HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1987-02-18, Page 4PAGE 4. THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1987.
Opinion
Villages forgotten?
In a county like Huron that is historically and geographically
dominated by rural municipalities, the people in urban areas
can often get overlooked politically. The mayors of the county’s
five towns have done something about evening the balance.
The problem is that it leaves the five villages out in the cold.
A while back the mayors of the five towns in the county held a
meeting to discuss their common problems and then got
together to make a presentation to the county council. As is
often the way in these things, the mayors didn’t think it was
worth the time to include representatives of the other urban
areas in the county: the villages.
Why is a little hard tofathom. Most of the problems the towns
have, the villages also have. The crux of the argument the
mayors made to county council was that more industry was
needed in the county because of the decline of agriculture
applies equally as well to the villages as well as to the towns. So
does the problem of waste disposal.
It would alsoseem that having 10 municipalities represented
would give more weight to the arguments of the urban
municipalities than merely having five, even if they are the
largest five urban municipalities.
Sadly, the only real conclusion is that the mayors of the towns
consider themselves the only real urban representatives in the
county: that the villages are just inconsequential dots on the
map.
That leaves the villages in a tough spot as far as having their
needs heard. They are neither with the main weight of the
representation on county council which comes from the 16 rural
townships, or with the urban representation as represented by
the five towns.
If the mayors are going to ignore the fact that the five villages
of the county are important urban centres too, then maybe the
reeves of those villages had better organize their own meetings
to make sure that the best interests of their taxpayers is also
represented at council.
Balancing the payments
When a country pays out more to buy goods and services than
it has coming in from the sale of goods and services, it is in
trouble. The same thing happens with communities but nobody
ever seems to pay any attention.
In Canada, the Canadian dollar came under pressure last
week and caused the Bank of Canada to raise interest rates
because there is so much money going out of the country to meet
dividend cheques on foreign-owned companies that the value
of our dollar dipped. Down in the states the U.S. balance of
payment deficit is so large it is causing politicians to regard
trading partners like Canada as villains.
Incommunities like ours, however, there is no measurement
of balance of payments. Dollars flow out of a community and'
nobody really notices until there are for rent or for sale signs in
the stores on main street. The problem remains the same,
however: if more dollars flow out of a community than flow into
the community then the community is in trouble.
One of the reasons behind the founding of The Citizen was to
try to keep more dollars in the communities of northern Huron
that we serve. When the Blyth and Brussels communities were
served by newspapers from larger communities, the future of
the villages looked bleak. Every week the communities were
flooded with advertising from companies urging people to
come to the larger communities to shop. Combined with the
high cost of advertising in the larger paper which made it
almost impossible for the village merchants to advertise and it
meant that slowly but surely the lifeblood of the community was
being pumped into the larger centres. Given that economists
say that every dollar spent generates a further two dollars in
paying for services you can see that every time someone takes a
shopping dollar out of town it helps the larger centre and hurts
the small one.
Trying to stem that flow of money out of the villages of north
Huron was one of the reasons The Citizen was born. The paper
has been a tremendous success. The irony is that a large part of
that success was based on the fact that merchants outside our
communities wanted a piece of the shopping dollars of the 2,000
subscribers of the paper. Look through this, or any issue of The
Citizen and you’ll see that there is a solid core of local
businesses who take advantage of the market offered by the
paper every week. Aside from those aggressive businesses,
however, most of the bills are paid by merchants from the
surrounding larger communities.
The situation is aggravated by some of the merchant buying
groups which suck promotion dollars out of the community to
pay for television advertising, and catalogue and flyer printing
out of the local community and into distant economies. The
people who work at those television stations and the printers
who print the flyers, however, don’t spend much money in the
local communities. There are 10 people on the payroll at The
Citizen.
Whether shoppers taking their dollars out of the community
or merchants taking their promotion dollars out of the
community the result is the same: the community’s balance of
payments goes in the red and a community, like a country, can’t
survive if more money is going out than is coming in.
Frigid beauty
Letter from the editor
When spending is investment
BY KEITH ROULSTON
Critics of government spending,
particularly business critics, often
say government should be more
businesslike. Perhaps we should
all be more businesslike in looking
at government expenditures.
