For most of 2005, I wrote columns for the Guelph Mercury, our local daily newspaper. The first column was published in May and the last one in December.
In the few days between writing this column and seeing it in print, the political situation in Canada could have changed dramatically. Or it could still be the same. The politicians and big city pundits spent the last couple of weeks counting noses in Parliament, studying public opinion polls and looking at the leaves in their tea cups. In the end, Paul Martin has either dodged the bullet until next January or we are into another election campaign.
One way or another, we should be turning our attention to the idea of democracy and what it means to us because one thing is certain: within the next 18 months we will have a federal election and a municipal election. The federal Conservatives have been particularly busy recently. They’ve been burning up the phone lines trying to find out if we the people want an election. As it turns out, a lot of people are saying no thanks, I have to do my gardening. Or I’d rather go to the cottage. Or I’d rather drop a brick on my toe, thank you very much.
We have reached the stage where many people view democracy as a risky thing to get involved in. They see it sort of like crossing a busy highway. Every time they try it they get hit by a truck, so now they just stay on the side of the road. Or they view the result much as they do a bad accident on the 401. They slow down, take a look, and drive away happy to have not been part of it.
Fortunately, a lot of other people look at the wreck on the highway and decide to get involved, to do what they can to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Many of them live in Guelph. A few years ago, when a public consultation process was started, well over a thousand people participated and helped formulate the Smart Guelph principles. A year ago, city council had a meeting at the Italian-Canadian Club to hear input on the Official Plan and the zoning at Woodlawn and Woolwich. The room was jammed, with over 40 individuals making presentations. When a workshop was held recently on the Water Supply Master Plan, over a hundred people showed up. The city’s planning department sent out 2,000 random surveys on urban design guidelines. Usually a five per cent response to a survey like this is considered a success. The city did better than 25 per cent!
This is democracy, and it is alive and well at the community level in Guelph. There is keen interest in the fate of the Loretto Convent and the Public Library. Mention the name Wal-Mart in Guelph and you will find very little indifference. A new group has a petition circulating that will end up with over 12,000 signatures from people opposed to Wal-Mart locating in the shadow of the Ignatius Retreat Centre. In its first year of operation, the Guelph Civic League was joined by groups such as the Labour Council, the Old University Neighbourhood Association and others that represent a combined 10,000 Guelph residents. The Civic League was set up to increase public awareness of issues affecting the quality of life in Guelph and to improve voter participation in future municipal elections.
Democracy is a bus that carries people along the road at a steady pace, carefully examining the potholes and taking the time to steer around them safely. The trouble starts when some individuals decide to speed up and switch lanes to get around things like the Official Plan. Or when they ignore the carefully placed growth objectives and planning guidelines. These are the street signs designed to control traffic and keep it all flowing smoothly to its destination. We disregard them at our peril. The only result will be chaos, confusion and a lot of messy collisions that frustrate those people who only want a smooth and safe journey through life.
Our local development community is already raging against the provincial Places to Grow initiative, trying to force it off the road. They also want to control the city’s Commercial Policy Review to make sure it doesn’t contain anything that might slow them down. They want to put us on a German-style autobahn with no speed limits and very few rules. We’ll be a lot better off if we take the democracy bus along the scenic route. It’s the better way to go and there’s room enough on board for everyone.
Guelph is in the middle of a comprehensive commercial policy review that will define, for many years to come, where new stores will locate and the types of stores they will be. It has been kept under the radar, guided by land developers with very little public input. It threatens to turn Guelph into a carbon copy of some of the worst planned cities in Ontario.
During the OMB hearings about Wal-Mart, the citizens who defended Guelph’s Official Plan had several good arguments on their side. One was that locating Wal-Mart on the corner of Woodlawn and Woolwich would open the door to development of a massive “power centre” similar to the ones that surround the store almost everywhere else it operates. This fear was downplayed by Peter Smith, the land use planner working for 6 & 7 Developments Ltd. “There will not necessarily or inevitably be pressures to develop the remaining lands as commercial,” Smith said at the hearing.
