Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Cleaning up other people's messes
(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.
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