their hands in abject obeisance to the development dollars.

Last week, all 13 people around the horseshoe spoke out with reasoned rationales either in favour or against. That alone shows an enormous growth in the maturity of the women and men who govern our city.

It is not over yet, and now is not the time for silence. I am convinced that if there had been a vote, the majority of people in Guelph did not want a Wal-Mart between Woodlawn Cemetery and the Ignatius Centre. They might not have cared if the store came to Guelph, but not there.

If you think the power centre should not grow bigger on that corner, put up your hand now. Write letters to the editor. Send e-mails to city council. Do something to join the debate and frame the way our city will grow.

Let there be no misunderstanding, though. If city council says no to the developers again in September, the argument will go back to the OMB. A similar Wal-Mart fight is brewing in Toronto. The outcome there might help settle the matter here. We have two months to decide if we want to get back into the trenches.

Who wants to be dinner?

2008-07-08T17:08:00.000-07:00

(July 8) - Bigger is not always better. Sometimes it is, but not usually. I don’t think bigness helped children get a better education when the school boards were merged. Our local credit union didn’t become better when it became Meridian. It is unlikely that our hydro delivery will improve after it is swallowed by Horizon Utilities.

The Upper Grand District School Board was formed 10 years ago by amalgamating the Wellington County Board of Education with Dufferin. This happened during the Mike Harris years. Even though the former Premier was a former teacher, quality of education was never a priority with his government. It was all about cutting services and taxes. The merger shifted control of the system further away from local citizens. Guelph ended up with fewer trustees.

Amalgamation didn’t make teachers’ jobs any easier. Nor did it improve the education received by students. In this one, bigger was worse.

The Credit Union growth is a bit more complex. I’ve been a member for over 35 years. When I joined, it was in a basement office on College Ave. It went through a series of mergers, ending in a great big one in 2005. Meridian is now the biggest credit union in Ontario. The head office is in St. Catharines. Service at the two Guelph branches is still exceptional, and it will always be better than a chartered bank. Credit Unions are financial co-operatives, owned and controlled by members. When the Meridian merger was put to a vote, I was one of the minority who said no.

Becoming huge made it stronger, but not better. Neither did it get worse. In this case, bigger was relatively neutral.

Now we are staring down the throat of a Hydro buy out. Something the stock markets would call a hostile take over.

At the moment, the citizens of Guelph own Guelph Hydro. Horizon Utilities came along with an offer to purchase before we’d even begun thinking of selling. This is the company that was born when Hamilton Hydro bought St. Catharines Hydro. They are also trying to buy Brant County Power.

The provincial government wants fewer electricity distribution companies in Ontario, and Horizon is aggressively trying to make it happen. It wants to be the diner, but do we want to be the dinner?

In this age of increasing environmental awareness, this is the wrong direction for an electrical utility. It should not be moving towards a monolith that has been immunized against local control. Instead of this, we should have a network of community based distribution outlets that can work together co-operatively. That’s the best way to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The job of government is to supply the tools to make this happen.

City council is studying a business case put forward by Horizon. We don’t know what’s in it because property deals are always done in camera. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s strangely appropriate that an electrical connection is being made with the lights off.

Some reports have Horizon offering a million or more dollars. Others have them promising a 20 per cent rate reduction that is really only four per cent. None of it matters.

Any good salesman can dress a hog in an evening gown and make it look beautiful. But underneath it is still a hog. Our councillors should be able to see through the slick sales pitches and look at what they’re getting. They should be wise enough to know one thing.

If we want to leave a smaller footprint, we have to start wearing smaller boots.

Everyone in Guelph is excited and happy that Sister Christine has been recognized with the Order of Canada. She deserves it much more that some of the people who were recognized in the past. She certainly has much more merit than Conrad Black. Black’s award should have been called back the minute he was led out of a Chicago courtroom in handcuffs. There is no reason for him to be treated any more leniently than was Alan Eagleson when he went to prison.

There is something very disturbing about the image of Black sitting down for breakfast in his Florida penitentiary with an Order of Canada medal hanging on his lapel. There is something equally refreshing about Sister Christine serving breakfast with one hanging on her apron.