A Power Centre is defined as having three or more big box retailers with a shared parking lot. It’s the sort of thing you see when you drive down highway 24, across the 401 and into Cambridge. If you go to the Highway 407 web site, you see how dependent a power centre is on car travel. “35 million square feet of new power centre space have been added in Canada in the last ten years, making up ten per cent of the nation’s entire retail stock” it says there. “Power centres often favour locations in proximity to highway interchanges so as to provide good vehicular accessibility.”
Most Guelph residents wouldn’t want to see something like this evolving in the shadow of the Ignatius Retreat Centre, between two cemeteries. They would have wanted nothing more than to be able to believe Smith, to hope that if and when 6 & 7 Developments gets the go ahead to build a Wal-Mart it will stop there. It looks now as though this will not happen. It looks now as though Mr. Smith either completely misread the future or badly misled the OMB.
They haven’t been given the go ahead yet, and it is still not a sure thing that the American retail giant will come into Guelph’s north end. It is a sure thing that if they do go in, they will open a flood gate that will wash away many local retail stores. The commercial policy review could be the lever that will force it open. City Council hired Meridian Planning Consultants to wield the lever. A quick review of their client list is very revealing.
Prominent among them is First Professional Management, the parent company of First Pro Shopping Centres. On their web site they say “our most significant relationship is with Wal-Mart in Canada as their joint venture partner. We have contributed to their rapid expansion in Canada by developing and opening over 70 stores, including their first store in Canada in Barrie, Ontario.” Meridian has also worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, owners of Zellers, and did consulting work on the environmental assessment for the proposed new highway 7 between Guelph and Kitchener.
A background paper prepared by Meridian Consultants envisions a massive commercial shopping area on the corner of Woodlawn and Woolwich about four times the size needed by Wal-Mart, plus a new one on the old Lafarge lands between Silvercreek and the Hanlon, and new nodes to the east on Watson Parkway and to the south on the corner of Gordon and Laird.
In total, an additional two million square feet of commercial space is proposed for five centres. This is happening right on the heels of city council rejecting the inclusion of commercial space on the ground floor of the soon to be constructed downtown parking arcade. We can only guess at why some councillors are so hostile to downtown shopping.
The proposal to develop the Lafarge lands into a large commercial area will be as controversial as the 6 & 7 proposal. Many of the same issues are involved. The new shopping centre will be very close to the Guelph Bible Chapel, and on the edge of an established residential area that can look forward to a lot more traffic than currently uses their formerly quiet streets.
The commercial policy review is scheduled to go to the city’s Planning, Environment and Transportation Committee for review on June 27. The best hope for our city’s future is to have an informed and engaged citizenry today. If we don’t act now to correct the flawed process driving the policy review, we will regret it for many years to come.
The city could have spent a hundred million dollars to buy a thousand different Cuff reports and it still would not have uncovered the cure to the sickness that engulfs our city council.
If you listen to Peter Hamtak, Cuff’s primary job was to lay the groundwork for squeezing out the city’s Chief Administrative Officer, David Creech. Although the mayor said she didn’t want to hear anyone suggesting this was the reason the city got a cuff on the ear, there was some truth behind Hamtak’s sulken rant. He became very animated because he wanted Cuff to do more than rid us of our CAO, but he wasn’t very clear about what else he wanted.
The trouble with the group sitting around the horseshoe is not something Cuff could ever fix. The problem is not a misunderstanding of procedural matters. We didn’t need a consultant to come in and remind councillors to always do A before B and make sure you follow F with G. If it was that simple, we wouldn’t have needed Cuff.
Nor does the problem lie in the start times of meetings. Not even with where the councillors sit around the horseshoe. Back in the days when the seats were occupied by the likes of Carl Hamilton, Ken Hammill, Margaret MacKinnon, Norm Jary and others, councillors managed to agree to disagree without acrimony and vengeful bile. They didn’t always agree with each other, but they always saw both sides of an issue. They had the ability to modify their positions to accommodate valid arguments brought up by the other side.
Not any more. Now we have a group of councillors such as Rocco Furfaro, Dan Schnurr, Christine Billings and Dan Moziar who are completely intransigent. It is as though they see their mandate on council as accomplishing two goals: to obstruct anything that originates from community initiatives; and to fast track and expedite any and every proposal coming from land developers. When David Birtwistle, Ray Ferraro and Peter Hamtak get on board, absolutely nothing good can happen in council chambers.
