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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2007-04-26, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, APRIL 26, 2007. PAGE 5. Bonnie Gropp TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt Premier Dalton McGuinty sat in a Tim Hortons restaurant for an hour the other day and no one noticed him. But the Liberal premier’s bigger problem six months before an election is many of his policies and particularly those that have formed the main theme of his government also are going unrecognized. McGuinty’s central theme, not always well accomplished, has been protecting people, from smoking, pit bulls, children’s car seats that do not fit and scores of other hazards in life. His many safeguards include requiring bars and liquor stores to post signs warning pregnant women alcohol can cause birth defects and ordering elementary schools to remove junk foods such as potato chips and pop from vending machines and replace them with healthier snacks. His solutions have not always been perfect to put it mildly. He has given more money but nowhere near enough to treat autistic children, refused to require adult as well as younger cyclists to wear helmets and ignored doctors’ pleas to ban smoking in cars carrying children. McGuinty also had to be pushed into some. He did not require vehicles to provide seatbelts for all passengers until a collision killed four people. When the legislature resumed sitting in March, it might have seemed there was nothing left for McGuinty to protect, but he has still produced a steady stream of new safeguards. These include fines up to $10,000 and temporary impounding of vehicles to curb street racing, and quadrupling the species of rare animals and plants the province will protect to enrich people’s lives. No premier before or since has brought in as much protection of various sorts for residents, although the Liberals have never claimed this. They may not want to promote it fearing they will be accused of interfering and being Big Brother. Or they may even be unaware they have established a record. Political parties often are ill informed on the past. But anyone who has watched the legislature the past four decades knows no other government in that time has produced anywhere near as many programs to protect residents and earlier governments simply did not make protecting citizens as high a priority. Some of this protection also is low profile compared to controversies. Anyone seeing the legislature through news media recently would think it has been occupied almost exclusively by concerns some lottery retailers have cheated ticket buyers. Premiers usually have had a trademark. Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris was known for welcome tax cuts and then weaker public services and confrontations with those who protested. New Democrat premier Bob Rae is remembered for piling up huge budget deficits in a recession, and Rae Days, forcing public servants to take time off without pay. Liberal David Peterson was known first as a welcome change after 42 years of one government – Conservative; any party ruling that long would have been too much; and innovations such as pay equity, but later as a playboy yuppie seen mostly in tuxedo at theatre first nights and book launches. Conservative premier William Davis was seen as a master of moderation, never too far to the right and certainly not to the left and John Robarts as a stable chairman of the board. Most premiers also had moments of high drama such as Davis stopping the Spadina Expressway slicing through Toronto on the grounds cities are for people, not cars, and reversing and funding Catholic education to the end of high school. McGuinty has had no such highlights and his most dramatic moment was not one he can boast about, when he broke a promise not to increase taxes after the Conservatives left him a massive deficit. Most people still don’t appear to know what McGuinty stands for and the first question they ask is what he is really like, as if he is from another planet. But he has a trademark as much as HP Sauce or Maytag’s repairman – people just don’t know about it. Forget what if I wish I had a river I could skate away on. – Joni Mitchell Big deal. I grew up beside a river you could skate away on any day of the week, providing it was cold enough. It was called the Don River and it percolated down from the Oak Ridges moraine through the clay flats of Southern Ontario, right through the belly of Hogtown until it finally ran into Lake Ontario. Well, sort of ‘ran’. Truth is, skating was about all the Don River was good for when I was a kid. Each spring when the ice melted, the Don turned into a fetid sludge of toxic chemicals, agricultural runoff and human sewage that destroyed every living thing it touched. There were no fish or frogs or even tadpoles in my Don River. The odd rat slithering along its blistered banks, maybe. As kids we were forbidden to even wet our gumboots in the Don. It was one of the most polluted rivers in all of North America – so bad that, in 1969, environmental groups staged a public funeral for the entire river system. What’s sadder is the stalwart Ontario stewards of the land who poisoned the Don were simply ahead of their time. People who live beside rivers around the world have followed their trailblazing lead. World Wildlife International recently published a list of the 10 most threatened rivers on the planet. The list includes some of the most famous: the Yangtze, the Nile, the Ganges, the Rio Grande…and the famous Blue Danube. Which is a sick joke. The Danube that Johann Strauss immortalized a century and a half ago hasn’t been blue for a long time. In fact it hasn’t been a real river for a long time. More like a thruway. And a drainage ditch. And a latrine. Eleven countries abut the Danube on its meandering 2,000 mile journey to the Black Sea. It starts out pristine, sparkling and drinkable high in the Swiss Alps. It finishes its run as a grey-brown radioactive ooze of sewage, fertilizers and