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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2019-05-16, Page 5Other Views Minding our manners and big sticks Who made the rich so rich? Us Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Let me start by saying that I am a big believer in good manners, so much so that my daughter gets reprimanded when she says “thanks” instead of “thank you”. I say this because, if anyone knows me outside of work, they know that I always try to be polite. You don’t have to agree with everyone. You don’t have to be nice. You don’t even have to respect people, but you should always be polite. (Personally, I aim for respect and politeness, but I don’t want to hold anyone else to my metre stick.) I could go with recently co-opted pop culture references and say, “Manners maketh man,” but the reality of it is, and don’t get too big a head mom and dad, I was raised to be polite. Ninety-nine times out of 100, you should thank people for giving you things or doing things for you. Ninety-nine times out of 100 you should apologize if you’ve slighted someone, even in the most minor way. Ninety- nine times out of 100 you should say please when you’re asking for something. However, if you’re doing something 99 times out of 100, that means that one time out of 100, you need to drop the manners and speak plainly. One time out of 100 you need to stand up, beat your chest, scream and hold people accountable because there is no polite way to get your message across. As the old saying goes, walk softly and carry a big stick. Ninety-nine times out of 100, walking softly gets the job done, but that one in 100 occasion requires swinging the big stick. North Huron council members seem to have forgotten about that (or maybe they’re all drinking Premier Doug Ford’s Kool-Aid, I’m not sure). And just because this will be another consecutive column that focuses on the decisions of the provincial Conservative party, I feel I need to say that I’m not advocating voting for any other party, I’m advocating holding the party in power responsible. During North Huron Council’s May 6 meeting, councillors bemoaned the impact of the cuts to the conservation authorities funding and primary responsibilities, wondering where the finances would come from to cover the necessary expenditures of groups like the Maitland Valley Conservation Authority. During that same meeting, Reeve Bernie Bailey explained that the approximately $500,000 the municipality received from the province, called the Municipal Modernization Fund, surprised him. He said the provincial government, specifically Premier Doug Ford and Huron-Bruce MPP Lisa Thompson should be thanked for the funding. The whole thing didn’t sit well with me. It’s like condemning someone for stealing your car, but thanking them for paying for the cab ride. I’m not going to get into the fact that Ontario already spends the least amount per capita on social programming when compared to other provinces while also bringing in the lowest revenue per capita (according to the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario), or the fact that multiple financial organizations have said that increased taxes, specifically against the highest earners in the province, is the way to fight the deficit, not cutting services used by some of the most vulnerable residents of the province. I’m not even going to get into the fact that third-party agencies have said program cuts are actually driving revenue lower, kind of like trying to dig your way out of a hole. No, I’m just going to say that we all need to remember, especially in Huron County where humbleness is a practised virtue and discretion is the better part of valour, that on occasion we need to stand up and say what we really feel. I’m all for reduced government spending, but it has to be the right kind of cuts, and we have to make sure that the government knows when they are making the wrong kind of cuts. This harkens back to when North Huron Council reduced its recycling pick-up. In its own residents’ surveys, the message was clear: garbage and recycling are services people didn’t want cut. You have to speak up when the government isn’t acting in your best interest. I’m not saying telling the government that they’ve made a mistake will precipitate a change (after all, we still don’t have wheelie bins or restored recycling schedules), but at least it sends the right message. Grovelling at the feet of the guy who stole your car then paid for a cab like North Huron is doing by officially thanking the provincial government for cutting essential services, then providing a Tylenol to help with the pain, is ridiculous. Like I said, one time in 100, we need to yell, shout and swing our sticks. Denny Scott Denny’s Den THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MAY 16, 2019. PAGE 5. The winds of change Change is inevitable. I’m nowhere near the first person to say that but it is truly a fact of life. And, as they say, you can either change with the times or get out of the way – those are your two options. Just last week, Publisher Deb Sholdice and I worked as co-editors for our first issue of Stops Along The Way, North Huron Publishing’s thrice-a-year tourism magazine. When I say it was our first, that’s because former Publisher Keith Roulston always took charge on the magazine, leaving Denny and me to write the odd story here or there. This was the first time that Deb, Denny and I took on the task ourselves. When it came time to choose a lead story, the choice was clear. What is the predominant tourism story in Huron County today? It is, of course, its burgeoning alcohol industry. Whether it’s beer, wine or cider, Huron County has grown exponentially along with the boom. In Blyth, Cowbell Brewing Co. has welcomed hundreds of thousands of people to its home farm, selling millions of dollars worth of beer along the way. Cowbell is joined by nearly 10 other breweries now operating in Huron County. There are now three wineries with product ready to drink right now, while a few others are well on their way. Just five years ago, it would have been unthinkable to go to a local restaurant and order a beer or a glass of wine made in Huron County. Now, you have to go out of your way to find beer or wine that isn’t made here. It wasn’t that long ago that Denny and I were deemed “local experts” on alcoholic cider and were brought in by Peter Gusso at Part II Bistro in Blyth (goodnight, sweet prince) for a drink and meal pairing