Take a look at two examples that illustrate this very well. Our dysfunctional city council hit a new low point at their meeting of June 21. During this meeting they discussed the St. George’s Neighbourhood traffic calming plan. This is something the people in that area have been working on for six years. They have discussed it among themselves. They have discussed it with city officials. They ended up with a well thought out plan to control the flow of traffic up and down the Grange St. hill. When the plan went to city council, it ran into the brick wall of a three-hour debate. One new stop sign was finally approved.
Six years of community input plus three hours of debate equals one stop sign. When it is put up, the city should mount a brass plaque on it. And then they should bring at least half of council over to read the sign. It says STOP. Your nonsense.
Now look at the commercial policy review. Next to no community discussion. Hardly any input from the public. But some developers saw a parcel of empty land along the Hanlon and thought it would make a dandy parking lot with a couple of enormous shops. Suddenly we have a proposal to develop two million square feet of new asphalt to hold a dozen or so new big box American retailers.
Now that they have found out about it, the people living near the old Lafarge cement plant are outraged. They want to be heard. They do not want to be dictated to by a land developer coming into Guelph from Woodbridge. When they asked to be heard, they ran into the stubborn intransigence of councillor David Birtwistle.
He had scheduled the committee meeting to discuss the commercial policy review for 9:30 in the morning of Monday June 27. People in the neighbourhood told him they have to be at work on a Monday morning and asked him to hold the meeting in the evening. Birtwistle refused to budge. The people who are paid by the developers to argue their position in front of the city can be there at any time of day. The people who are volunteering their time to defend their community have to be at work during the day.
Birtwistle understands this very well. But like our mayor telling councillor Hamtak to be quiet, he doesn’t want to hear about it.
After all this time and all this money, one thing is clear. We didn’t need George Cuff to fix city council. We need an election.
Last week’s Live 8 concerts had at least one significant achievement. Unfortunately, it was not ending poverty either in Africa or anywhere else. This is not something that can be wished away, even when 25 million people are all making the wish at the same time. If the simultaneous concerts across the globe achieved anything, it was to show the fundamental decency of people.
People everywhere want to contribute to their communities and help make the world a better place. You see that all the time in small ways. Individuals contribute generously to charities through such organizations as United Way. Last winter thousands upon thousands opened their hearts and wallets to help the relief efforts for victims of the south Asian tsunami. A couple of years ago, when ice storms disrupted power supplies in eastern Ontario and Quebec, people in other parts of Canada pitched in to send whatever help they could.
We have shown time and again that we are very good at responding to the devastating effects of a crisis. We tend to fall down when it comes to dealing with the causes. If you ask “who wants to make poverty history?” everyone will say yes. If you ask them how we will do it, feet will shuffle, eyes will shift, voices will mumble and disagreement will grow. We cannot solve a problem if we don’t understand what caused it.
Left to its own devices, Africa would not be a poverty stricken continent. It is rich in natural resources and has a deep and ancient cultural background. The people of Africa, though, do not control or share in their own wealth. For well over a hundred years European and American corporations have pillaged the continent and extracted the resources for their own use and their own greed.
If Africans are suffering poverty, it is because of the harsh legacy of companies such as DeBeers and Shell Oil, among others. The economic and environmental devastation wreaked upon South Africa by international gold and diamond mining companies is well-documented. So is the chaos caused in Nigeria by the oil industry. Scratch any African country and you will find a multi-national corporation lurking beneath the surface. They take what they want and leave behind famine, drought and diseases, of which the AIDS tragedy is just the latest.
An article by Fred Bridgland in the June 5 on-line edition of The Sunday Herald says: “The latest scramble in Africa is for oil. The reserves, for which Western oil companies pay hundreds of millions of pounds in “signing bonuses” merely for the right to sink exploration wells, may eventually match the Middle East’s. The US expects to import 25% of its oil from Africa within 10 years. Thanks to oil, Angola’s economy is growing at 15% a year, yet the UN says it is the worst place on Earth to be a child.” Read Linda McQuaig’s latest book It’s the Crude, Dude: War, Big Oil, and the Fight for the Planet and you’ll get the same message in much greater detail.