When we look at an expenditure
in private business we don’t
necessarily just look at the expense
but at the return on investment. A
heating bill for a homeowner, for
instance, is an expense but to a
businessman, the heat made it
possible for him to carry on his
business and therefore there was a
return on that investment. •
But when we look at government
spending we tend not to look at it as
being a cost of doing business but
as an expense only. In the 1970’s
businessmen complained that the
word “profit” had been made a
dirty word but in the 1980’sthey
have done the same thing to the
word “subsidy”. Let’sface it. Just
as there were justifiable profits and
excessive profits, there are now
justifiable subsidies and exces
sive, ridiculous subsidies. But in
these dogmatic, right-wing politi
cal times any subsidy is looked on
as bad.
Take a look at the post office, for
instance. The entire focus of the
federal government seems to be on
getting rid of the deficit the post
office runs. The fixation on cost
cutting has gone to the ridiculous
extent that the post office is willing
to cut service in order to try to cut
costs. Somewhere the baby seems
to have been thrown out with the
bathwater.
Let’s turn the situation around
and look at how much poor postal
service is costing Canadian busi
ness. As the once-efficient postal
delivery system declined, courier
services have boomed. In fact,
courier services have been held up
as an example of how private
enterprise can do the job better
than the government-owned post
office. Yet the courier system The
Citizen uses from time to time now
charges a minimum $11 to deliver
one envelope. We scream when the
post office wants to charge two
cents more in postage.
Take that $11 and multiply it by
the thousands of envelopes and
packages sent by courier each day
and you have a huge amount of
expense to Canadian business,
expense that wouldn’t be there if
our post office was functioning as it
should be.
This idea of “franchising” the
small post offices is supposedly
something new but it has an old
ring to it. In the 1870’s, there were
franchises sold in Huron county to
maintain roads. Those who had the
franchise were authorized to coll
ect tolls from the users of the road.
Obviously the idea couldn’t have
worked too well because one of the
first government departments or
ganized was for roads. Today there
are very few cases where toll
booths exist in Canada. We’ve
come to the conclusion it’s a lot
more efficient for government to
maintain the roads for the benefit
of business and private individuals
(and in doing so have undermined
the railways by making it cheaper
to move freight by truck than on the
privately-maintained railways).
We spend far more on highways in
this country that we do on the post
office but we consider it a good
investment.
We seem to have lost our ability
to think reasonably when it comes
to the post office however. Tired of
postal strikes and threats of postal
strikes, fed up with having mail
delivery slower in the space age
than the steam age, we’re so angry
at the postal situation that we’re
willing to see the postal service
mangled in the name of “efficien
cy” and cutting out a subsidy.
If we were looking at what we
spend on the post office as an
investment rather than just an
expense, we’d be worried more
about improving the service rather
than closing post offices in the
name of cost cutting. If this
dogmatic pursuit of cutting the
government deficit means the
postal system is chopped down to
some unrecognizable shadow of
itself, business will end up paying a
price a lot higher than the current
cost of the post office to get other
service. Business in small com
munities that won’t have as good
postal service will pay an even
bigger cost as they try to compete
with businesses in larger centres
which are better served by the post
office.
The post office deficit of $183
million to March 31,1986 works out
to only $7.32 for each of the 25
million Canadians, (less than the
price of sending one package by
courier). It isn’t the cost of the post
office that should be worrying us: it
should be improving the quality of
service we should be concentrating
on.
[Published by North Huron Publishing Company Inc.]
Serving Brussels, Blyth, Auburn, Belgrave, Ethel,
Londesborough, Walton and surrounding townships.
Published weekly in Brussels, Ontario
P.O. Box 152 P.O. Box 429,
Brussels, Ont. Blyth, Ont.
N0G1H0 N0M1H0
887-9114 523-4792
Subscription price: $15.00; $35.00 foreign.
Advertising and news deadline:
Monday 2p.m. in Brussels; 4p.m. in Blyth
Editor and Publisher: Keith Roulston
Advertising Manager: Beverley A. Brown
Production and Office Manager: Jill Roulston
Second Class Mail Registration No. 6968