industrial waste so toxic it has all but destroyed the entire ecosystem of the Black Sea itself. The Danube didn’t go down without a fight. As late as the 1970s Hungarians were hauling six-foot sturgeon out of the Danube waters – with such regularity that they grew bored with their steady diet of caviar. The sturgeon that didn’t succumb to pollution were finally stopped by a massive hydro-electric dam constructed by the Soviets in 1973. From then on, any surviving sturgeon were physically prevented from returning to their spawning beds. Bizarre. Someday some future race is going to construct a psychological profile of Homo sapiens and I suspect they will be buffaloed by this psychotic anomaly: we made our homes and towns and cities beside our rivers for obvious reasons. They were our highways, our source of life and food and of our very essence – water. And we systematically poisoned them, all over the world. So is it all over for the Blue Danube? It’s a near thing, but perhaps not. The countries that share the Danube now belong to the European Union and the EU has very strict environmental regulations. Every country admitted to the EU must adopt comprehensive environmental controls and policies. And it’s working. Concentrations of nitrogen have dropped by 50 per cent in the past 20 years. Phosphorus is down by 20 per cent. For the first time in over a century, the waters of the Danube are getting cleaner. And once more they have a model to follow. Ontario’s Don River. Those Canuck environmental groups may have symbolically buried the Don back in 1969, but they didn’t desert it. Over the following decades they badgered politicians to curb agricultural runoff and update sewer systems. They sponsored clean-up bees where volunteers pulled out the old tires, batteries, shopping carts and other junk that littered the riverbed. They also planted over 10,000 dogwood, high-bush cranberry, white cedar, silver maple and other trees along the banks of the Don. Last October, Phil Goodwin, chairman of the East Don Parkland Partners and member of the Don Watershed Regeneration Council had his own ‘watershed’ moment. Goodwin was standing on the banks of the Don about 20 kilometres upstream from its mouth. He looked down in the shallows and he beheld, slogging against the current, a dogged Chinook salmon battling its way upstream. That’s a sight that no one has seen since long before I was born – and I’m a greybeard. Hey. If we can put salmon back in the Don, we can put Blue back in the Danube. Arthur Black McGuinty trademark unnoticed They are too little for this. The tiny hand still fits so snugly in yours, the short strides double-time to keep pace with yours. Walking my kids to school that first day, oh so long ago now, was a bittersweet time, at once heart-wrenching, frightening and proud. My care had nurtured them and kept them safe. Now I would be sharing that responsibility. I didn’t do it lightly. Each and every day that it was possible, while my kids were in elementary school, I followed their progress from my home. Moving to my kitchen window I could witness their arrival to school and believed the yard at recess to be the worst they would handle. Each stage of education after took them further away from my protection, and as it should be, closer to independence. But never, in all those days, would I have dreamed that school would become a dangerous place. Dunblane, Scotland; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Taber, Alberta; Littleton, Colorado; Blacksburg, Virginia. Since Moses Lake, Washington, on Feb. 2, 1996, close to 50 schools worldwide have made headlines because beautiful, young lives have been cut short. Then, last week, a 23-year-old Virginia Tech student killed 32 at the university and dorm, then himself. The shooting rampage made it the deadliest in U.S. history, which boasts no modest record in this type of tragedy. It is the 36th school shooting in America since Moses Lake. Though nonetheless shocked and saddened, we tend to be less surprised when the incident happens south of the border. Most would argue that America’s loose gun laws make it a likely target for trouble. Yet even before Moses Lake, there was the Dec. 6, 1989 Montreal Massacre, when Marc Lépine shot and killed 14 women at École Polytechnique. It was that incident however, that led to the passage of the Firearms Act, which ushered in stricter gun control regulations. We can take some pride, perhaps, that we learn from our mistakes. Yet, there have been murders at Canadian schools since. And so, therefore, any threat must be taken seriously. Which is exactly what happened at Central Huron Secondary School in Clinton just days after the Virginia Tech shooting. Information released from the OPP said that threatening graffiti had been discovered earlier in the month. The message targetted April 19. Local schools have emergency plans in place. CHSS’s is to bring in police presence to protect and deter. Despite what it may have cost taxpayers it was necessary action. There have been those who complained about the money spent to have police officers on scene throughout the day. It would not surprise me if they would be the same people to cast stones at inaction if tragedy had indeed played out. It is easy in hindsight to have the answer. We will never know if the messenger, seeing the situation, changed his plans. More likely, the graffiti was simply an act of vandalism, one that had some immature idiot giggling on the sidelines at the pot stirred. But in this day and age we have seen enough sadness on school campuses to know that no threat should be taken lightly. When it comes to protecting our children, spend whatever it takes and take whatever measures are necessary. Even then tragedy may occur, but at least there is comfort in knowing every possible attempt was made to stop it. In the face of overwhelming pain, it’s too much to have to wonder what if. Other Views Putting the Blue back in the Danube Eric Dowd FFrroomm QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. – Carl Jung Final Thought