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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2015-10-29, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2015. PAGE 5. The British literary giant Rudyard Kipling was a gushing font of short stories, poems and novels but he wrote only one limerick. Here it is: There was a small boy of Quebec, Who was buried in snow to his neck; When asked, “Are you friz?” He replied “Yes, I is; But we don’t call this cold in Quebec.” That limerick is at least 100 years old and perfectly captures, alas, what Canada is internationally famous for: Snow. Kipling wasn’t the first literary lion to, as the Brits say, “cock a snook” at The Great White North. A century before Kipling, the French writer Voltaire sneeringly dismissed Canada as “quelques arpents de neige” – a few acres of snow. “Few acres” be damned. Canada is about two and a half billion acres of snow – and that’s not counting a few hundred million acres of lakes, ponds and rivers which are also covered with snow come the fall freeze. It’s extraordinary that Canadians have so few snow-related words for something so ubiquitous. We speak of blizzards and avalanches, sleet and slush, but after that our imagination peters out. We just tack ‘snow’ on to words we already have – snowstorm, snow shower, snowblower, snowflake , snowdrift... Not like the Inuit – they have 22 different words for snow. Or is it 36? Or 100? Actually, it’s a myth. “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax” is what some linguists call it. They maintain it’s just an urban legend made popular because it’s a great conversation starter. In any case it’s academic. Turns out the Inuit – and other hyphenated Canadians – have been shut out in the ‘words for snow’ department by the Scots. A brand new publication called The Historical Thesaurus of Scots presents no fewer than 421 words for snow. Granted, they aren’t all in current use, but some of them should be. The Thesaurus tells us that Scots refer to swirling snow as feefle. Skelf is a large snowflake. Shelling is the snow that collects on the backs of sheep. Finely granulated driving snow is called snau pouther. Snow that clings to horses’ hooves? That’s balter. And when the Snow Gods can’t make up their mind whether to send snow or rain so they send both at once? The Historical Thesaurus of Scots gives us a great name for that. It’s called sneesl. Unquestionably my all-round favourite is the word used to describe those giant snowballs that all Canadian (and I guess, many Scots) kids roll up to make snowmen, snowforts and the like. What do we call them? Big snowballs. Bor- ing. The ancient Scots called them hogamadogs. Me? I spent a lifetime with snow – shovelling it, ploughing it, trudging through it, fluffing it off my shoulders and scraping it off windshields. And after all that I can offer only one fail-safe, sure-fire morsel of snow lore: If it’s yellow, don’t eat it. Arthur Black Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Most of Canada, in terms of areas represented by Member of Parliament, decided last week that nearly a decade of Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party of Canada was all it had the stomach for and booted Harper, as well as a number of Conservative Members of Parliament (MPs), out. While that isn’t exactly news (and yes, the irony of it being in a newspaper isn’t lost on me), what may be news to a lot of people is that the majority of Huron County voters also said they had enough of the Conservative Party and its local representative MP Ben Lobb. The difference is, Ben is still the MP of this area. Before we go any further, I’m not in any way indicating that Ben shouldn’t be representing Huron County. I met Ben, I’ve got to know Ben a little and he’s a great guy. I’m also not saying he should be our representative, I’m just using last week’s federal election to point out a few things. The first thing I’ll point out is that strategic voting is not a bad word. Strategic voting is a term that has been used to describe voting with the intent of getting someone out of power instead of getting someone into power. Using Huron County as an example, had everyone who wanted a more left-leaning candidate got together and formed a strategic plan about who to vote for, Ben would be out of a job. What do I mean? Well, between the National Democratic Party’s Gerard Creces and Liberal Party’s Allan Thompson there were more than enough votes to oust Ben and put one of those two candidates in power. Ben walked away from the election with 25,803 people voting for him, 44.6 per cent of the vote. The left-leaning candidates commanded 23,126 for Allan and 7,558 for Gerard, or, between the two of them, 30,684 votes. That means that without even considering the Green Party’s 1,401 votes, there were nearly 5,000 more people in the Huron-Bruce riding who didn’t want Ben or the Conservatives than did. South of the border, that would have likely meant that Ben would be out of a job because it’s primarily a two-party system. Here, fortunately for Ben, there could be as many candidates vying for the vote as there are people in Huron County. Gerard, in one of his many videos on Facebook, decried the idea of strategic voting, saying that people should vote for what they believe in, not against what they don’t believe in, but, from where I’m sitting, those are two sides of the same coin. This election saw Canadians emphatically say that, yes, they want to go into debt to spur economic development, yes they want to make marijuana legal and yes they want to provide support to people, through their tax dollars. The country said yes to all the promises that the Liberals and Justin Trudeau brought forward. In doing so, they said no to Harper, no to his party and no to his platform. Many people, myself included, surmise, some voters didn’t vote for the Liberals but against the Conservatives (and therefore voted for the most likely candidate to oust them according to polls). I think that this election didn’t necessarily say Canada believed in Trudeau or the Liberal candidates that won, but