To end poverty anywhere, we must empower people everywhere to control their own lives, to regulate their own economies and to protect their own communities. It is up to us, as individuals, to decide what we can do to help make this a reality.
Did the Live 8 concerts make a difference? Did they do anything to help? That all depends. If they were just a one-day wonder, a chance for thousands of people to sit in a park on a hot afternoon and listen to music, then no. Not if the contradictions of the day overwhelm the realities of the core message. About 35,000 people were at the Barrie concert. Part of the event preparation involved traffic control and setting up a parking lot for 7,500 vehicles. That’s one for every 5 people. A lot of African oil was burned getting to and from an event intended to relieve African poverty.
The concerts could be about more than the strange paradoxes. Tens of thousands were at the concerts, but millions more watched on television. The official number is that over 25 million people added their names to the Live 8 Internet list. If only half of all the people who signed the petition make a commitment to reduce their dependence on oil, to cut their consumption in half, the day could be a success.
By reducing our use of oil we will reduce the motivation for Exxon, Shell and the others to be in Africa. Then, perhaps, the African people can start to reclaim their environment and put their economies and lives back together.
Ron and Margie Steadman are not bad people. Or at least, they didn’t used to be. I’ve known them for over 20 years. Margie used to look after our daughter while we were at work. Ron and I played on the same dart team for a couple of years. These days, a bum hip is keeping him off work and off the golf course. But it isn’t keeping him out of his garden.
It is in the garden that the Steadmans’ unblemished record as upstanding law abiding citizens could come to a sad and sorry end. What could land them on the wrong side of by-law enforcement officers is that they own a tidy little home on Edwin St. Like most homeowners, they take pride in their property. Like most of their neighbours, they have helped beautify their street with some lovely perennials on the boulevard. Now they live with the uncertain fear that the long arm of the law will reach out and cut down their dream. The multi-coloured flowers so attractive to visitors, birds and butterflies could be replaced by the drab brown of dormant grass and the yellow dots of invading dandelions.
This is all happening because, in a 6-5 vote, the brainiacs on our city council decided that boulevard plants may not grow higher than 30 centimeters. For those of us still stuck in the old math, that is just under a foot, 11.8 inches to be precise. For comparison purposes, consider that daffodils grow to about 18 inches. So do tulips. All those beautiful bulbs given to Canada by an ever-grateful Holland after the war will have no place on the boulevards of Guelph. According to six Guelph councillors, it doesn’t matter how many of our parents and grandparents died liberating the Dutch people from the Nazis. No Dutch tulip will be allowed to interfere with the right of a car to park on the side of a street.
That is what this is all about: parking cars, and letting passengers out. Other than that, not much thought went into the decision. Council was considering a report by staff that had been carefully thought through. Input had been sought from interested community groups, and the recommendation was to limit the height of boulevard plantings to 80 centimeters, or about 31 inches. Part way through the debate, councillor Furfaro said “you can't have a passenger get out if you go on Charles and Edwin Street … because you have to get out and walk in this garden area.” That is taken from a taped transcript of the meeting. Soon after this, councillor Hamtak made an amendment to the motion reducing the height limit to much lower than the average tulip. And the amendment passed. Councillors Downer and Kovach were not at the meeting, and we can hope they would have had the good sense to vote against the amendment. But that doesn’t matter now. It is passed.
Only one Ward 3 councillor rallied to a spirited defence of her constituents on Edwin St. Maggie Laidlaw pointed out what most sensible people do when confronted with the enormous problem of parking at a boulevard garden in the summer or a snow bank in the winter. We stop at the driveway opening, let the passengers out, and pull forward to park. Problem solved. The usually gregarious Ward 3 councillor Dan Schnurr silently raised his hand when asked to vote in favour of slaying the day lilies.
