Alan Pickersgill - The View From Here

(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.

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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.

(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.

(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.

(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.