night. We were pretty impressed with ourselves when we were able to present two “local ciders” to diners that night. One was from Hoity Toity in Mildmay and the other was from Twin Pines in Thedford, 20 minutes south of Grand Bend. Looking back, it’s amazing to think that we considered those local to us, but they were the closest we had at the time. Now, Huron County is a full-blown destination for those with a tongue for beer, wine and cider. It only took a few years for that change to take hold. You think of factors that can lead to entire cultural shift and they’re all around us. Some are intended, others are not. I was speaking with a friend the other day and he told me that some of the world’s most well-known razor companies are hurting, simply because beards are en vogue right now. A simple fashion trend can dramatically alter the state of an industry – just like that. Then you think about cities that ebb and flow depending on a number of factors. I think the most obvious example right now is the renaissance of downtown Detroit. While it’s far from complete, Detroit is a much different city than it was just 10 years ago. Left to die by the rest of the world as being behind the times, dangerous and not worth the effort to save, Detroit has risen from the ashes of its former self. It has become a place that’s home to all of the things any major city should have, like a thriving arts scene, an attractive culinary uprising and a vibrant downtown full of life and opportunity. It’s been within my years on earth that Manhattan was written off as a den of urban decay and crime. It was left for developers to pick at its bones. Now, it’s one of the great urban neighbourhoods of the world. Like certain climates, if you don’t like what’s happening, simply wait five minutes and it can change before your very eyes. Times change, they say, but some things never do, particularly the sense of injustice people hold about the relative positions of the rich and ordinary citizens. Last week there was big news when the ride sharing company Uber issued stock on the New York Stock Exchange. There were protests that the people who run the company get big money but the drivers get very little by comparison. Also last week the most recent issue of Walrus magazine arrived in my mailbox containing an article on the Winnipeg General Strike which began 100 years ago this month. That strike involved 35,000 workers from most of the city’s unions and lasted nearly a month. The article by Tom Jokinen quotes James Naylor of Brandon University who says that the strikers, in the year after the country had been traumatized by World War I, were driven by the “unfairness of everything”. Many returning soldiers who had watched their buddies slaughtered in the mud of Flanders, became angry when they returned home to see all the businessmen who had grown rich from manufacturing and supplying goods for the war effort. Today, Naylor says, many of his young university students “see the same enemy, the one per cent”, the very top of the income group who own so much of the wealth. No doubt Travis Kalanick, the co-founder of Uber, his net worth estimated at $5.9 billion and his Canadian-born partner Garrett Camp (net worth $4.2 billion) would be included in that super-rich group that Naylor’s students see as the threat to their futures. But the comparison of the fat businessmen who were the target of the Winnipeg General Strike and people like Kalanick and Camp breaks down when you look at how they made their money. The business leaders targeted by the strikers a century ago grew rich by selling supplies for the war, often at vastly inflated prices. Billionaires like Kalanick and Camp, meanwhile, got rich quick by providing services, for better or for worse, that the public wanted. I’ve always been troubled by the way the urban public embraced Uber. In movies and television shows it became the cool thing to do to use Uber. After all, you used an app on your cellphone and you were part of a revolution, undermining the established taxi industry while at the same time saving money. But to me, I saw people who could well afford a taxi charge trying to save a few bucks while hurting taxi drivers, many of whom were recent immigrants struggling to make a living. At the same time, the Uber drivers aren’t exactly getting rich either, as those protesting Uber’s public share offering complained. Though a driver gets $8 of a $10 Uber fee, he or she has to pick up the expenses of providing, fueling and insuring a car. On top of that, how many people do you need to give rides to in order to make a living wage at that rate. At the same time, Uber has never turned a profit, losing billions every year. Those customers, an estimated 110 million monthly users world-wide, have then been getting a cheap ride subsidized by under-paid drivers and money-losing owners while undermining struggling taxi drivers. Similarly, ordinary people are responsible for much of the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (net worth $155 billion) is so wealthy he announced plans last week to set up a colony on the moon. He became so rich because hundreds of millions of us shopped online with his company, killing off the jobs of thousands of retail workers whose stores closed when they couldn’t compete. Bezos was just finishing the destruction of small retailers begun by Walmart (owned by the Walton family, net worth $140 billion). Walmart’s cheap prices have left small towns all over North America with empty storefronts because local merchants, who had incomes more or less like our own, couldn’t compete with the company’s vast buying power. Walmart’s success also destroyed millions of manufacturing jobs in North America because factory owners, trying to meet Walmart’s ever-increasing demands for cheaper prices, moved manufacturing to China or other low-wage countries. It’s troubling and wrong that a smaller and smaller group of people control a larger and larger share of the world’s wealth, but in so many cases, we the people who complain the most, have made this happen. We wanted more, more, more for ourselves in terms of material goods and comfort. To get it, we made choices that have undercut our neighbours, whether they be newly- immigrated taxi drivers, factory workers or small merchants. As the old Pogo comic strip famously said, “We have seen the enemy and it is us”. Keith Roulston From the cluttered desk Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you. – Walt Whitman Final Thought