HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2012-11-29, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2012. PAGE 5.
N owhere in a zoo can a stranger
encounter the look of an animal. At
most the animal’s gaze flickers and
passes on. They look sideways. They look
blindly beyond.
– John Berger
I acquired an early distaste for zoos when I
was just a kid, maybe 10 or 12. My dad
stopped for gas at a Hicksville service
station/greasy spoon just north of Toronto on
Hwy 27. Near the pump I spied a crudely
lettered wooden sign that said BEAR with an
arrow pointing towards the back of the garage.
I followed the arrow and came upon what
looked like an old wino in a scruffy wool coat.
Turned out to be Tiny, a sad-eyed brown
bear stuck in a cage that was hardly big
enough for him to turn around in.
That’s what Tiny the Bear did – turn around.
Around and around and around. He didn’t look
at me, he ignored the wieners and donuts
visitors had tossed in the cage. He just turned
around and around.
Oh, I know that modern zoos have come
along way since Tiny’s time. Nowadays the
enclosures are bigger and more ‘natural’; the
animals – in this country at least – are well-fed
and cared for by professionals.
But they’re still inmates; they’re still in
prison.
It’s a conundrum. We continue to clear-cut,
sub-divide and pave their natural habitat, so
what’s the alternative – let them starve? No,
better to ‘re-locate’ them to the safer
environment of a zoo – sorry: a ‘monitored
wildlife refuge’.
You know – like we did with the Natives
when we stole their land.
I hadn’t thought about Tiny in years.
What brought him back to my mind was a
story about another bear, named Clover,
presently residing at a wildlife centre near
Smithers, B.C. Clover’s only about a year
and a half but he comes from a broken home
and he’s already got a rap sheet. His mother
was shot by hunters; Clover subsequently
broke into a shack at an archaeology camp
looking for food. Campers had been tempting
him with food so they could take his picture,
but never mind. Clover was now into breaking
and entering and that is usually the kiss of
death for any wild bear. Once they associate
humans with food, they become too
unpredictable. Indeed, when conservation
officers trapped Clover they fully intended to
shoot him on the spot. Only one thing saved
him.
Clover is pure white.
He’s a Kermode or Spirit Bear – a black bear
with a rare genetic trait that renders his coat a
creamy white. There are fewer than 1,000 –
perhaps as few as 400 – spirit bears in the
world and they all live in British Columbia’s
central and north coast wilderness. The fact
that there are any spirit bears at all is probably
due to the protection of First Nations people
who have always held them in high esteem.
They neither hunted them nor mentioned their
existence to Russian or European fur traders
and trappers.
Clover’s life will be spared too, but
his roving days are done. Bears can’t be
‘un-trained’ from looking to humans
for food.
So Clover will spend the rest of his life at the
B.C. Wildlife Park in Kamloops. Folks there
are excited. They’ve set out to raise $500,000
to construct a new bear facility just for Clover.
“I anticipate enormous public interest,” says
general manager Glenn Grant. “It’s hard to
quantify in dollars or visits, but we know there
will be tour companies that will want to come
to Kamloops to see this bear.”
Lucky Clover.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Modern zoos too much to bear
In the last few weeks the Toronto Blue Jays
have done plenty of different things. They
have made blockbuster trades, they have
made dynamite pick-ups, but the biggest things
they’ve done is give the rest of Canada a lesson
in business.
When the free agency market opened up, the
Blue Jays made some minor splashes, picking
up pitcher Jeremy Jeffress from the Kansas
City Royals and infielder Maicer Izturis from
the Los Angeles Angels. However, it was mid-
month when news broke that the team had
orchestrated one of the biggest trades in recent
memory and perhaps the biggest in Blue Jays
history.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock,
you’ve heard about the deal. It involves a
dozen players and the Blue Jays picked up
three all-stars in pitchers Mark Buehrle and
Josh Johnson and shortstop José Reyes.
The next day it was announced that they had
picked up Melky Cabrera, an outfielder who
led the National League in hitting last season,
but was looking for a fresh start after being
banned due to the use of performance-
enhancing drugs.
So how is this a sound business decision? On
the surface it seems that on a scale of one to
George Steinbrenner the Blue Jays are
spending money like drunken sailors, taking on
over $150 million in salary.
However, it didn’t take long for the pebble
the Blue Jays dropped in the water to ripple
throughout the ocean.
By all accounts the team’s season ticket sales
are going through the roof, which is saying
something with four months left until spring
training even begins. Similarly, The Jays Shop
can’t print jerseys adorned with the new
players’ names and numbers fast enough as
they fly off the shelves just in time for the
Christmas season.
Indeed, the Toronto Blue Jays, for the first
time in a long time, have subscribed to the age-
old theory that you have to spend money to
make money.
The excitement and optimism that general
manager Alex Anthopoulos has generated with
these off-season moves has likely already
covered the jump in salary the team has taken
on with their new faces. And if it hasn’t yet,
surely it won’t take much longer to reach that
mark.
This is a strategy that sports teams don’t
often subscribe to. Unfortunately, it’s a
problem that often plagues many businesses as
well.
It was a baseball movie, Field of Dreams,
that gave us the iconic phrase, “If you build it,
he will come.” That phrase has been adapted to
apply to just about anything across any
field (pardon the pun). The phrase is so
universally accepted because it makes a lot of
sense.
