HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2007-06-14, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JUNE 14, 2007. PAGE 5.
Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
Premier Dalton McGuinty and his
Liberals are trying to get their campaign
for the Oct. 10 election off the ground
particularly by digging up two former
premiers from their graves.
The message the Liberals are putting out
almost four months before the election, is that
voters should not bring back the “old gang”
that ran the province under Progressive
Conservative premiers Ernie Eves and
especially Mike Harris, in the belief this will
be a major help to getting themselves re-
elected.
In the last few days before the Liberals shut
down the legislature early to prevent it
continuing as a forum for criticisms of their
own failings, they attacked their predecessors
at least a dozen times.
Conservative leader John Tory asked
McGuinty how his latest promise not to
increase taxes if re-elected is different from
one he made before the 2003 election, which
he broke.
McGuinty retorted that Eves in trying to
appear prudent hid the fact he had a $5.5
billion deficit which left his successor without
funds to pay for his promises.
This is true. But McGuinty had warnings
this was coming and should have
hedged his promises, so both parties deserve
blame.
McGuinty insisted Ontarians will not forget
this trickery or that the Conservatives cut
social programs and closed hospitals and left
the Liberals to deal with the mess.
The premier claimed Tory, although he tries
not to seem like Harris, “is determined to take
us back to those years.”
McGuinty said Ontarians have progressed
under the Liberals and want to keep moving
forward and not return to that Conservative
era.
Tory asked about lead from old pipes getting
in drinking water and accused the Liberals of
being slow to require their replacement.
McGuinty responded that the Conservatives
under Harris cut staff for inspecting water and
abdicated their responsibility for protecting
the environment and this contributed to deaths
at Walkerton.
When Tory put the same question to
Environment Minister Laurel Broten, she
stuck to the same theme that a judicial enquiry
criticized the Harris Conservatives for their
cuts and the Liberals have been fixing the
damage for four years.
Broten to another question said she would
not take advice on ensuring the province
provides safe water from Conservatives whose
legacy was failing to protect.
Health Minister George Smitherman said he
could not accept Conservatives’ criticism the
Liberals do not provide enough money for
nurse practitioners working in community
health centres, when Harris and Eves froze
their budgets for eight years and the Liberals
have increased them.
Energy Minister Dwight Duncan said
electrical power has been assured to York
Region north of Toronto “after eight years of
Conservative neglect”.
Some of the Liberal responses can be
criticized for not dealing enough with current
concerns and pointing too much to the past.
McGuinty told a party meeting he will have
two main themes in the election and the first
will be to remind voters of the Conservatives’
misdeeds in power.
He said voters should remember
Conservatives fired nurses and forced teachers
to strike and would do this again if they get
back. He urged those at the meeting to remind
their friends and neighbours how far the
province has come since the Conservatives
were kicked out.
McGuinty is pinning more hopes of winning
re-election by pointing to opponents’ failings
when in power than any premier in memory.
He also is taking some risks. Some
voters will feel he should campaign much
more on his record in government and
policies for the future and less on what another
party did between four and a dozen years
ago.
McGuinty may even remind some voters
accidentally why they idolized Harris for a
time, because he cut taxes more than any
premier before or since.
But Harris’s far-right and confrontational
policies are much less popular than they were
and one proof is Tory never has much praise
for his former leader.
On balance Harris will be baggage for
today’s Conservatives – not perhaps a
wagonload but a lot more than a suitcase.
Places of my heart
Here’s a question for you. Suppose you
were not the urbane, sophisticated and
knowledgeable citizen we both know
you to be. Suppose instead you grew up in a
small, benighted Arctic outpost with no
library, no newspaper and lousy TV reception.
One day somebody plops a canvas in front
of you. It’s Leonardo da Vinci’s famous
painting, the Mona Lisa.
Here’s my question. Would you know you
were looking at a masterpiece, one of the
greatest paintings of all time?
Or would you just see a picture of a country
gal with bad hair and a slightly goofy smile?
How about poetry? Say you’d grown up
never having heard of T.S. Eliot, Emily
Dickinson or William Shakespeare. You’re
down at The Legion tucking into a cold one
and the guy on the next bar stool stands up and
starts belting out a Shakespearian sonnet:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Would you be enthralled? Or would you be
trying to make urgent eye contact with the
bartender?
I only ask because of something
that happened on the subway platform at
L’Enfant Plaza station in Washington, DC
recently.
It’s 8 a.m. on a typical workday morning.
Commuters are hustling on and off the trains
on their way to work or maybe to Starbucks
for a cuppa to go. Up against the wall there’s a
young guy, a busker, in a baseball cap and blue
jeans sawing away on a fiddle. He’s got an
open violin case at his feet with a few coins in
it.
He’s playing energetically. He’s being pretty
much ignored by the streams of commuters
eddying around him.
Nobody smiles. Nobody looks up. Nobody
applauds when he finishes one piece and
begins another.
To be precise, 1,097 people will pass the
fiddle player in the next 43 minutes. A few –
very few – will distractedly toss some small
bills or spare change towards the violin case
without making eye contact with the fiddler –
or even breaking stride.
