From time to time I have had opinion pieces published on the "op ed" pages of the Guelph Mercury and the Kitchener-Waterloo Record. The Record pieces were from the days when I was president of the Waterloo Regional Labour Council. That was in the late 80s and early 90s. Many of them were book reviews that I had printed every few weeks. Unfortunately, most have been lost. They weren't saved electronically at the time. Three of them are preserved here.
At an all-candidates meeting during the last municipal election campaign, we were asked if we favoured the creation of a green belt around Guelph. Of course, most did. Even those successful candidates who have spent the last year and a half saying yes to every development proposal brought before council.
I remember thinking at the time that it doesn’t make much sense to create an artificial green belt when there is already a natural one out there. This is generally known as farm land, wetland and woodland. The problem is that it is getting smaller and further away from the centre of town. It is hard to place anything on the edge of the city when the edge won’t stand still.
We cannot have viable greenbelts if we keep giving the green light to every developer who wanders into city hall with a plan to turn woodland into housing estates. As Joni Mitchell pointed out, if you pave paradise and put up a parking lot, you don’t have paradise anymore.
Those among us who need to be dragged by the nose and forced to learn our lessons the hard way might see this soon enough on the corner of Woodlawn and Woolwich. For the rest, there is already ample evidence about the effects of unchecked urban sprawl. The provincial government saw it and brought in a couple of pieces of legislation such as the Greenbelt Protection Act and the Places to Grow Act. One is designed to protect sensitive rural land stretching from the Niagara Escarpment to the Oak Ridges Moraine. The other looks at future growth in the Greater Horseshoe Area, which includes Guelph.
Although the provincial
effort is a noble one, it suffers the general weakness of applying patchwork,
ad hoc solutions to big environmental problems. There are several contradictions
between the two proposed Acts. For example, while one tries to protect rural
land, the other envisions an expansion of the 400 series highways. You can’t
have your cake and eat it too.
The more Guelph grows, the less farm land, wetland and woodland there is between
us and Waterloo Region. That’s a given. Sprawl affects the air, with increasingly
frequent smog days. It affects our food. We can’t buy locally produced
vegetables if we’ve squeezed out the local farms. It also strains our
water supply, sewage system, waste disposal, public transit and other infrastructure
services.
The only way to protect the greenbelt surrounding Guelph is to learn to say no to the developers. We need to take a break while the city catches up with itself. Once we have the city back under control, we would then need to manage future growth by restricting it to a rate at which we can absorb it. A big part of this would be setting residential development charges at a level where growth would pay for itself.
Provincial legislation can protect some rural greenbelt land, and provide a context within which we can make future growth decisions. But if we truly want to preserve our city and the surrounding countryside, we will have to do it ourselves.
About a year and a half ago, my sister-in-law and her partner came to Ontario from their home in Tennessee to get married. For several years, they have enjoyed a stable, loving relationship which, through the wonders of in-vitro fertilization, has resulted in a daughter and a son. They can now tell the world they are happily and legally married.
In the social darkness engulfing our neighbour to the south, this could not have happened. My wife and I could not have had the honour of standing beside them during the ceremony. We could not have acted as their witnesses while a United Church minister proclaimed the marriage. If Brenda Chamberlain had her way they wouldn’t have been able to do it here either. She has announced she will not support a government bill to legitimize same-sex marriages everywhere in Canada. She prefers to maintain a very shaky “tradition” that treats people differently for no reason other than their sexual orientation.
Opponents of same-sex marriages only have a couple of arguments to bolster their case, and none of them are very good. The one we hear most frequently is that a gay or lesbian wedding threatens the sanctity of traditional ones. What rubbish. My wife and I have been married for over 25 years, and the success of our relationship does not depend on denying the same opportunity to gays and lesbians. My sons and daughter will still be able to move forward and marry their girlfriends and boyfriend. Their right to do so will not be threatened because somewhere else in Canada Adam is marrying Yves and Mabel is marrying Mildred.
Another argument we hear frequently has to do with the health of children. We are told that healthy children need a mother and a father and only heterosexual unions can provide them with this comfort. When I hear this, I am reminded that Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were the issue of heterosexual relationships, and entered into one themselves. So were Clifford Olson, Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin and just about every other social misfit who has walked on the face of the earth. The same is equally true for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, and Einstein, Gandhi, Tommy Douglas and just about every other great individual who has helped make our world a better place. The sexual orientation of the parents is not a defining factor in the outcome of the children.
The third argument is that the traditional definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman must be defended and cannot be changed. This argument has led to some very strange and illogical outcomes.
The definition of “man” and “ woman” has evolved over time. A long time ago, in the 14th century, woman was defined as the sex which bears young or produces eggs. Man was defined as the sex which produces the sperm that fertilizes the eggs. If this definition had never evolved, a marriage today would be a union between sperm-producers and egg-producers. Thousands upon thousands of Canadians with reproductive disorders would be tossed into the same limbo now restricted only to gay men and lesbian women.