Charles and Edwin Streets are not the only places in town where people have responded to water shortages and other concerns by reducing the amount of grass around their homes. Councillor Furfaro also mentioned London Rd., Elizabeth St., Ontario St., Richardson St., Neeve St. and Toronto St. Most of these are in the ward he was elected to represent. Boulevard gardens are not just in Wards 1 and 3 where all the streets so far mentioned are located. They are everywhere. All across the city you can find homeowners who love their gardens. Their pride and imagination always leads them away from the drab monoculture of golf green lawns fed by chemicals to suppress the plantain and the dandelion and consuming much more than their fair share of water.
They obviously put a lot more thought into the design of their gardens than six of our city councillors put into the design of our by-laws.
About 15 years ago, George Bush Sr. ridiculed “the vision thing” as though it were some sort of weakness. A clear vision of the future gets in the way of quick fixes and short term solutions. Many of our city councillors don’t suffer from this weakness. You might say they can’t see the forest for the trees, and are generally quite pleased that they can’t. A few weeks ago they couldn’t see the blooming city because of the boulevard gardens. These days, it’s the urban forest they can’t see because of a bunch of old growth silver maples in Royal City Park.
When a group of concerned citizens arrived at the last council meeting to plead for more time to assess the condition of the trees, councillors responded in their typical fashion. They are not afraid to save us from ourselves. In fact, they are eager to do so. If a bunch of ecological tree huggers are asking for a couple more weeks to think things through, these councillors will act now. People whose lives are hampered by visions of a green and growing city obviously can’t see the tax advantages generated by a patch of asphalt. They don’t know that growth is for economies, not for plants and trees. They don’t realize that the mandate of this council is to provide us with more places to shop, not more places to picnic. If people want time to think things through, our councillors must act now. And act they did. They passed a resolution instructing staff to get out the chain saws without delay. If doctors behaved like these councillors, they’d schedule you for an autopsy to find out why you have a sore throat.
Politicians who suffer from “the vision thing” might have looked at the wider implications of what they are doing. They might have wondered why the park was planted those many years ago with monoculture in mind. Were that many silver maples appropriate for the park? Should they now be replaced with more of the same? Then they might wonder why there are no regulations covering the removal of any trees anywhere in the city. This could all lead to the formulation of a coherent policy. People suffering from clear vision take all the fun out of government by crisis management.
It wasn’t just trees that showed the character of this council at their last meeting. A grieving mother pleaded with them for a set of traffic lights on the corner of Rickson and Edinburgh. Her daughter was tragically killed in a collision there last June, the absolutely worst nightmare any parent can face. Council responded by authorizing a pedestrian activated crossing signal. I suppose that if you live close to that particular speedway, it is better than nothing. At least now you don’t have to be an Olympic athlete to get safely from one side of the street to the other. But the little girl was not trying to walk across Edinburgh Rd. She was a passenger in one of the two vehicles that collided there.
The answer should have been to authorize a full set of traffic lights that will control and slow down the cars on Edinburgh. City council is still obstinately blocking all attempts to implement neighbourhood traffic calming measures. The only way to make our streets safe for pedestrians, cyclists and the passengers in cars is to make it difficult for irresponsible drivers to speed. Traffic calming is not something that only belongs in the idyllic, tweedy neighbourhoods close to downtown. The further you get from St. George’s Square, the straighter and wider the streets become. In the neighbourhoods on the edge of the city, the movement of cars and trucks is far more dangerous and traffic calming is even more urgently needed. If a bunch of residents ask for immediate action, these councillors will take the time to think things through.
Most people in Guelph do not want Wal-Mart to open a store half-way between Woodlawn and Marymount Cemeteries. Many of them may want one somewhere in the city, but not there. This much is clear from two competing petitions. Several years ago, a group of the store’s supporters gathered signatures asking the giant American retailer to come to Guelph. According to an advertisement placed in the Mercury back then, they gathered about 9,000 signatures. A more recent petition organized by the Guelph Preservation Action Committee talks specifically about location. Over 11,000 Guelph residents signed it.