Afraid of shadows

2008-07-02T16:53:00.000-07:00

(July 2) - We’ve now put 141 Canada Days behind us. Seven since the catastrophic events of September 11 2001. What has come to characterize the state of our nation in the years since those terrible crimes were unleashed in New York? It isn’t the sight of Canadian troops on patrol in Kandahar. They are bravely fighting a fight the politicians should never have joined. The sooner they are brought home the better.

The defining image of our country is unfolding in a courthouse down the 401. It’s not pleasant. If you have been following the news, you will know that a young man is on trial in Brampton accused of plotting the downfall of our country. He is the first Canadian to be brought before a judge under the Anti-Terrorism Act, and he has been held in jail since 2006.

Also, if you have been following the news, you will know the evidence against him is flimsy at best. He was apparently one in a group of young men whose minds were shaped in equal parts by their video games and by their religion. Like many others in their age group, they said foolish things and concocted unrealistic fantasies.

We are not fighting terror. We have fallen under its spell.

Who in their right minds would ever believe that they would ever get close enough to behead the Prime Minister? Who could believe that Rockwood Conservation Area would be used as a jihadist training camp?

Only one thing gave this absurdity any credibility at all. The kids are Muslims.

After September 2001, our politicians became sudden converts to the precautionary principle. They never bought into it in all the years that thousands of new chemicals were introduced to workplaces. When unions asked that they be banned until they are proven safe, the politicos said it can’t be done. The same thing when environmentalists argued that pesticides should be banned if they can’t be proven safe. The politicians stood firm in their rejection of caution. But show them a Muslim with a preposterous plan and they go all weak in the knees.

We haven’t just become afraid of Muslims. We’ve become afraid of shadows.

We talk tough but behave weakly. We imprison people not for what they have done, but for what we are afraid they might do. Public policy is set by the bureaucrat with the most vivid imagination. When that happens, we lose our direction as a nation.

For further evidence, look at the cases of Brenda Martin and Omar Khadr.

Martin was arrested and imprisoned in Mexico in 2006. She was charged and eventually convicted of money laundering. During her trial, the Canadian government intervened on her behalf. After her conviction, the Canadian government paid a fine for her and sent a private jet to bring her home. She was held briefly in Kitchener then released on parole.

Khadr has been in the American prison at Guantanamo Bay since 2002. Conditions there are far worse than anything found in any Mexican prison. He is the only Canadian there. Britain and Australia secured the release of their nationals from Guantanamo. Canada has not even tried to do so.

It makes you wonder. Martin and Khadr were both born in Canada. They were both arrested and imprisoned under harsh conditions in a foreign country. They both steadfastly maintain they are not guilty. What difference is there between them? For one thing, Martin was 49 years old when she was arrested, Khadr was 15. For another, Martin has been convicted and Khadr hasn’t. Other than that, what difference is there? Yes indeed. It makes you wonder.

It doesn’t have to be like this. We can do better. We have put 141 Canada Days behind us. While it hasn’t been an unblemished history, it was mostly peaceful. There was a bad patch near the beginning when Louis Riel led the Métis rebellions. Back in 1885 the government regarded him as a leader of a terrorist organization and sent him to the gallows. Today he is considered a hero, the father of Manitoba.

That’s the trouble with a war on terror. We can’t define the enemy, so we imagine it. Then it changes shape, disappears, reappears and takes on the face of whomever we are afraid of at the moment. It’s a poor way to run a country.

The Americans might mend their ways in November. When will we?

A fitness centre for your mind

2008-06-24T16:57:00.000-07:00

(June 24) - It’s official. Reading does not make you fat. Watching television does. Sitting in front of a computer for hours on end helps widen the waist line. Reading doesn’t. Books expand the mind without expanding the love handles.

We know this because Statistics Canada studied the relationship between leisure time activities and body mass indexes of more than 42,500 Canadian adults. The results were released last week. What do they tell us? Watch a lot of television and look like Jabba the Hutt. Read a lot of books and look like a buff heart throb. Exercise helps as well, but reading is the secret ingredient in the fitness meringue.

