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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2019-05-09, Page 5Other Views A Grit? A Tory? No, I’m on a budget Why does anyone want this job?Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Igot into a bit of discussion with some people recently who apparently thought I was a Liberal or NDP supporter. I politely told them I’m not, I’m a journalist and that means, outside of when I mark my own personal voting ballot, I’m impartial. That doesn’t mean, however, that I can’t weigh in on issues that will impact me, like many of the recent cuts proposed by the provincial government. Some people would have you believe that these cuts will be made without having an adverse impact on people’s lives, but, if the experts we’ve interviewed for the various stories we’ve written are to be believed (or even if the truth lies somewhere between the government’s statements and those expert opinions) there will be problems. Take, for example, the proposed cuts to the conservation authorities. While I won’t sit at my desk, typing this column and claim to be an expert on conservation, I will claim to have watched, year-in, year-out, as the local conservation authorities’ budgets are approved by the councils I cover. Every year the same remarks are made: the authorities are running on the same level of funding they received “decades ago” (when I started, it was “just over a decade ago”, and that makes me feel old). So to have further cuts made to an essential service already running on a shoestring budget will have an impact. And before anyone thinks I’m some kind of tree-hugging hippy (which we all should be), I’m not talking about the dire environmental impacts, I’m talking about the impact to my family’s budget. North Huron knows, first-hand, the importance of flood forecasting and flood prevention. Just a couple years ago, the Maitland River burst forth from its banks, damaging homes, flood control structures and reminding us all that Mother Nature is not to be trifled with. The Conservative government has proposed cutting funding specifically associated with flood prevention, which means, if crucial, and integral flood prevention and protection programs are to be continued by the conservation authorities, that funding, and more, will have to be borne by municipalities, increasing municipal tax rates. While families may think they are going to see some relief in the form of the new income tax credit for children, the reality is that, to make it happen, the government has cut a fund implemented by the former government designed to make day care more affordable. The fund, which was implemented alongside the minimum wage increase, was established to prevent skyrocketing childcare costs due to childcare employees receiving an increase in wage due to the new minimum wage. The end result is that, while we may get a little more back at income tax time, as a family with a child going to day care (and one that will likely continue doing so until she’s old enough to come home by herself), we’re going to pay all year for that childcare “benefit”. Despite all these cuts, the budget is still increasing nearly $5 billion over the Liberal government’s last budget, coming in at $163.4 billion. So the question is, where are all the savings from these cuts? Well, if you live in Toronto, you’re in luck: $11.2 billion has been earmarked for Toronto- area transit projects. That’s right, important province-wide initiatives like flood prevention, tree planting and education are being cut, but hey, Doug Ford (a former Toronto municipal councillor, for those keeping score) is saving Toronto municipal taxpayers money by spending 6.7 per cent of the province’s budget to make their commute easier. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out here that Toronto doesn’t even seem to want the plan, with Mayor John Tory saying he doesn’t believe the province can make transit faster and cheaper and other representatives saying Ford’s plan is derailing years of work on the city’s transit plan. Meanwhile, in Ontario’s southern rural regions (which are partly responsible for Ford’s majority win), we’ve lost the only transit options we’ve had with bus companies pulling local service. To be fair, that was a decision made by private companies and it happened while the Liberals were in power, but it doesn’t change the fact that, like voters in Blyth having to deal with Wingham council members forgetting about everything outside of Wingham, our current Premier seems to still be wearing the hat of a Toronto councillor, and doing so by cutting from the rest of the province. I’m not a tailgater, I’m not interested in buying booze at 9 a.m., I’ve used Toronto transit twice in my entire life and yet these are the priorities that the government representing me has prioritized over social, ecological and infrastructure projects. So, is my blood blue, red, green or orange? That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that, like many other people in the province, my wallet is going to be emptier as a result of Ford’s priorities. Denny Scott Denny’s Den THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2019. PAGE 5. Getting there When it comes to finding great places to eat or drink, signage can be an important part of the process, or it could be non-existent. In the 1990s movie Swingers – the film that introduced us to Vince Vaughan – the main characters explain it perfectly. The movie is about a group of young men trying to carve out acting careers for themselves, but mostly follows them out drinking and carousing. After finding their next bar, one character explains to his friend, a relative newcomer to California from New York, that all of the great bars in Los Angeles are known to be hard to find and have no sign. He equates it to the speakeasy days, saying that in L.A. talking about a bar is akin to bragging that you knew how to find it. At the tail end of last month, my friend Brett and I travelled to Ottawa to see The Pigeon King at the National Arts Centre. While there, he and I tried to make up for lost time in our nation’s capital, neither of us having been there for a number of years. We dined at Atelier; one of Canada’s 25 best restaurants and home to Marc Lepine, who was recently voted the country’s most innovative chef. Neither Brett nor I were going to break social custom and take pictures inside, but I sent home a picture of the building from the street. It is an unassuming brick building with an industrial-style grey door with only the number 540 (its address) to adorn it. People asked whose house we had eaten at that night. So, while we had just eaten one of the best meals of our lives, those walking by on the street could have no idea such magic was