HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2015-10-22, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2015. PAGE 5.
It was dramatic. The stuff Hollywood epics
are made of. There I was, on a vast, barren
plain devoid of vegetation, surrounded by
fellow humans dashing hither and yon,
burdened with backpacks, satchels and
shopping bags, every man Jack and gal Jill of
them grimly clutching plastic bottles of
Dasani, Aquavita or Evian – life-saving caches
of precious water to sustain them on the
arduous and perilous adventure that loomed
ahead.
A Sahara crossing perhaps? The final
summit of Everest? A yoga break at the
Burning Man Festival?
Nah. The Departures Terminal at Pearson
International. The people around me were air
travellers bound for destinations as sundry and
mundane as Detroit, Trois Rivieres and
Thunder Bay, Ontario. But no matter where
they were bound, they were all convinced that
they couldn’t possibly survive without their
personal water canteen.
Sorry – I meant to say ‘individual hydration
system’. I forgot that people don’t sip, gulp,
guzzle or chugalug anymore – they hydrate.
Drinking water is no longer the simple act of
pouring H20 down your throat every time you
feel a bit parched. It’s a sacred ritual to honour
the temple of your body – and more important:
stave off the ever-lurking fatal effects of
dehydration.
And it’s utterly bogus. We all need to drink
eight glasses of water a day? Bollocks, as the
Brits like to say. The eight-glasses myth is a
neurotic shibboleth based on an obscure
government guideline that was published in
1945 – and even the guideline (since
discredited) did not suggest one had to “drink
eight glasses of water daily”. It said the human
body needs to consume 2.5 litres daily – most
of which, it explained, would be supplied by
prepared foods.
Not to mention unprepared foods. When it
comes to water content, most fruits and
vegetables are virtual artesian wells. Broccoli,
celery, radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes and
carrots are all over 90 per cent water.
You don’t have to drink the stuff to get
hydrated.
Mind you, drinking a Niagara of water
each day is not all bad (it’s better for you
than chugging gallons of Coke, Fanta
or Molson’s Ex). Water also works as an
appetite suppressant. Even fruit juices,
which pack a sucker punch of sugar, are worse
for you than calorie-free water. Besides, if
you’ve got a bellyful of agua you’re more
likely to pass on that fast food greaseburger,
not to mention the extra slab of Black Forest
cake.
Eight glasses a day or not, it’ll be a rainy
day in the Kalahari before you actually
die from dehydration. Your own carcass is
over 70 per cent water. It does not mummify
easily.
Besides... this is something you really don’t
have to worry about. You’re covered. Your
body contains a fail-safe, solar-powered built-
in emergency app that will let you know about
any acute water shortage long before
dehydration sets in.
It’s called ‘thirst’.
Arthur
Black
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Bad service wasn’t really demonstrated
to me until I moved to Blyth, owned a
house and started paying a bill to
Hydro One every month.
If you’re not a homeowner (i.e. if you’re a
renter) who doesn’t have to pay an electric bill
every month, consider yourself lucky. Not only
is electricity, as a commodity, set to increase in
the future as it costs more and more to
generate, the infrastructure to transfer it is also
expensive, or so Hydro One would have you
believe.
Most people I’ve talked to about this feel the
same way; their actual consumption makes up
the smaller part of the bill. The majority of it is
additional, complicated costs and “delivery”
of the commodity.
Now, I would understand if I were anywhere
but Blyth. It costs money to erect and maintain
a power grid. However, as a resident of Blyth,
I can’t help but feel we’re getting the short end
of the stick.
I’m writing this on Monday and, over the
last seven days there have been seven power
outages in the area. This is higher than the
average, but parts of Blyth still suffer outages,
by my math, at least once or twice a month
which is ridiculous.
This past week, especially Sunday, however
was the breaking point.
There were four consecutive outages while
my wife and I were trying to make dinner and
watch some television. Thank goodness for gas
appliances or else we never would have gotten
our spaghetti made.
Discounting natural disasters like the
tornado and cyclones that hit Goderich and the
outage caused by the intense January thaw six
or seven years ago, I would have to add up all
the time I didn’t live in Blyth to come
anywhere near the downtime we experience in
a single year in the village and Hydro One still
has the audacity to continually charge us for
delivery.
That would be like ordering delivery, having
the guy show up with half the food, more than
an hour late and asking for not only the cost of
the food but a tip to boot.
Now the Liberal Government of Ontario
wants to continue parcelling shares of Hydro
One off and sell it.
Valued at between $15 and $16 billion, it’s
understandable. Selling portions of it could
result in significant influx into the provincial
budget.
However, since Hydro One was given the
mandate of running like a private company to
better provide service for the province, it
seems the opposite has happened.
Service seems to have dropped while prices
have continued to increase, especially for
places like Blyth which seem to experience
exponentially more outages than anywhere
else I’ve lived.
On top of the outages, there is also the
damage these constant outages due to the
incredibly complex, incredibly fragile
electronic systems the government expects us
to use to do everything from communicating
with them to renewing our drivers licences,
vehicle identification plates and health cards.
Heck, our office has had at least one
computer fried, despite an expensive surge
protector power bar, because of the constant
outages and I have suspicions it might be
behind other problems in the office.
