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