Alan Pickersgill - The View From Here

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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.