The time has come to get away from the circular and futile debate about who has the bigger petition. It’s impossible to settle, because Wal-Mart still has the original petition and refuses to release it in order for names to be verified. We should now move forward to the one and only legally binding way of settling the argument – a referendum at the next municipal election. This is only a year away. Considering that the issue has now been simmering for over 10 years, this is not too much longer to wait. Most of the legal delays so far were caused by obstructions thrown up by Wal-Mart itself, so the corporation should be willing to take a chance on another relatively short wait. Don’t forget that Guelphites could have been working and shopping at a Wal-Mart for several years now were it not for its own stubborn refusal to locate where our zoning laws allowed them.
There is already going to be a question on the ballot about the ward system. It won’t take much to add another one: Are you in favour of Wal-Mart opening a store on the corner of Woolwich St. and Woodlawn Rd.? A simple question that invites a simple yes or no answer will settle the issue once and for all.
The Residents for Sustainable Development challenged Wal-Mart last week to prove it has the support of the majority of Guelph’s adult shoppers to open a north end store. If they can get 40,001 signatures, RSD will withdraw its court appeals. This was a courageous and creative twist to the battle, but Wal-Mart will not take up the challenge. First of all, they know they can’t do it. They know the majority of Guelph citizens are decent and honourable people who do not want the location of our two cemeteries to be sullied by big box commercialization.
Wal-Mart also knows that no other municipal decision requires such a high threshold. In 2003, only 30,375 votes were cast for mayor. Kate Quarrie, who supported Wal-Mart’s venture, received 53 per cent of those votes. That was about 20 per cent of the eligible voters! Wal-Mart can reasonably expect that it should not be required to get 50 per cent support when the mayor only needed 20.
An argument was made on the editorial page of this paper last week that the 2003 election was a referendum on Wal-Mart. It wasn’t. The store was certainly an issue, but it was not the only one. There were many others, including the redevelopment of city hall and the library; the future of waste management; water conservation; and a shamefully misleading press conference organized by Peter Hamtak which created the false perception that the previous council lied to us about the municipal budget. Wal-Mart in general was an issue. The specific location was not.
In the two years since the election, the issue has become further complicated by a new Commercial Policy Review that begins to do exactly what the Wal-Mart lawyers said would not happen. The lawyers told the OMB hearing that a store at Woodlawn and Woolwich would not lead to the development of a big box power centre. The commercial review predicts not just one, but four of these massive shopping centres.
Let us now let the people decide. Let them choose how they want to shop, and where they want to shop. Let them decide the matter in the full context of the commercial policy review. Does a regional power centre similar to the one we see at the intersection of highways 401 and 24 in Cambridge belong between two cemeteries and on the edge of the Ignatius Retreat Centre?
Will the world’s largest corporation have the courage to take this risk? Are the majority of our city councillors brave enough to consult the people in a legally binding referendum?
"No one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library." – Daniel Quinn, Ishmael.
Libraries make knowledge and opportunities available to everyone who wants to take advantage of them, and a tremendous number of people in Guelph do. When the downtown main branch was built in 1965, it was designed to circulate 267,000 books per year. In 2004, it circulated over 625,000 items. This year, the library system as a whole passed the one million mark on September 8.
That is an amazing amount of knowledge changing hands every day, all without the burden of individual user fees. When the new south end branch opens, and when the Bookmobile finally gets back on the road, these numbers will increase even more.
Guelphites have been able to borrow books since 1832, when Thomas Sandilands began lending them from the back of his business. Eighteen years later, the Mechanics Institute set up a proper library which evolved, in 1905, into the Carnegie Free Library, constructed on the corner of Norfolk and Paisley Streets. Is there any other public institution in the city that can trace its roots so deeply into the historical soil that nurtures our community?
I arrived in Guelph in 1971, and never had the opportunity to see and touch the old Carnegie Library building. Photographs show that it was a magnificent structure. But talk to old time Guelphites – I’m still a newcomer in some eyes – and you learn that even the photos don’t do it justice. There is still a sadness at the cavity left in our communal heart when the building fell under the crushing blows of the wrecking ball in 1965. The same fate had befallen the old Customs House and the Bank of Montreal building a few years earlier. The sixties were not kind to our heritage structures. The decade ended with the demolition of the magnificent Bank of Commerce building in 1969.