If we were to take everyone in Guelph and toss us all onto a scale, we’d find a ton of excess poundage. There’s a lot to lose and it will take a lot of reading to get it off. None of us can afford to buy all the books we need, nor would we have room to keep them. That’s why we have a library. It gets the books and stores them for us. All we have to do is borrow, read and return them.

Our library likes to keep books circulating. It has no choice. As vice-chair of the Public Library Board, I can offer one certainty: if everyone decided to return all their books on the same day, it would be a disaster. There wouldn’t be room for them. That’s not news any more. Most of us know we need a new library, and we can be fairly confident we will get one. Public discussion on the issue has shifted from “should we” to “when will we” and “where will it go.”

We’re getting closer to knowing where. It will be somewhere on the Baker St. parking lot. The City hired some consultants who presented three preferred options to a recent city council meeting. Two have the library fully contained on the parking lot land. One has it fronting on Wyndham St. and backing onto the lot.

There’s a public consultation in the library this evening from 5:00 – 8:00 p.m. It’s a drop-in type of event where you can come and go as you please. The consultants will be consulting. People will be questioning. City staff will be responding. City councillors will be listening. Tax revolters will be revolting.

The most controversial option would see the city acquire the buildings currently occupied by the Family Thrift Store and Wyndham Art Supplies and the cowboy bar. There are apartments above the shops. The bar is between them and the health centre on a historical site. It used to be the Odeon Cinema and, before that, the old opera house.

It would probably make more sense to leave the two shops and their apartments alone and renovate the saloon. If we had bought the Post Office building, the library would have taken up the whole building and extended into the parking lot. A good architect should be able to do much the same thing with the bar.

In the end, the decision about location is the city’s. Public money funds it. The Library Board is responsible for ensuring it provides the services people need where and when they need them. City Council is responsible for providing the space in which it operates. Citizens are responsible for making sure their voices are heard as they participate in the planning process. That’s what this evening is all about.

It’s your library, and your downtown. Make sure they reflect your values and vision.

Then there’s ownership. The library will always be owned by you. The Public Libraries Act guarantees it. What your councillors have to decide soon is who will own the building. From the beginning of its days, the library building has been owned by the library.

Because of pressures resulting from a very real cash shortage, the city is considering the option of turning Baker St. over to private interests and leasing back the space. It’s a false economy. We’ll either pay in the capital budget now, or in operating budgets for decades to come.

Either way we’ll pay, so we might as well own it.

The public library is a fitness centre for the mind, and the staff are our personal fitness trainers.

Use it, cherish it, and keep it firmly within our grasp.

Down On Downloading

2008-06-17T17:15:00.000-07:00

(June 17) - I don’t steal songs. I used to, but not any more. Several years ago, Roy Orbison’s widow caught me at it and forced Napster to cancel my account. All because my turntable died and I couldn’t play my old vinyl copy of Running Scared. That, and the fact that I was too cheap to go to the mall and buy his greatest hits CD. Other file sharing programs were magnets for spyware, adware, viruses and the other trash found in the ditches along the information highway.

Then, after a while, my CD player also died. My computer became obsolete. Technological upgrades came into the home in the form of a new beast with a hard drive big enough to hold all the software a family could ever want plus more songs than Roy Orbison could ever have written. Run some long speaker wire through the computer room floor, across the basement ceiling joists and back up through the living room floor and Bob’s your uncle. The stereo is connected to the computer. You don’t need a CD player, unless you’re a sensitive audiophile. If you want to hear the pin that fell on the recording studio floor, running music from your computer isn’t the way to go.

My technological upgrade went hand in hand with an upgraded sense of social responsibility. No more pirating. Barbara Orbison had made an honest man of me.

It might sound like it, but I wasn’t stealing everything that wasn’t tied down. There were rationalizations I thought made sense at the time. The Kramdens don’t have a lot of money, so I bought Quiet Collision. The Rolling Stones do, so who cares if I get Sticky Fingers without paying? Other than them, I mean.

The trouble is that sticky fingers are found all over the Internet. If you can find something, you can take it and keep it and multiply it and give it away to all your friends.

There are people who think they learned everything they need to know in kindergarten. When they get on the Internet, their principles become governed by the number one rule of the playground: finders keepers, losers weepers. Or, in the harsher language of the 21st century: you snooze, you lose.

