The Citizen, 2012-10-04, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2012. PAGE 5.
Ican’t go to the bathroom anymore.
No, no, it’s not that. There’s nothing wrong
with the personal plumbing, it’s the
public washrooms that don’t work for me
anymore.
I hail from the horse-and-buggy days of
public washrooms. In my day, if you wanted to
flush a toilet, you pressed the shiny doohickey
on the tank and you were done. To wash your
hands, you turned on the hot water tap (right)
and the cold water tap (left) until an agreeably
comfortable flow gushed from the spout and
you scrubbed away. Drying the washed hands
was a simple feat; a couple of paper towels
from the handy wall dispenser would do the
trick.
That’s not how it works anymore. Approach
a sink in a modern public washroom with your
hands lathered up in supplication and you
trip a sensor – which decides how much
water you will get, and what temperature it
will be. Usually that means a tepid squirt that
wouldn’t wash the lint from a gerbil’s navel.
No matter – your hands are at least dampish
now, which means you need some paper
towels to…
Not so fast, forest killer! Modern public
washrooms don’t do paper towels. They
provide eco-friendly, environmentally
responsible sanitary hand dryers which
produce warm air to dry your hands.
Theoretically.
The machine wails like a banshee; you look
like an idiot trying to shake hands with
yourself and your hands remain wet and
dripping. No problem. Now you can wipe
them on the inside of your pant legs and creep
out of the washroom, trying not to look like a
pervert.
Of course I haven’t even mentioned those
most inconvenient of all the public
conveniences – that sombre line of metal stalls
ranged against the back wall.
The toilets.
They’ve been modernized too. Gone is the
shiny, manually-operated flush lever on the
toilet tank. It’s been replaced by another
sensor. A very sensitive sensor. It responds
to your every bodily movement. Thus, when
you open the stall door, the toilet flushes.
When you take off your jacket, it flushes
again. It flushes when you sit down; it flushes
when you stand up. The water I waste in one
trip to a public toilet stall would probably
irrigate a Saskatchewan wheat farm through a
drought.
That’s one scenario. Often the sensor
doesn’t work. At all. And you are left with a
toilet you would dearly like to flush…but
there’s no flush handle.
Perhaps if you waved your arm. Or your leg.
Or both legs and both arms.
This helps to explain those noisy, desperate
shuffles you occasionally hear emanating from
the stalls of public washrooms. It sounds like
some So You Think You Can Dance hopeful’s
in there, executing a complicated routine, but
no, it’s just some poor schlub trying to activate
a balky toilet stall sensor.
They’re not done tinkering with our public
toilets either. Toto, a Japanese toilet
manufacturer, has unveiled a model they call
the Neorest AH Tankless Toilet. No toilet
paper with this baby – instead the ‘client’ is
treated to an extremely personal wash and
blow-dry all activated by, yes, an unseen
sensor. Cost of the Neorest AH Tankless
Toilet? Four thousand dollars.
All so I can experience what happens to my
jalopy in a hands-free car wash? No thanks.
I’ll just hold it until I get home.
Arthur
Black
Other Views
When ya gotta go, ya gotta go
It was on 1962’s The Freewheelin’ Bob
Dylan that Dylan asked a series of
rhetorical questions with the song “Blowin’
in the Wind”. Dylan essentially continued to
ask how much work/experience is needed to
consider a job finished or a case closed.
“How many roads must a man walk down,”
the song begins, “before you can call him a
man?” The answer to the song’s multiple
questions, my friend, not to spoil the song, is
“blowing in the wind”.
Huron East Council has me wondering how
many times we can have the same debate,
before we can never talk about it again. The
answer, I fear, is blowing in the wind.
At the Sept. 24 council meeting, the issue
was raised once again by Councillor Nathan
Marshall, who has occupied his chair for just
under two years and wants to change how
things have been done in Huron East since
amalgamation.
Marshall suggests that the work (such as
committee positions) is spread so thin that
councillors don’t know enough about what is
going on in their municipality. He suggests that
if they attended more committee meetings,
they would have their fingers on the pulse of
the community and would have less reading to
do before council meetings.
He suggests that council could be cut in half
and the same level of service could be realized,
which led to the inevitable debate of the
abolition of the ward system.
Marshall was shot down by several
councillors, including David Blaney, Alvin
McLellan, Bill Siemon and Larry McGrath,
whose combined years of service on various
councils eclipse Marshall’s years on this
planet.
Councillors recalled debating (and turning
down) restructuring last year and the year
before, which left councillors wondering when
they would finally be done with the issue.
Blaney wondered aloud if the proposal
would simply keep returning to council until
those who were against restructuring got tired
of opposing it and just gave in.
The unfortunate reality of the idea is that it’s
being implemented all across North America
under the guise of downsizing. The idea being
that half the employees can do double the work
and everyone wins in the end. Government is
cheaper and there are few people around the
council table to complicate issues.
The problem with the above, however, is that
it’s a solution that only looks at the bottom
line. As Councillor Andy Flowers suggested,
there is also a home life to consider. With
councillors spending the majority of their
nights at meetings of various committees, and
many working full-time jobs throughout the
day, the position could soon leave little time for
much else.
Marshall, however, insists that the proposal
has little to do with council costs (Huron East
is one of the cheaper councils in Huron
County) but more to do with efficiency around
the council table.