I think part of this sadness comes from the realization that there are two opposing forces at work. On the one hand, there is the umbilical cord connecting us to the birth and growth of our city. The library is a part of this life force, as are the limestone buildings that make up our downtown, and the stone houses built by pioneers on what was once lush farmland. On the other hand there is a dark force that wants to cut this connection and turn Guelph into something it was never meant to be. Although not as deeply rooted, there is also a continuity on the dark side. It is dragging us back to the same destructiveness we should have grown out of forty years ago.
The past-destroyers and future-speculators don’t have to win all the time. If we follow Bruce Cockburn’s advice to “kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight” we will be able to hold them back. The artefacts of our past, the memories of the years and decades before our births, are all archived in the public library. We can look at them and compare the architecture of the Carnegie Library to that of a typical Zellers or Wal-Mart. We can wonder why any sane society would destroy the one to build the other.
Some daylight is starting to bleed through, and during Public Library Week we can be encouraged that a very competent committee, headed by Bob Ireland, is searching out a new downtown location to replace the cramped building now housing more information than it has room for. The new main branch should be in the downtown core somewhere. After all, it is the focal point for literacy, life-long education and intellectual freedom for the whole city. It is a repository for our cultural heritage, and it does not belong anywhere else.
As the people who use it know very well, it is not just a dusty old place full of the past. It also holds enough new technology to connect patrons to the wider world of knowledge housed on the Internet. As it moves into the world of wireless connectivity, it is moving well beyond anything that was dreamed of when it was built. You can now use it to do things that science fiction only speculated about forty years ago.
The public library truly connects the past, the present and the future in a way that few other institutions can. It both links them and separates them. While preserving past knowledge, it enriches the present and makes the future possible. We would be lost without it, and we should never short change it.
Ontario workplaces continue to be very dangerous places to be in. The Workplace
Safety & Insurance Board allowed claims for almost 300 work related deaths
in 2004. There were over 90,000 allowed claims for lost-time injuries. There
is no indication that the numbers will drop when the dust settles on 2005.
These terrible statistics came to Guelph in October, when a Linamar worker was crushed to death in a grinding machine. William Xu came to Canada expecting to build a better life for his family and himself. He should have been able to do it. When he went to work on the morning of October 28 he had plans for the future, dreams for his daughter, a vision of a good life spread out before him. When he left home, his wife and daughter had every expectation that he would come home again. Instead, he fell into the tragic abyss of statistics that claim far too many working men and women of our province.
During a month in which we remember the brave men and women who died in wartime, we should also remember the brave men and women who die at work. Their loss is no les poignant. In some ways, perhaps, it is more so. Our parents and grandparents who fell victim to the violence of the second world war over sixty years ago were at least fighting in a noble cause. They were, for the most part, trained and equipped to deal with the battlefield hazards they would confront. In too many cases, workers are not.
The Ministry of Labour is investigating the incident that killed William Xu. As with all sudden workplace deaths, there will be a coroner’s inquest. It would not be fair to either the worker or the company to prejudge the outcome of these inquiries. Between the Ministry and the Coroner, a judgment will be made about the level of training provided at Linamar, and the adequacy of lock out systems on their machinery.
But still, the fact remains that a worker died. He wasn’t in some far off land defending your freedom. He was in Ariss, making parts for your car. He should still be doing it. He should be going to work and earning his pay cheque next week, next month, and next year. While we may not know yet what factors came into play to cause this particular death, we do know that all industrial fatalities are preventable. Not just some of them. All of them.
There are recognizable hazards in every workplace. There are also proven methods that can be taken to either eliminate or control them. Machinery can be guarded, and workers can be trained to ensure that guards are in place and functioning properly before they operate the machine. This newspaper reported on Nov. 1 that the Ministry of Labour shut down the grinder that killed Mr. Xu until Linamar ensures it is “equipped with a guarding device and that its operating controls are located in such a manner that a worker is not endangered.” Part of the tragedy surrounding industrial fatalities is that we all stand around waiting for the horse to bolt from the barn before we think to close the doors.
Workers at Linamar, just as those working for other employers, have access to most of the proven control methods that can eliminate industrial injuries and fatalities. They can get training. They can get guarding. They can have an occupational health and safety committee. They have a lot of legislation on their side. However, there is one important piece of the jigsaw puzzle they are missing: a union.