happening on the other side of those walls. And yes, I’m bragging that I knew how to find it – our Uber driver did anyway, but someone had to give him the address. Jess and I went through something similar when we were in Detroit in March. We went to dinner and a concert with both our hotel and the concert hall situated conveniently on Woodward Avenue (certainly one of the main thoroughfares in downtown Detroit). However, we ventured off the beaten path for pre-dinner drinks as we searched out the Bad Luck Bar and its tremendous cocktails. As I discreetly checked my phone as we walked around, I eventually admitted to Jess that I was stumped. I couldn’t find the bar. We were in the neighbourhood though. Lost and tired of walking, we popped into Detroit Bikes, an upscale bike shop in the downtown, to check out their wares and as we cashed out, I broke down and, against the better judgement of men everywhere, asked where the bar was. We had lucked out. The guys told us the bar was on the other side of their wall. Simply U- turn once you left the bike shop, they said, and make your way into the alley. Walk through the door with the snake on it, they said. Now, I don’t need to tell you that walking around in alleys anywhere is not a great habit to get into (I have seen rats the size of dogs in a few Toronto alleys), but in Detroit especially, the proposal was a worrying one. All in search of the door with the snake painted on it. However, true to the word of the bike store guys, behind the snake door were some lovely people and tasty drink concoctions. If you’ve ever driven on any interstate highway in the U.S., you know about the tall signs that float beyond the highway, sitting there like ideas above highway-adjacent communities waiting for you to pluck them out of the air. There’s something to be said for great signage, but it’s also good to know that if you’re good at what you do, people will find you – and brag about being able to do so. If psychological testing was done on all politicians I sometimes think we’d find the majority are masochists. How else do you explain why anyone would want to go into politics except that they enjoy pain? I know most politicians would say they go into politics because they want to serve, but most often the service they seem to provide best is as the whipping boy for a frustrated public to blame for everything that’s wrong. Recently-elected Alberta Premier Jason Kenney owes his job to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who he ran against in the recent Alberta provincial election even though Trudeau’s name wasn’t on the ballot. The Prime Minister, with a surname already detested by many Albertans because of his father, provided a convenient strawman for Kenney to blame for everything that’s wrong in Alberta, even though the federal government has stuck its neck out (with our money) to buy a pipeline to try to get Alberta’s oil to market. Meanwhile, columnist Marcus Gee, writing in The Globe and Mail last week, pointed out that many of the groups currently marching in loud protests against the spending cuts of the current Progressive Conservative government in Ontario never complained when the previous Liberal government was running up the provincial debt with yearly deficits that just kept growing. In fact many of the groups were blaming the Liberals for not spending even more to deliver more of the items on their wish list. My advice to Premier Kenney is to enjoy the job while he can because sooner or later he, too, will be blamed for not delivering heaven on earth. He’s started his term by renewing his battle with outside forces by vowing to punish the people of British Columbia by cutting off their oil and gas because of opposition by many people there to oil pipelines crossing their province. Then he returned to battling the federal government and hinting that if the feds don’t give them what they want, Albertans might vote to separate from Canada. Why British Columbia or the rest of Canada would be more willing to have pipelines cross their territory to carry oil from an independent Alberta remains unexplained. Blaming others for your province’s problems works in the short term but sooner or later the voting public begins to look at what you’ve actually done for them and the good times often end. One can’t help wondering if Prime Minister Trudeau’s secret revenge on Premier Kenney is the knowledge that someday people will turn against him, just as they have Trudeau. It was less than four years ago that Trudeau was new and refreshingly different than Stephen Harper, the Conservative Prime Minister of whom people had grown tired. He won praise from all but the most conservative media outlets for such things as appointing a cabinet in which half the ministers were women and there was more ethnic diversity than ever before. The honeymoon lasted nearly three years with only a few commentators taking Trudeau to task for things like running twice as large a deficit as he’d promised when he campaigned. But there’s an element of the mainstream media, particularly in government centres, which sees itself as the unofficial opposition to the government in power. Sooner or later they feel uncomfortable not finding reasons to complain about the government. The trigger – the “gotcha” moment – for Trudeau was his trip to India early in 2018 when he dressed in a series of ceremonial Indian costumes that made him look ridiculous to folks back home. He’d gone too far in his efforts to be empathetic to people unlike himself. Now his strength has become his weakness. A narrative takes over in the media. In Trudeau’s case, it was that he was all show. So commentators ready to leap when the SNC- Lavalin scandal was presented. For many, the Prime Minister was guilty of hypocrisy when members of his staff pushed the attorney- general for a non-criminal resolution of the fraud and bribery charges against the engineering multi-national company, thereby siding with the big guy against proper justice. What’s more, since the attorney general was an Indigenous woman, he was showing that he wasn’t a feminist as he’d claimed and wasn’t really interested in reconciliation with Indigenous Canadians For Premier Doug Ford, the media narrative was written before he even ran for his party’s leadership, shaped by his – and his brother Rob’s – contentious years in Toronto municipal politics. (Not that he hasn’t added to the story line with his own Donald Trumpish behaviour.) Our leaders at both the federal and provincial levels are under attack. Some of this they’ve brought on themselves. Still, they must have known sooner or later they’d be blamed for things they’d done, and hadn’t done. Me, I wouldn’t have wanted the job in the first place. Keith Roulston From the cluttered desk