Try this in the bank one day. If the teller goes to the toilet and leaves the cash drawer unlocked, help yourself to a fist full of twenties. Then explain to the police that you were allowed to take it because it was there and who cares anyway because the bank has loads of money.

Moral justifications used on the Internet fall apart behind the marble pillars of the banks. Quite often, moral justifications are neither.

There are a lot of talented singers and song writers in Guelph. A lot of them hold down regular day jobs to buy the groceries and pay the mortgage. They still find time to create beautiful music. The next time you’re downtown, go into Ground Floor Music and buy a copy of Lucky Blue by Tannis Slimmon. It’s as fine a piece of work as anything made by any skilled cabinet maker. People who make music are as entitled to earn money from it as are people who make furniture.

Last week, the federal government introduced amendments to the Copyright Act that set hefty fines for piracy. Like most things coming out of Ottawa these days, it is harsh. Those people who think the Internet should be an unregulated free for all are whining because they might be forced to pay for music. They shouldn’t cry. They’ve no one to blame but themselves.

They should remember kindergarten, and what the teacher did when one kid took another’s lunch money.

Speaking of the federal government, Prime Minister Harper got something right last week. The apology for forcing native children into residential schools was an overdue recognition of the deep injustices in our nation’s past. It’s been a long time coming.

Now we need to see what happens next. Words alone, no matter how eloquently spoken, can’t erase the past. Neither can money. What we need is concrete action to recognize that Native Canadians have seniority rights in this country.

Let’s hope this turning point helps bring a healthy conclusion to disputes about natural resource rights on Indian land, and support for strengthening the political and social infrastructure of their communities. That will put flesh on the body of the apology.

No easy way out of the energy crunch

2008-06-10T17:16:00.000-07:00

(June 10) - There are connecting lines joining apparently unconnected things. They’re not usually straight lines with arrow heads pointing clearly from one cause to a resulting effect. Sometimes they are round, or oval, or confusingly squiggly. No matter what, they are always there.

If we squint up our eyes and look closely at the events of the past couple of weeks, we can see a line joining Detroit, Rome, Quebec City and Guelph.

If we plot the line on a graph, it goes from point E to point N, back to point E, up to point R, down to point G, and way up to point Y. That’s my hokey way of saying it’s all about energy. Or the impending lack of it.

I don’t have Detroit on the list because of the Stanley Cup. It’s true enough that I ran out of the energy needed to watch hockey after the first third of the baseball season was in the books. There's more to it than that.

Detroit is about a lot more than talented Swedish athletes. It’s also the home of General Motors. The world is running out of the energy needed to drive many of GM’s vehicles. Thousands of workers will suffer the consequences when the company closes the Oshawa truck plant.

Buzz Hargrove is understandably upset because it’s only been a few weeks since he concluded an early collective agreement with GM. It froze wages across the Canadian operations for three years in return for job guarantees from the company. If the job guarantees are not there, the contract should be declared null and void. Wages should be unfrozen until they get back to the table in September.

It is absurd for the company to claim they were taken by surprise by a two week decline in truck sales or a two week spike in the price of crude oil. No one else was surprised.

They weren't surprised in Rome where a recently concluded UN conference looked at the crisis in the world’s food supply. Soaring oil prices bring more biofuels which bring soaring food prices.

Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. Lots of people want to save the environment without giving up the creature comforts that are killing it.

We can’t have it both ways. Every litre of ethanol in the tank of an SUV lifts the price of corn around the world. People go hungry. The higher the price of corn, the more land is given over to growing it. Rainforests disappear.

At the Rome meeting, the United States, Brazil, Canada and some European countries blocked a clear statement linking biofuels to food prices. These countries are leading the global charge to convert arable farmland from food to fuel production.

At least biofuel doesn’t directly emit greenhouse gases. In an effort to deal with companies that do, the premiers of Ontario and Quebec got together in Quebec City a week or so ago. They reached a carbon “cap and trade” deal that is supposed to help us meet our Kyoto targets.

