HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2008-03-27, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MARCH 27, 2008. PAGE 5.
Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
A future decision?
Anyone who isn’t confused doesn’t really
understand the situation.
– Edward R. Murrow
Iadmit it – I’m deeply confused. Every day
I am offered simple, no-nonsense,
unambiguous advice from Greenpeace,
David Suzuki, the Sierra Club,Al Gore, Oprah
and the Grade 6 class of Salt Spring
Elementary School as to exactly what I Ought
to Be Doing to Save This Planet…
And every day I just get more and more
confused.
It begins at the supermarket checkout
counter. “Will that be paper or plastic?” the
clerk asks me.
And I think to myself, well, let me
see…Would I prefer to decimate what’s left of
Canada’s old growth forests by having my
groceries bundled into paper bags, or…
Should I continue to contribute to The
West’s slavish dependence on foreign oil by
using petroleum-derived plastic bags – which,
being non-bio-degradable, will of course go
on to moulder sullenly in some land fill site for
untold millennia?
(And for those Environannies who are right
now clucking that I should be carrying my
own re-usable cloth shopping bags – I know
that. As a matter of fact I do carry my own re-
usable cloth shopping bags. They’re in my car
behind the driver’s seat. I always recall that
they’re in the car behind the driver’s seat about
the time the clerk is asking me whether I’d
prefer paper or plastic.)
The salmon question is equally perplexing.
Detractors claim the very idea of raising
salmon in pens is insane. The fish, they say,
are flabby, laced with antibiotics, riddled with
sea lice and about as tasty as mulched
telephone book.
Said fishbots also pollute the seabed,
consume outrageous tonnages of vulnerable
fish foodstock and, by escaping from their
pens, threaten to infect and/or mongrelize wild
salmon stocks.
Fine, then. Let’s just catch and eat wild
salmon.
Or what’s left of them. We’re told that
Pacific salmon stocks, from California to the
Queen Charlottes, are already seriously
stressed.
Atlantic salmon? It is to whimper. We
fished those to death decades ago.
Of course with our federal government
fisheries experts in charge, there’s no way we
could possibly be stupid enough to overfish
the remaining wild salmon, right?
I’ve got four words for you: In Cod We
Trust.
How about electricity? Well, those coal-fired
generators sure work fine – aside from the
noise and the air pollution. Hydro-generated
electricity, then – you don’t have to worry
about dirty air with hydro – although you do
lose the odd river system or two in the process.
Now, nuclear power...that’s different.
Nuclear’s super clean. And quiet.
Of course, if something goes wrong, it gets
real quiet. For about 250,000 years.
When it comes to the environment, nothing
is as simple as it looks. Wind turbines looked
for a while like a wonderful power alternative.
Sure! Windmills! Non-polluting, silent – and
what could be cheaper and more satisfying
than harnessing the breeze?
But there’s an aesthetic price. Tier after tier
of what look like giant eggbeaters whirring
away on a craggy bluff do not constitute a
picturesque vignette. Plus there’s the slice-
and-dice effect those whirling blades have on
migrating flocks of birds…
As Kermit said, it ain’t easy being green.
And few bipeds know that better than
Carolynn Bissett and Richard Treanor, of
Sunnyvale, California. Richard and Carolynn
are dyed-in-the-non-synthetic-wool environ-
mentalists. They recycle. They belong to the
Sierra Club. They drive a Prius.
That’s why they were shocked when they
got the court order from the State of California
ordering them to chop down the eight giant
redwoods in their backyard.
Reason? The trees were casting a shadow on
a neighbour’s solar panels rendering them
useless. And in California, solar panels trump
trees.
Hilarious? Not if you’re Richard and
Carolynn. So far they’ve spent more than
$25,000 in legal fees trying to protect their
trees.
When it comes to bedrock stupidity, one
should never underestimate the boundless
capacity of the human race. Environmental
awareness is merely the latest frontier we have
yet to plumb.
And we’re already making important
inroads. Just last year, the media giant NBC
flew its East Coast environmental
correspondent, Anne Curry, complete with
film crew, from the New York office all the
way to the South Pole.
So that Ms. Curry could do a 45-second
stand-up report.
On global warming.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Paper or plastic? Wild or farmed?
Ontario Progressive Conservative leader
John Tory is suggesting he could run
government better because he once
ran a cable TV company. A lot of people will
doubt it.
Many have had problems with TV, phone
and internet services and will side with New
Democrat House leader Peter Kormos, who
criticized them in the legislature.
Kormos first took a shot at cable TV and
specifically the company Tory ran. The
Conservative leader was president and chief
executive officer of Rogers Cable TV Inc.,
which serves much of the Toronto area, and
has been saying the province needs business
experience he could bring.
Kormos, a lawyer, said he receives cable TV
through Rogers and “there are no good
stories” about it. He said often during his
favourite program, Law and Order, just when
the culprit is about to confess, a box that seems
to connect the TV to the cable collapses and
someone has to reset it.
