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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Brussels Post, 1979-01-31, Page 2WILMS LS ONTARIO Serving Brussels and the surrounding community. Published each Wednesday afternoon at Brussels, Ontario By McLean Bros. Publishers Limited Evelyn Kennedy - Editor Pat Langlois - Advertising Member Canadian Community Newspaper Association and Ontario Weekly Newspaper Association Subscriptions (in advance) Canada $9.00 a Year. Others $17.00 a Year. Single Copies 20 cents each. em Sugar and spice By Bill Smiley It looks like residents around the Brussels area are one group who know how to make the best of winter. It sometimes seems like there's going to be something going on every weekend until winter ends. Just for starters, there's the Walton Snowmobile Poker Rally, the Brussels Snowmobile Poker Rallies, the annual Polar Daize and the Atoms Hockey Tournament. ' But it takes the spirit of competition and participation to keep these events alive and area residents must have that spirit or the events wouldn't still be going on. If you're not the competitive type, however, you can still show your appreciation to the organizations who put these events on by being out there to cheer on the competitiors. Support is a big factor in what keeps these events alive. If there's no audience to watch, there's not much point in having the event. If these organizations can go to the trouble and expenses of holding these events, then don't they deserve your support to keep them going? Behind the scenes by Keith Roulston Simple solutions WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 31, 1979. Winter has improved. ° *N 1 tt t'. 1 t I V ',At.' A' ni.............../11111.1.11.111111111111\amum.1111TAIN OROS 11172 4Brussels Post Keep things going Just struggled home through about the tenth blizzard of this month. You could see your hand before your face, if you had a large hand and good eyesight. Found my street more by feel than sight, turned off with a skid, went through the routine of getting into the garage. It's rather like launching a small boat in a large surf. It tales a lot of skill and a fair bit of nerve. A t the entrance to the driveway are the boulders. These are huge gobbets of snow thrown up by the snowplow, which then freezes them bigger than a large man's head. Then there is a flat space, shovelled, about the length of a car. Then, just at -the entrance to the garage itself, there is a sort of reef of ice, built up to a foot or so of frozen snow. You have to hit the driveway, and there is a large maple a foot to one side, at about 24 miles an hour. There is a great rending noise from beneath, just like rocks tearing the bottom out of a boat. But you don't even slow down. With a judicious touch of brakes here and accelerator there, you sashay past the maple, line her up for the middle of the garage, and goose her just a little on the flat patch. There is six inches clearance on each side. All being well, you then ride up over the reef of ice, with another rending noise, this time part of your roof peeling away, slam the brakes at the last minute so that you don't go through the end of the garage, switch off, and sit there wiping your brow. My wife is a big chicken. She won't even try to put the thing in the driveway, let alone the garage. Maybe that's because she has hit the side of the garage door about six times, both in and coming out. I enjoy it. I feel like a skipper whose ship is sinking, and who has launched a boat, taken her through the surf, over the rocks, through the reef, and beached her on golden sand. But inevitably, on such occasions, my thoughts turn to the poor devils, our pioneer ancestors, who had to cope with the same weather and snow conditions, with a pittance of what we have to work with. When I've shut off my engine, feeling a bit like Captain Bligh on one of his good days, all I have to do is walk 40 yards to the house. Inside there is warmth from an oil furnace, light, an electric stove to cook dinner, a colored television to take me to lotus-land. I can huddle in the cowardly safety of my modern home and defy the elements. Let 'er snow, let 'er blow. No chores to do. No trips to the barn to feed, water, milk the beasts, by the light of a lantern, in sub-zero temperature. No wood to lug in from the woodpile, or ashes to carry out. All I have to do is sit down with a drink, unfold my daily paper, and wait for dinner. And it's no dinner of salt pork or canned beef, with a hearty helping of smashed potatoes and some turnips or carrots my wife had to dig up from the root cellar, topped off by some preserved raspberries from last summer's crop. No, the refrigerator is one of our modern gods, and one of the most popular. I think it takes precedence even over the car as a twentieth-century deity. We kneel before it, contemplating its innards. We place offerings of food inside it, much as the ancients proffered food to their gods. And just like the ancients, we are smart enough to take food back and eat it, after the god has been placated. Not for us the pioneers' meagre fare. We have fresh (frozen) meat to hand. We have fresh vegetables, nothing from the root cellar. We have cheese and fruit and eggs and orange juice and a myriad other exotics that would make our ancestors blink in awe and fear. On the shelves in the kitchen we have another host of luxuries: canned fruit and vegetables and soup, coffee and tea and sugar and smoked oysters and sardines and salmon and tuna. In the bread-box, cookies and cakes and bread that cost money but no labour. After a meal that would appear to a pioneer as food for the gods (even though half the stuff in it is going to give us cancer, according to the quacks), we don't have to sit huddled by the stove trying to read a week-old newspaper by the light of a kerosene lamp. We can sit in comfort and read a book from among thousands in a library five minutes away. Or we can listen to music or drama from hundreds of miles away. Or we can watch the same, or the news of the day, from thousands of miles away. By merely twisting a dial. How did they stand it, those sturdy forebears of ours? Wouldn't you think that