In a large, sprawling municipality like Huron
East, however, as several councillors pointed
out, if there’s an issue in Grey, for example, a
Tuckersmith councillor, despite the effort he
may make, can’t be expected to be familiar
with it.
The veteran voices of council knew that the
greater the experience and perspective around
the council table, the better the representation
would be, rather than someone who has been
on council for two years attempting to re-
invent a wheel that has been rolling smoothly
for over a decade.
How many roads...
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
The politicians we have representing
Huron-Bruce are good people and good
politicians in my opinion.
Sure, I may not agree with everything in the
Conservative handbook (or heck, maybe not
even the majority of it), but the one thing I
remember people saying about past politicians
in Huron is that, regardless of their political
leanings, they were there for the people.
I never even thought otherwise until I was
sitting in the front row of the Seaforth and
District Community Centre last week listening
to the son of the late, great Pierre Trudeau, talk
about the way the world is and the way he
thinks it should be.
During Justin Trudeau’s speech, I realized
that people will never agree with everything
their representatives do and say at Queen’s
Park or at Parliament. Voters just have to hope
the people they elect follow the majority of
people say and feel.
Now, I’m praying that, in the following
paragraphs, I’m right in my assumptions. If
I’m not, I’m sure it will result in a flurry of
letters about the subject matter, and that’s
great, because it means people are both
reading and passionate. If I’m wrong, well,
I’m not sure where I fit in Huron County.
As I sat there and listened to Justin Trudeau
speak about how government has become
about representing just enough of your
electoral district to get re-elected, I realized
that, in a fairly monumental decision (when
contrasted with my beliefs) my own MP, Ben
Lobb, had voted in a way that I don’t think
most Huronians would.
Lobb was one of 91 voters who tried to
study what being a human being meant in the
Criminal Code of Canada (a decision which
critics state would lead to re-opening the
abortion debate in Canada).
I might as well come right out and say this
since beating around the bush will require the
majority of the rest of my editorial space: I’m
comfortable with where the rules sit now, I
think they are fair and balanced. I think they
could be tweaked or better defined, but I
believe the spirit under which the law was
made is a good one.
These 91, who were defeated by 203 of their
co-workers, included Lobb and, shockingly,
Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose.
This is where we get to the, I hope I’m right
part of the editorial.
I know that Huron-Bruce was, in my youth,
a strong Liberal area. I hope that the prevailing
attitude is that things are fine as they are. (I’m
also fairly sure that Ambrose wasn’t working
on behalf of the majority of women in Canada
when she cast her vote, but that’s just me
making my best, educated guess).
In one of the most politically charged
arenas, the person representing me, regardless
of my vote, made a decision that didn’t reflect
my own beliefs.
Aside from Ambrose’s decision being
interpreted as re-opening the abortion debate
and causing an outcry about the Conservative
Party of Canada’s views on equal and
women’s rights, the results of this motion paint
a very different picture of Canada than the one
I have in my mind.
Do 30.9 per cent of Canadians believe that
the definition of human is wrong?
[For those of you who, like me, don’t know
the exact wording, here it is:
“When child becomes human being
223. (1) A child becomes a human being
within the meaning of this Act when it has
completely proceeded, in a living state, from
the body of its mother, whether or not
(a) it has breathed;
(b) it has an independent circulation; or
(c) the navel string is severed.
Killing child
(2) A person commits homicide when he
causes injury to a child before or during its
birth as a result of which the child dies after
becoming a human being.”]
Maybe my own beliefs aren’t exactly those
of 69.1 per cent of the country, but I have to
believe that, since there hasn’t been some kind
of dramatic outcry against the statement by the
people of the country (not by their elected
officials, but by the grass-roots movements
and people of this nation) I have to assume that
most of the people are comfortable enough
with the ruling to have it stand.
If I’m wrong in this, we all need to take a
lesson from Quebec and start standing up and
saying when things are wrong. Sure, it may
result in a expensive referendum being called
to verify that the governments we elect are
acting both in our best interest and with our
intent in mind, but in a world of investigating
fraudulent elections, mis-reports of fighter jet
costs and outrageous public servant salaries,
spending money to be sure the government is
representing their constituents is money well
spent in my books.
I only really came to realize how I was
seeing my elected officials when I was moving
some furniture to London this weekend.
I couldn’t see out of my rear-view mirror
due to the size of my car (no jokes necessary,
it is a tiny car, I know) so I had to re-arrange
my side-view mirrors to compensate.
I moved the mirrors so I had the best
possible angles and I realized that this was the
perfect analogy to pair with this editorial.
You don’t always see what your elected
officials feel about issues if those issues aren’t
questioned or brought up in debate.
There are blind spots.
If I never ask my representatives what they
think of abortion, or eye-for-an-eye justice or
any number of issues which I just take for
granted every other Canadian feels the same
way I do about, I’ll never know what my
elected officials will say when asked.
I’ll have been driving through the political
landscape with huge, glaring pitfalls just out of
my line of sight and in my blind spots and I
just pray that I never need to change lanes and
figure out if... okay the analogy has been
stretched a bit far now.
I guess the basic moral of the story here is
that there is no way to find a political
representative who will agree with all of your
issues (except by running yourself). Even
finding someone who has most of your values
at heart may not work because they may not
get elected.
I’m lucky, I can ask the question here, but
for everyone else I guess it requires more. To
them I say don’t be quiet, write a letter, send
an e-mail or call your elected representative.
Blind spots in the driver’s seat
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den