This never happens, he said, during rinky-
dink programs no-one cares about, or at 4 a.m.
when everyone is sleeping, but “right when
Mariska Hargitay has got the accused in the
interrogation room and he’s ready to spill, and
all of a sudden – a grey screen.”
Kormos said viewers who phone Rogers
first are kept waiting 10 or 15 minutes, if they
are lucky, and, if they get through, fortunate to
be kept on the line.
If they are held on, they are told they can
reset their TVs simply by crawling behind the
TV set, unplugging a box and following a
series of procedures.
Kormos said he responds he did not screw
up the TV, Rogers did, and he pays rent, so
Rogers should fix it. Rogers inevitably hangs
up on him, he said.
Kormos said Tory would do himself a favour
if he avoided suggesting he will make Ontario
run like Rogers, because it is the most
customer-unfriendly operation he knows.
Conservative finance critic Tim Hudak
interjected that Bell Canada might compete in
this regard and prompted Kormos to describe
his misfortunes with that phone and internet
giant.
Kormos said currently he is trying to
upgrade his internet service from dial-up to
high speed and Rogers was not on his short list
to do it. So he called Bell and it put him on
hold for 15 minutes and serenaded him with
muzak, then disconnected, and he called again
and was on hold and given muzak for another
15 minutes.
He was eventually on the phone two-and-a-
half hours and talking mostly to a service rep
in New Delhi. He understands and appreciates
people in all parts of the world need jobs. But
he still was puzzled Bell Canada runs
advertisements with singing, dancing beavers
to emphasize how Canadian it is and he was
ordering its internet service from someone in
India.
He then waited a week for a modem that did
not arrive and called Bell again. A
representative in Oshawa explained he had not
been sent a modem because he had never been
hooked up to the Bell high-speed internet, and
he had to go through the whole process again.
Even when he received the Bell modem and
hooked it up, it did not work and he found he
needed filters on his phone lines. Bell provides
them for cable hookups, but owners of wall
phones, like himself, have to go to its website
and order wall phone filters.
When he went to the Bell website, he could
not find how to obtain a wall filter, so he now
has no e-mail, his wall phone is on his kitchen
floor, and he phoned Bell and it has assured
him the filter is in the mail.
Kormos said cable TV and phone companies
should be required by law to provide more
efficient services. Voters in an election also
may not be all that impressed to find one
leader is a guy who ran a cable company.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
While great strides have been made in
cancer treatment, the real key to
defeating this enemy is with a focus
on prevention.
If it was suggested, therefore, that there was
a free magic pill to protect people from cancer,
it’s unlikely that anyone would reject it.
Likewise, one would assume a natural
reaction to the Human Papillomavirus (HPV)
vaccination of Grade 8 girls, with a goal of
protecting them from the possibility of
cervical cancer as adults, would be to proceed
without question. Yet, having spoken with a
public health nurse last week, I was told that
only 50 per cent of the target group here have
taken advantage of the provincially-funded
program.
The reasons, of course, are as logical to
those who have them as the vaccination is to
its advocates. Certainly one might argue that
there is an element of the extreme. While it’s
estimated that 70-80 per cent of the sexually-
active Canadians carry the virus at some time
in their life, the body’s immune system usually
rids itself of HPVs within a year or two. And
not every HPV will develop into cervical
cancer.
Others argue that the target group is too
young, that they would prefer to wait until
their daughter is more likely to be sexually
active. It seems a logical choice if a parent can
afford the $405 price tag that accompanies the
vaccination for anyone not a Grade 8 girl.
And if you have a crystal ball.
Because the reality is that while most people
would like to assume they’ll know when their
child is going to begin to experiment sexually,
honest parents will admit that just isn’t so. As
well, while a 13-year-old may be too young to
be ‘getting physical’ it doesn’t mean it’s not
happening. Remember, they don’t need to
have sex to contract the virus; it can be
transmitted through any kind of intimate
contact.
And according to the public health nurse, 26
per cent of 14-19-year-olds have sexually-
transmitted diseases. Which means that some
certainly have started very young.
It’s frightening and the “well, mine would
never” argument is a naive response.
Communication, discussion and education are
the best prevention, but all of that said, you
cannot ever be sure.
What decision then does a parent make
when something that can protect their
daughter down the road is being offered, yet
could also ultimately have introduced
something into their system unnecessarily?
It’s a choice I’m happy I no longer have to
make. I have complete and total empathy for
parents uncomfortable with the idea of
vaccinating a child unnecessarily. I don’t
believe in medicine for medicine’s sake. If I
can tolerate the physical problem, I try to do so
without chemical solutions.
However, vaccinations were created for a
reason. Poliomyelitis, for example was once a
common childhood disease in Canada, which
thanks to the introduction of vaccines was
rapidly controlled here. The last major polio
epidemic occurred in 1959.
Smallpox was responsible for 300–500
million deaths, in the 20th century. After
successful vaccination campaigns the World
Health Organization certified the eradication
of smallpox in 1979.
The HPV vaccine is worth careful
consideration and a weighing of the pros and
cons. Just make sure you can be comfortable
with the unknown down the road that comes
from that decision.
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MPPs knock TV, phones