The question is, once the provincial
government finished it plan, which will see all
but 40 per cent of the shares of Hydro One sold
off, what guarantee is there the service will
remain at its currently dubious level?
What promise is there Blyth won’t have
weeks where the power goes out 14 times?
I’m shocked to hear/see myself say/type this,
but the devil we know in Hydro One may be
better than the devil we don’t with
privatization.
I’m not sure what the point in keeping 40 per
cent of the stock is. It’s not a controlling share.
It’s just enough so the government will be able
to say they have a voice when it comes time to
vote (a vote that could easily be swayed
against whatever the government is pushing).
Personally, I’ve had about enough of the
ridiculous poor service we receive from Hydro
One and the poor excuses when I call to ask
why this keeps happening.
I’ve yet to be told, by any Hydro One
representative, why Blyth seems to lose power
when a butterfly decides to fly in the opposite
direction.
Even the supporters of selling off chunks of
the utility service say it’s because private
investors will encourage the company to cut
costs to make better profits for those investors.
That would be wonderful if Hydro One’s
only problem was operating at a deficit but, it
isn’t. Right now, those who buy from Hydro
One are paying more than ever before and will
continue to do so. The only way to make more
profit for the company is to either charge us
more for the same service or drop the level of
service and, as I said before, the level of
service can’t get much worse for Blyth unless
we start going days without power instead of
hours.
What really frustrates me, however, is that,
currently, we’re paying for a poor service that
is provided by a crown corporation for the
most part. It’s run by the government in one
way or another so (and yes, this may sound
jaded) I expect it to only work right half the
time.
The government believes it can pay solar
and wind energy providers twice what we pay
for electricity as a commodity and not have
prices go up substantially, so I completely
expect crown corporations to be about as
logical and work as well as that.
But when we parcel off a crown corporation,
that includes failing infrastructure, poor
customer service and a shoddy product and
expect investors to somehow make money on
it, things aren’t going to get better, they are
going to get worse.
So consider this my open letter to anyone
and everyone involved in provincial
government: get Hydro One’s act together
before we parcel and sell so much of it off that
we lose the ability to control it.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
The Waiting Game
As I sit at my desk and write this column
on Monday morning, the day of the
42nd Canadian General Election, I
look ahead to my job tonight and I’m reminded
of one of my very first jobs.
I’ve already told everybody that I’ll be very
busy today. It kind of goes without saying.
Everyone figures that it’s election day, so the
truth-seekers out there will be a busy bunch
following the results.
This is true, but therein lies a lot of waiting.
A lot.
One of my very first jobs (my first job
actually on the books where I got a real pay
cheque and the government took its part) was
at Swiss Chalet. I was a dishwasher for about
two glorious months.
I say glorious as a joke, because, of course,
they were not glorious. The job involved hard
work, late nights, low pay and very, very little
respect.
How it relates to election coverage is that
both jobs had a huge black hole right in the
middle of a shift, for lack of a better term,
where you had to play the waiting game.
Today being Monday, we are on our natural
deadline, so there is that workload to consider,
but then there is the election. For 12 hours,
from 9:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., people like you
will have spent your time going to the polls
and having your say as to who you’d like as
your next Member of Parliament and, in turn,
your next Prime Minister.
Because the polls are open so late, that
means that (and anyone who has watched
election coverage on television before will
know this) you can expect no news whatsoever
until the polls close.
So tonight, for me, will consist of waiting...
waiting... waiting... waiting... and then
working like a madman for a few hours.
At Swiss Chalet, I was churning out a
different product altogether, but it was the
same process.
Of course, during a rush at the restaurant on,
let’s say, a Saturday night, I would be washing
dishes faster than my arms could move through
major dinner hours. But then, all of a sudden,
it just stopped and there were no more dishes
to wash for about two hours.
There were dishes to wash, of course, tons of
them – I just couldn’t wash them yet.
Once the dinner rush was over, I would have
to wash, essentially, every dish in the place. So
that means all of the dishes associated with
preparing the food as well, of which there were
many. But since the restaurant stayed open
late, I couldn’t wash them until the doors were
closed and we knew no one else was coming
in.
Then, once those doors closed, I had to work
like a mad man to clean everything in the back
end of the restaurant so it was sparkling when
the next day’s lunch crew came in. Hours and
hours of work yet I was just sitting there
waiting to be given the go-ahead to start doing
it.
That’s what tonight will be like for me. And
that’s what every election night has been like
for me. Whether I was sitting in front of my
computer, on the phone with local municipal
staff, with my feet up in the Clinton Legion,
watching playoff baseball at the Candlelight,
or at the golf course in Wingham, I’ve done a
lot of work on election nights, but like the
famous iceberg fact, every election is 10 per
cent work and about 90 per cent waiting.
By the time you read this, we’ll have a new
government, maybe a new Prime Minister, and
maybe a new Member of Parliament. I guess
we’ll just have to wait and see.
Other Views
Water, water everywhere…
Privatization of a failing system
Each minute we spend worrying about the
future and regretting the past is a minute we
miss in our appointment with life.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Final Thought