Numerous studies, anecdotal evidence and direct experience have all shown that compliance with occupational health and safety legislation is much higher in unionized workplaces than it is in those without a union. Laws, regulations and standards are all well and good, but if they are not enforced they are just words. The practice of occupational health and safety is based on the Internal Responsibility System. Recent Ontario governments have cut back the number of Ministry of Labour inspectors and rely instead on voluntary compliance by employers. Sadly, this does not work.
A good union lifts the fine concepts that lie behind the laws and puts them into practice in the workplace. They present some compelling reasons for compliance with the law. Would William Xu still be alive today if Linamar workers were protected by a union? That’s impossible to know. What we do know is that the odds would have been considerably more in his favour.
Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. And hyperbole gets stuck in the mouth of the publicist. At the grand opening of the Home Depot store at the end of November, our mayor is reported to have said "Boy, it's been a long time coming, but isn't it beautiful?" Mrs. Quarrie had been at two events that day, and it would be nice to think she got her speeches mixed up. She was also at the sod turning for the new south end branch library.
She wasn’t talking about the library branch, though. She doesn’t appear to have thought this was a long time coming, and boy oh boy, isn’t it beautiful. Nope. It really was the giant hardware store that she was gushing over. She was also quoted as saying the Home Depot "has been long awaited by our citizens." She said this despite the fact that, counting Rona, Home Hardware and Canadian Tire, there are already lots of places in the north end of Guelph to buy a bag of screws and a cordless drill. The only branch library in the south end is on Scottsdale Rd., close to Stone Rd.
The many old limestone churches and other buildings in Guelph are beautiful. The old Mitchell farm house was beautiful. What made them so is their unique character and design. Their architects made a statement that went far beyond mere functionality. They all look different. The hardware store, on the other hand, looks exactly like every other Home Depot in the country. It is functional, convenient and works well as a place to contain tools and shoppers. But Helen of Troy it isn’t.
Quarrie’s hyperbole, though, was no match for her former campaign co-chair Ginty Jocius. He was busily buying baseboards when he remarked that this store opening is “the best thing that happened to Guelph.” Really? Does he believe that a store opening is better for Guelph than, for example, hosting the Memorial Cup in 2002? Or winning it in 1986? Or our wet/dry waste management system that inspired other communities to re-think how they dispose of the packaging brought home from places like Home Depot? Does he believe that a store opening is better for Guelph than was the election of the mayoral candidate whose campaign he helped to manage in 2003? Some people might think this latter comparison is a bit of a coin toss, but it sounds like a kick in the teeth when said by the man who got her elected.
We shouldn’t waste a lot of energy looking for grains of truth washing up in the tide of hyperbole. They just aren’t there. The Home Depot has not been long awaited by Guelph citizens. In the realm of property development it came to town relatively smoothly and quickly. The land is located between a gas station and a nearly defunct tobacco factory. It was zoned Service/Commercial a designation allowing for uses varying from banquet halls to home improvement stores. Opposition to the Home Depot by other commercial development interests was taken care of when the decks were cleared for the Wal-Mart OMB hearings.
Mr. Jocius took the opportunity to compare the two, saying that the only thing that would be even better for Guelph than library redevelopment, a Memorial Cup win, the election of his candidate, or the opening of a hardware store, will be the opening of a Wal-Mart.
One of the basic issues underlying the Wal-Mart debate has always been the matter of who controls the planning process in Guelph. Wal-Mart, right from the beginning, has been using its enormous power to force us to change our Official Plan. It chose to locate in the most inappropriate location it could find, and refuses to listen to reason. It refuses to consider the opinion of over 12,000 Guelph residents who signed a petition saying “not there.”
Wal-Mart opening in any of the commercially zoned areas of Guelph would be one thing. Opening on the corner of Woodlawn and Woolwich would be a disaster. It would be the final message that we have abandoned control of our city and handed all planning over to property developers. How can Mr. Jocius think that this would be the best thing ever to happen in Guelph?
Perhaps the most disturbing part of this whole episode is the realization that some very influential people have such a shallow and unimaginative vision of what is good for the city.