It becomes even stranger. A pair of Alberta women, Donna Kilpatrick and Kale Hobbes, were denied a marriage license. In April 2003, they made a submission to that province’s Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights in which they refer to a letter received from the Justice Minister, Dave Hancock. He told them that if one of them underwent gender reassignment surgery, they would be allowed to get married. They point out that it is “completely ludicrous” that they “can marry after a penis is constructed yet our chromosomes will still be that of two females.”
Is this the attitude that will define Canadian social policy? Two people who love each other dearly and want to celebrate that love through marriage can only do so if one of them undergoes a painful surgical procedure?
The traditional wedding ceremony was an elaborate ritual celebrating the transfer of property. The father would walk the bride down the aisle and give her away to the groom. To seal the deal, the bride would immediately sign the transfer documents and change her name from her father’s to her husband’s. This is changing rapidly. Fewer and fewer women allow themselves to be “given away.” More and more are keeping the last name they were born with.
They are not allowing marriage to change who they are. Rather, they are changing marriage to allow them the room to be themselves. Change cannot be made in half-measures. It must continue until it embraces all Canadians equally. It should not be stopped just because some people are afraid of it.
For over a hundred years, people around the globe have dreamed of a better way of life under a socialist society. This dream was shared by workers in the industrialized countries and peasants in the developing countries – not all of them of course, just a few million.
Canada and Canadians were not immune to the dream. Since the Communist Party of Canada was founded in a Guelph barn in 1921, thousands of Canadians came to see it as the ship that would make their dream a reality. Many stuck with it all their lives. Many more sailed on it temporarily and then moved on to other goals. I sailed that ship for about 10 years.
Now that the Soviet Union is falling apart and its Communist party publicly and finally disgraced, was I fooled? No. I joined it, and left it, with my eyes and mind wide open. Nobody had to trick the passengers into boarding the ship of fools.
Now that the Canadian party has finally lost its limited credibility, should I have regrets about wasted years? Obviously not. The choices we make in life shape our future. My choices brought me to where I am today, married to my best friend, with three sons and a daughter that I wouldn’t trade for the world, and president of the finest labour council in the country. Regretting the past is a denial of the present. It makes no sense.
I met many good people during those years, these people we used to call comrades. Now they are brothers and sisters, friends. As in most organisations, of course, I met many others that I wouldn’t cross the street to talk to, even in those days. But by and large, they were, and still are, the type of people who would stand outside in freezing weather helping to organise unions. We would go to picket lines. We would stand up to racists. We would fight against war. We would debate political events and political theory.
We didn’t do all this because we were part of an international conspiracy. We weren’t agents of a foreign power. We didn’t want to undermine unions or destroy Canada. We did it because we love Canada and we want to make it a better place to live. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union kept getting in the way.
Whenever we tried to explain party policies about Canada, disarmament, racism, sexism, Quebec, or whatever, we would be asked questions about the Soviet Union. We defended it because we thought it was part of the family, the misunderstood cousin everyone like to beat up. This wasn’t something I was really comfortable doing but it was part of the act and it had to be folded into the performance.
Things eventually reached the point where I didn’t really want to defend a foreign country when my intentions were to defend Canadian workers. So I packed up my membership and set sail for reality – or at least the version of reality that is shared by social democrats around the world.
Now, seven years later, millions of Soviets are also packing up their memberships and setting sail for reality. We can’t be clear yet about the reality they have set their sight on. Mikhail Gorbachev is cautiously tacking towards some social democratic ports. Boris Yeltsin wants to go full steam ahead into the free market. The Soviet people can now make up their own minds. They have survived the storm and have the right to make their choices freely and independently.
We cannot deny their experiences, but neither should we deny our own. Their Soviet Union was not my Soviet Union. Theirs was a hard reality, a bitter experience of hunger and poverty. Mine was an idea that had no real existence, a naïve alternative to unemployment, poverty and militarism in my own country. Several years ago, this Soviet Union ceased to exist for me, replaced by more rational ideas, achievable goals and a realistic alternative.
There is one idea that still has currency, which I can’t let go, and which is validated by the Soviet experience. This is the idea that working people have a right to be treated with dignity. We have a right to a decent life.
This is the basic idea that kept the Soviets alive while they fought the Czar, Hitler and the state apparatus. It is also the basic idea that keeps Canadian trade unionists moving forward.
It is an idea that has fuelled a dream.
This dream didn’t die when the nightmare ended. We still need controls on foreign investment. We still need a Canadian energy policy. We still need a public television network. We still need plant closure legislation. Native Canadians must still fight for their rights. Canadian women must still fight for equality. Unemployed Canadians must still fight for jobs. Our children must still fight for a meaningful education. Our sick must still fight for universal health care. Our elderly must still fight for dignity. Workers must still fight for justice.
No, the dream didn’t die when the nightmare ended. It just became a whole lot clearer.