believed that the Conservatives had strayed from what made Canada Canada. So while Gerard may have railed against the idea of strategic voting, I think that having more than two candidates actually put Huron-Bruce in a position where the majority of its people aren’t being represented by the kind of person that they wanted to be represented by. Yes, the NDP and the Liberals are different parties with different goals, however, they are on the same side of the political spectrum. The second thing I will point out is that aside from not being a bad word, strategic voting is nearly necessary, especially in a place as divided as Huron County. The message I got from looking at the election results locally was that most of Huron Bruce wanted a left-leaning candidate, they just couldn’t decide on which one. Because of that 55 per cent of the county, with the Green vote added, are being represented by someone on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Heck, technically, 60.5 per cent of Canadians are being represented by a government they didn’t vote for, though changing the way the popular vote reflects government composition might be a little bit beyond what space I have left in this column. Suffice to say, the political program we have in Canada is flawed in that you could have someone win a riding with barely more than 25 per cent of the vote (assuming four people vying for the position from the major bilingual parties, 20 per cent in Quebec due to the fifth party). That means that just shy of 75 per cent of a riding could say no to a Liberal, Conservative, Green or NDP candidate and still end up with that person representing them. I know that, even in a two-party system, you could have nearly half the people represented by someone they didn’t vote for, but less than half certainly seems better to me than one- vote-less than 75 per cent of all voters. So strategic voting, in my books, is a perfectly great idea. Had 35 per cent of the people who voted for Gerard voted instead for Allan or had nearly everyone who voted for Allan voted for Gerard, they would at least be represented by someone on their preferred part of the spectrum. It’s unfortunate that so many people in the area are not going to have their political views represented because the left vote was split. It’s also unfortunate that it is far too late to do anything about it. The best we can do is use this as a cautionary tale: it may be better to be represented by someone of your leaning but not your specific beliefs than to be represented by someone who holds opposite views on many key issues. Remember that Huron County voters the next time you take to the polls. Denny Scott Denny’s Den Distancing ourselves In the nine years I’ve been in Huron County, there has been one constant theme: the people making decisions for Huron County simply don’t understand Huron County. You’ve heard it a million times and you’ve maybe even said it before after being stung by an urban-crafted policy. The people making the rules that govern ‘here’ don’t live here. So whether it’s a government agency in Toronto or Ottawa making rules for Huron County, or a corporation running its local business from elsewhere in the country, or from another country altogether, we’ve often lamented the lack of a ‘boots on the ground’ approach here. We like people from here, who live here, making the rules for us. The thinking being that when someone has lived here, they can apply the ever-elusive rule of common sense to things that might not make sense on paper to someone sitting in a Toronto office. Despite the seemingly universal stance against governing from a distance, it seems some keep thinking it’s a good idea just because it’s wrapped in different paper this time around. The first case is proportional representation that was, and is, a hot topic during the federal election. With Canada’s multi-party system, there is an increasingly vocal uprising against the first-past-the-post system. Opponents say that nation-wide votes should be divided and Member of Parliament seats should be awarded accordingly. This sounds great, but it will likely require a complete overhaul of the current system. Re-elected MP Ben Lobb made this point at an all-candidates meeting. If seats are awarded to a party, rather than to the local representative who won the riding, you’ll end up with a party figurehead no one knows in your riding – a rising political hotshot, likely from a larger city centre. A Huron County native with a knowledge of farming just isn’t a ‘sexy’ pick on the national stage (sorry Ben). So whereas locals have Lobb or MPP Lisa Thompson to call, or to welcome into their homes, if they have a problem, now what would they do? Call party headquarters? I can’t imagine Huron-Bruce getting much traction at a federal or provincial level for its problems. We need a local face that understands the local issues. The same can be said for Huron East’s suggestion (for at least the fifth time since I’ve been here) that it’s time to abolish the ward system. This is distancing residents from their representation again, on a much smaller scale. In figures provided to Huron East councillors last week, Brussels has just 934 electors, while Seaforth and Tuckersmith boast 1,894 and 2,368 electors respectively. Should the ward system be abolished, simple mathematics suggest that in the next election, more candidates will come from those areas, as will more votes. And, due to name and face recognition, areas with fewer electors will be left out in the cold. Areas like Brussels or Grey will be “governed” by residents of Seaforth and Tuckersmith, hypothetically speaking. Over and over again councillors say, “we’re Huron East” not its former wards, but the needs of an Ethel resident are very different from those in Seaforth, and you need geographically diverse councillors to realize that. For a group that hates being governed from a distance, there are some intent on cutting a trail for the rule-makers, leaving us in the dust as they drive further and further away. Other Views Confused? S’no wonder Ch-ch-changes, ch-ch-changes