Alan Pickersgill - The View From Here

(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.

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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?

(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.

(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.

(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.

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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.

(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.