Precisely seven (7) people will stop,
interrupt their journey, change their plans –
temporarily re-arrange their priorities – to stay
for a few moments and actually listen to the
man play his fiddle.
Good ears. The busker playing the fiddle is
Joshua Bell, who happens to be one of the
finest violinists in the world. The music he’s
playing? Bach. Schubert. Beethoven. The
fiddle he’s playing it on? A Stradivarius.
Worth $3.5 million U.S.
We know all the details of this subway
vignette because it’s a set-up. It was
orchestrated by the editors of The Washington
Post. Not only was the entire 43 minutes
videotaped, there’s a star reporter by the name
of Gene Weingarten standing by and taking
notes.
It’s an experiment to discover whether
beauty depends on its context. We all know the
Mona Lisa is a masterpiece because it’s in the
Louvre. We know Vivaldi is sublime because
his music gets played in concert halls by world
famous virtuosi.
But what happens if the Mona Lisa
shows up in a garage sale? Who notices if
Vivaldi gets played by a Bavarian Oompah
band?
It’s a variation on the old philosophical
conundrum: “If a tree falls in a forest and no
one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”
In this case, it’s “if an orchid blooms in a rat
maze, does anybody smell the aroma”?
Not many. Just seven of the 1,097
commuters on the Washington subway that
morning even paused to hear Joshua Bell.
Well, let me amend that. Seven adults
paused. Reporter Gene Weingarten noticed
one other curious thing. The cold shoulder that
Bell got from the public was nothing if not
democratic. He was ignored by whites, blacks,
Hispanics and Orientals, by males and
females, by geezers, middle-aged folks and
teeny-boppers with iPods.
But there was one demographic that
glommed onto Joshua Bell and his violin every
time, without fail.
Children.
“Ever single time a child walked past,”
wrote Weingarten, “he or she tried to stop and
watch. And every single time, a parent scooted
the kid away.”
Moral of the story? The corny old cliché I
guess. Don’t forget to stop and smell the roses.
Don’t forget to enjoy the sunrise. Don’t
forget to listen to the music.
And never forget to listen to the kids.
Arthur
Black
Liberals digging up graves
Home is where the heart is, for sure, but
my heart can be found in so many
places.
I sat on my deck the other day, a place where
my heart is firmly planted. The spring sounds
that so soothe me sang. The vibrant verdancy
of the well-fed lawn, the cornucopia of
blooming colours create an environment that
makes me feel comfortable and safe. I am
home.
Yet, as I sat I thought of so many other places
that have my heart. There is Kitchener,
Flamboro, Winnipeg, Lucknow, Listowel,
Barrie and Corunna to name a few. These are
home to those most dear to me, home to those
whose presence I think of each and every day
without exception.
It still surprises me that the majority of
people I love live at some distance from me.
The phone numbers I call all begin with 1, and
few are in the 519 area code. There are no kids
popping in on their way home from work, or
siblings running into me at the grocery store. I
must plan a few hours at least to drop by and
make sure my parents are doing okay and visits
with family are usually scheduled in advance
because of time and distance.
Never in my wildest imaginings did I suspect
that this was how life would be. It certainly
wasn’t the way it began for me.
My one set of grandparents lived right in
town. Other family members were in the
country, but no more than a 10 minute drive
away. Some of my cousins had three
generations under one roof and aunts and
uncles close by. My parents rarely left town for
anything. Work was there, friends were there,
and all extended family could be accounted for
in the immediate vicinity.
Then things began to change. My sister
married an OPP officer and moved, horror of
horrors, half an hour away. My brother went to
college in Hamilton and suddenly our circle
had spiralled outward, albeit modestly. When
the newlyweds began throwing out the words
posting and Kenora we became truly aware that
maintaining the status quo was not only not an
option, but out of our control.
Fortunately, Kenora never happened. But
other postings did that took them far beyond
that first half-hour drive.
Then, as everyone knows, we raise our kids
to leave us. And mine did. Careers and
relationships took them to different places and
I accept that, but don’t think for a second I
wouldn’t rather have those pop-ins at the end of
a day.
As I compared my life to my grandparents’
something struck me. I realized that maybe I
needed to actually go back a little further to
find a situation more similar to mine. In the
world of my great-grandparents for example,
where the horse and buggy ruled the country
roads, it didn’t take many miles to create a lot
of distance between families.
Thinking of where each of my grandparents
had grown up, I wondered how they had ever
met each other, let alone courted and married.
The several sideroads that separated them
could have proven challenging.
And when my great-grandmothers sent their
daughters off to start new lives with husbands,
it may very well have seemed they were
sending them off to the ends of the earth. There
would be no pop-ins in those cases either.
With all of our technology and modern ways,
it’s kind of strange to think that it has probably
made us as disconnected as generations before
us. And I think of my heart in its many places
and know that the more things change the more
they really do seem to stay the same.
Other Views Smell the roses. Listen to the music
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
“There are no mistakes. The events we
bring upon ourselves, no matter how
unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn
what we need to learn; whatever steps we
take, they’re necessary to reach the places
we’ve chosen to go.”
– Richard Bach
Final Thought