they'd have gone starkers under the burden of never-ending 'toil, never ending cold and snow, neverending monotony and loneliness in winter? Not a bit of it. They thrived and multiplied. (Maybe the latter was the answer. There's nothing like a bit of multiplying to pass the time.) Many of them didn't survive, of course. Children died in infancy. Women were old at 30. But it Was a lifelong test course in survival, and the tough ones made it. What a lot of complaining, compladent slobs we are today! But I'm sure glad I don't have to go out to the barn, put hay down for the horses, milk the cows, and drag in a qtiarter-cord of wood to keep the stoves going tonight. One of the traits of the 1970's has been that people keep coming up with simple solutions to difficult problems: solutions that seldom work but sound nice. I fear that Canada is falling under the- influence of one of these widely-accepted simple solutions at present. The Task Force on Canadian Unity made its report last week and the report was generally well received by various groups. There were many suggestions made in the report but the one that comes through most strongly, and the one that seems to win widest support, is the proposal to hand over more power to the provinces. It's not a new suggestion, of course. It'S been the panacea proposed by provincial premiers and opposition leaders for several years now. With so many people supporting the idea, I should be all for, it, but somehow I think the whole solution is too simplistic, naive, and is perhaps playing with fire. Before we start shifting responsibility for too many things we should perhaps take a look at the record to see just how well we have been served by our provincial governments. Last Week at a conference of ministers of education, the Quebec minister claimed the federal government is always starting projects, then backing out and leaving the provinces to pick up the tab. He got general agreement from his colleagues from other provinces. Yet who has been worse than provincial govern- ments at starting things then dumping the bills on the local taxpayers. In Ontario, for instance, the provincial government used the carrot and the stick to get us into a system of county school boards. The carrot was increased grants, the stick, legislation. So now that we have an expensive county schoolboard system the province had decided it no longer wants the burden of its high education bills and is throwing responsibility to the local boards and municipalities. The same sad tale has been told where people have been unlucky enought to take the government's bait and begin regional governments only to have the provincial government back out leaving the municipalities with a huge bureacratic structure. And how about the hospital situation? And these stories are not just Ontario Stories. They have been repeated across the country in every province: Provincial governments are being favoured over the federal government because they are supposed to be closer to the people than the federal government. The people in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan feel very remote and ill served by the federal government but are they served any more poorly by Ottawa than Northern Ontario it by Toronto? Are we in Huron County any more remote from the federal government than from Queen's Park, even though the latter is 600 miles closer? We hear about the arrogance of the federal government but as far as its effect on our everyday life was concerned, that was nothing compared to the arrogance shown by the provincial government before it recently had to face a minority govern- ment situation. I wonder if the idea of handing more power to the provinces is based so much on sober thought as it is on politics. The present occupant of the prime minister's residence is not popular with the general public so lets show him, let's take his power away. Then we have the simple arithmetic of the situation: there is one federal govern- ment to defend centralized power; there are 10 provincial premiers to attack it. The premiers are human beings and politicans and their natural goal is to seek more power. In addition, they are in a very good position policitically. When things go wrong they can blame the federal govern- ment in one direction, or pass on the responsibility to the municipalities in the other direction. They take all the credit and pass on all the blame. Will passing on more power to the provinces unite the country? My fear is that it will make it worse. The premiers will still use Ottawa as a whipping boy when they're in trouble, leading to continued disunity there. If the federal government gets out of trying to push language rights all understanding will vaish. All one has to do to realize that is lot* at Manitoba where the province took away the rights of French-speaking people or Quebec that stripped the English of their rights or Ontario where Premier Davis is too afraid to lose a vote to make a move towards helping the French-speaking population. Our present provincial boundaries are so large that I really doubt the government will get much closer to the people. If we want to give more power to the provinces, we should subdivide the present 10 provinces into smaller units. Northern Ontario, for instance, should be separated from the rest of the province. Otherwise, we're going to get all of the problems of balkanization with very few' benefits. If, fot instance, communications is handed over to the provinces as is proposed, we'll learn even less about people in other provinces than we do now. To see how good a job the provinces have done in teaching us about the rest of our own country, take a look at the education system that is dominated by U.S. text books. NO orie is a greater opponent of big government than this writer but I do hope that people Will do a lot of Serious thought before turning more power over to the provinces. instead of two solitudes, we May end up with 10. JU usi Op Cr 0 will with min( rally A that will La and Aret re-rt Thc serva has i ploys Cana $10,9 the J Immi ment total work, job empli Ch Hovii Faust Brow Becks from phew serva Cana r — 1 ISM. I I FF I I I rl I 1 D I I i I LB_ i,