These schemes are accurately described as free market environmentalism. There’s an interesting article about this in the April 19 edition of New Scientist magazine. If you are a library member, you can read it on the their web site. The bottom line is that a polluting company can buy carbon credits on an open market. The article points out: “You can gain carbon credits for burning biofuels in Europe, even if the crops from which they are produced are grown in fields created by draining peat swamps or cutting down forests.”

Meanwhile back here at home, the province is still trying to sell us their dream of a new and improved Hanlon and its money-pit-cousin, the GTA West transportation corridor. There are lots of cloverleaf interchanges, tons of steel and cement, lots of money and fast moving traffic. What it doesn’t have are traffic circles, common sense and a clear vision of the future.

It will be a highway designed to meet the faltering vision of a GM executive. That’s about as sensible as building a fourth multi-level parking garage downtown when we should be getting away from our dependency on cars.

There is no easy way out of the energy crisis. The only sure thing is there is no free lunch. Whatever we do carries a cost. One way or another, sooner or later, we are going to have to pay.

Gotta Cure the Tax Cut Fever

2008-05-27T17:17:00.000-07:00

(May 27) - A carpenter once complained that after cutting a board three times it was still too short. That’s the way it is with taxes as well. After cutting them several times, our governments still don’t have enough money to do what they need to do.

We’re getting perilously close to a tipping point.

It's hard to pin down exactly when the tax-cutting mania started. It has been going on at least since the early 1980s. That was when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put their conservative grips on both sides of the Atlantic. It hit Ontario with a vengeance in the mid-nineties when the Harris government was elected. Stephen Harper embraces it with a religious fervour. This is not surprising, since he is a former leader of the National Citizen’s Coalition, a lobby group set up to fight any and all taxation.

Tax cutting is promoted as a magic medicine, the cure for everything that ails us. We hear it all the time. “We are in a recession, so cut taxes.” “The economy is booming, so cut taxes.” No one seems to know any more why we have to do it. We just do.

We have swallowed so much of this fiscal laxative for so long that you would think it should have flushed us out by now. It obviously hasn’t. Harper wants to force feed us more of it.

What good has it done? For the most part, it shifted the suffering. When the Harris government slashed provincial taxes, it downloaded its responsibilities to municipal governments. The road from here to Cambridge used to be provincial highway 24. Now it’s regional road 24, administered by the county. Welfare was a provincial program. Now it’s run by the county. The same with housing. Guelph pays a large share of the county’s costs. Remember how much we paid to renovate the Post Office after the last council decided not to buy it? It’s the same with all the county services used by Guelph residents. Running a city of our size has always been difficult. Tax cut fever makes it more so.

Our city councillors are now grappling with the effects of being trapped at the bottom of a downward spiral. There’s a lot that needs done, but not much money to work with. After setting a list of priorities last January, they now have to take another look. To their credit, they are going about it in a thoughtful, systematic way. They are not looking at life through a rear view mirror and pointing accusatory fingers. It would be easy to do when we all know the city’s problems would be a lot smaller if a few people had been tossed off council in 2003 instead of 2006.

Now that they are having this second look, citizens should get into the process. Let your councillors know what projects you think are important. My guess is that most people would sooner see a new downtown library than a new parking garage. I was at a meeting in the Grange Hills neighbourhood last week and people there desperately want an east side branch library. Those who live south of Kortright are looking for a new emergency service station. It will house an ambulance service, a fire hall, a police station and a community component. There is nothing on the city’s list of priorities that would be considered frivolous. While they all fill different needs, they have one thing in common: they are paid for by taxes.

If we keep cutting, where will the money come from? The tax fighters who started it all might give an honest answer to this. They might say we have almost reached the goal they had in mind all those years ago. It has always been about reducing the role of government in our lives. Create a void and invite the private sector to fill it. If public money isn’t there, private money always will be, but not without a cost. We are very close to this kind of decision on Baker St. Do we want our public services to be publicly owned and controlled or will we abandon them to private interests? Do we want to have a Linamar Fire Hall? A Sleeman Police Station? That’s where we’re going, if we don’t turn around.

One of these years, a political party will campaign on a platform to raise taxes and it will win. Reversing the foolhardy cuts made over the past few decades will become an urgent public policy imperative.