The term “fairweather fan” is often applied
to sports, saying that many people from any
given city will only be a fan of their home team
when they are playing well. Frankly, can you
blame them? When an organization puts a
winning team on the field, people want to
come and watch them play. No one wants to go
and watch a baseball team lose every game of
the season.
When was the last time someone asked you
to go to a concert with them, telling you how
terrible the band is? I’m guessing that answer
is never.
It’s a lesson in sports and it’s a lesson in
business. If you commit to your product, in
turn others will too. But if you look like you
don’t care, then why should they?
Blue Jay economics
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Joe Fontana, the Mayor of London, may
have screwed up when he was a Liberal
Member of Parliament, then again, he
may not have.
He could be guilty of the misappropriation
of $1,700 which may or may not have been
used to pay for his son’s wedding reception at
The Marconi Club in London.
Whether this is true or not has little bearing
on my column, but it must be pointed out that,
for $1,700, the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police (RCMP) are bringing up charges
against Fontana.
When I heard that, my gut reaction was
“Shame on him,” but, after some thought, my
gut wasn’t reacting, it was roiling.
My stomach literally felt like it was spinning
in circles. It happens when I’m really, honestly
truly angry with something that I can do very
little about.
No, I wasn’t angry at Fontana. I mean, if
he’s guilty, he did a boneheaded thing and got
caught.
I wasn’t angry at Fontana, I was angry at the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Here they
are, making a huge spectacle of arresting a
man over a nearly trivial amount of money
(compared to some of the other debacles that
the government is responsible for) and
allowing other, far more heinous crimes to
continue on every day.
I guess I should admit first that this
isn’t a plausible editorial, it’s far more
altruistic than actionable. I know that,
unfortunately, we can’t hold people
responsible for the decisions they make as
elected officials in a legal sense. All we can do
is remember what they did and not vote for
them in the next election.
(Or, as most Canadians seem to have done,
remember what they did and vote for them
anyway because it doesn’t make sense to
disturb the status quo. Unless you’re from
Quebec, in which case you’ll elect someone
who doesn’t speak your provincial language
just to send a message that you’ve had enough
of a certain political party).
(Okay, wait, that may have sounded snide,
when, in reality, I really respect that. The
Liberals and Conservatives are going to
remember that they were ousted by a bunch of
college students and English-speaking
Canadians in a French-speaking province.)
So anyway, this is about how it should be,
not how it is.
Canadians saw history made in the past few
years within the government.
Despite being held in contempt, the federal
government was allowed to run the country
again. More than allowed, they saw their
traditional opposition completely devastated
and nearly eliminated from the political
landscape.
So we, as Canadians, saw this Conservative
federal government, or really, this person
leading it, do things that were so bad that they
were considered to be misleading the entire
nation (or bribery, or... well contempt of
parliament covers quite a few things) and,
instead of arresting them or having the RCMP
ride up and arrest them, we rewarded them for
it.
I’m going to visit a courtroom, get held in
contempt and see if I’m made a judge. That’s
pretty much the best parable I can pen for what
happened.
On the provincial level, we have a Liberal
government that, by all accounts, threw away
$230 million on power plants that aren’t going
to be constructed.
Two hundred and thirty million dollars. I
want you to sit there and figure out how many
years you would need to work to make that
much money at your current job.
For me, that would be something like 9,000
years.
We have a former MP being arrested for
$1,700 that he may or may not have used
inappropriately but when we have a
government waste more than the gross
domestic product of some countries like the
Republic of Palau and admit it (well, do all but
release the pertinent information in an
unedited format), we do nothing but sit smugly
back, knowing that former Ontario Premier
Dalton McGuinty will suffer with a mere
$300,000 severance package for stepping
down following the debacle.
Oh, and, let us not forget the other people
who left, either as a result of the power plant
screw up or because they saw the writing on
the wall and believed that the Liberal party
wouldn’t be around much longer. Every single
one of them is entitled to a goodly chunk of
money, including Finance Minister Dwight
Duncan and Energy Minister Chris Bentley
who will both walk away with $250,000
severance packages.
Anyway, again, I’m not defending Fontana
nor am I condemning him. We have courts for
that.
What I am saying is, if we are going to go to
such lengths to recover $1,700, why, do we as
a people, sit back and allow greater crimes,
both from a monetary standpoint and from a
rights standpoint happen ad nauseum at every
level of government and not even blink an eye
at them.
There are some countries where people
are scared of their governments. They are
frightened because, to speak out or to act
against them means certain death for
themselves and possibly their friends and
family. I can understand why people there
allow themselves to be pushed around. There
is a fear of true bodily harm driving them.
Here in Canada, we have the worst
excuse for allowing these acts to continue:
apathy.
Canadians just don’t care what our elected
officials do until they do something that takes
something tangible away from us. In some
ways that $1,700 is a lot easier to wrap our
minds around than $230 million, but we have
to force ourselves to understand $230 million
as something real and not money we’ll never
see.
We need to realize that, when we open
our pay cheques and lose a third of it to
the government, we are losing it to things
like severance packages, scrapped energy
plants, contempt of parliament hearings and
the subsequent elections and other decisions
we have no say in. It’s time to stop that and
hold someone accountable. Speak up.
Laws and politicians; I don’t get it
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den