HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2019-10-17, Page 5Other Views
People can surprise you
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
While much of the nation (at least I
hope much of the nation) was
watching the potential leaders of
our country duke it out last Monday evening, I
was sitting in a North Huron Township
Council meeting.
So while I was sitting there listening to some
councillors wax poetic about replacing
garbage-crushing machines, I could’ve been
listening to the best minds of our generations
debating the future of our country and get
some idea of how I might vote in two weeks.
At least that’s how I saw it from the hard
plastic chairs of the North Huron Township
Council chambers.
The reality, I found out later, was something
far less impressive and far more childish.
After the meeting, I did catch the tail end of
the debate on the radio on my way home and I
felt like I was stuck in a van with six
squabbling siblings arguing over who gets the
sprinkled doughnut.
I assumed that, after spending as much time
as they had together, trying to get the next
word in, there had been a breaking point where
they just started arguing with each other.
It was one of the most depressing political
experiences I’ve had, and that comes from
someone who has spent his professional life
sitting through municipal council meetings.
Our current Prime Minister, the Liberal
Party of Canada’s Justin Trudeau, shouted
over his four fellow candidates (and one
climate-change-denying doofus) like they
were arguing about who had cooties on the
playground. All of them attacked each other,
from benign comments about expecting better
of each other to flat-out character
assassination. No one was safe.
I’ve seen councillors yell at each other, I’ve
heard gallery members rant and rave, I’ve
witnessed people claim that politicians are
culpable for everything short of alien
abductions and yet, none of that soured me on
politics the way that meeting did.
No leader was without sin and all should be
put on notice: Canadian voters deserve better.
There is some blame to be put on the moder-
ators: the format was difficult to follow. With
such brief periods to deal with massive issues
(and very little control exerted over the
arguing back and forth), it was difficult for
anyone to put themselves ahead of the pack.
After taking in some more of the debate, I
came to the conclusion that there were less-
forgivable sins at play.
All of the name-calling, the critiques and the
character assassination could be forgiven if the
candidates had only answered the questions
that were asked.
The questions, no matter how easy to
answer, immediately became a jumping point
for the candidates to start sniping at each other.
Questions about climate change were
answered by expressing disappointment with
other leaders. Every question was marked by
diatribes attacking the existing government, or
to point out perceived holes in other people’s
platforms.
If that was the starting point, if someone said
“You’ve done wrong, and this is how I would
do right,” it would’ve been excusable. Heck,
that’s how debates and platforms are supposed
to work.
But there never was any follow-up. There
wasn’t a suggestion of how to do better, just,
“Don’t vote for those guys.”
Local politicians can fall into the pattern of
saying, “I won’t do what the last government
did,” but then usually follow up with a plan if
they previously served. Those running for the
first time would say they would look for a
better answer if elected.
All it takes to win votes is a little bit of
honesty and a little less bravado, a little more
answer and a little less attack.
I guess that’s the biggest problem I had with
the debate: it didn’t solve anything.
Those kinds of attacks aren’t going to do
anything to sway voters, all they’re going to do
is pander to the people who have already
decided how to vote.
The attacker will rally his supporters, while
the defender’s supporters will get their backs
up, then cheer all the louder when their
candidate decides to return fire.
That kind of political discourse, if it’s even
fair to call it that, doesn’t get us anywhere and
doesn’t encourage anyone to change their
mind or have their own conversations to figure
out the best way to vote.
The politicians aren’t doing themselves any
favours by falling into these positions, nor are
Canadians doing any better by having these
arguments.
It’s made even more concerning when more
and more studies indicate that people are
voting based on the party leader instead of
their local representatives.
Tribalism means that, until a political party
or leader does something truly heinous to
screw up, they will continue to have the same
support of the same people, even if there is a
better choice out there.
Weigh your options, ignore the debates and
look to your local candidates. That’s the only
way Canada will get its best leader.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2019. PAGE 5.
Paving paradise
As someone who came of age at
Ryerson University during the days of
Yorkville’s Riverboat coffee house,
The Citizen founder Keith Roulston seems
much more qualified to quote Joni Mitchell at
you, and he does, but I’ll see what I can do.
One of Keith’s go-to quotes comes from
Mitchell’s, “Big Yellow Taxi”, which laments
that “they paved paradise to put up a parking
lot.” An environmental anthem in 1970, it has
become a rebuttal to just about any form of
over-development. After all, as they say, land
is the only thing they’re not making more of.
There is also a sense in Mitchell’s lyrics of
paradise lost. A Google Maps search reveals
that the Riverboat, where musicians like
Mitchell and Neil Young used to play, has been
paved over. “You don’t know what you’ve got
’til it’s gone”, Mitchell says later in the song.
Forgetting for a minute that the Blyth Lions
Club would actually need to pave over some
grass to create a new sports pad at Lions Park,
the face-off between the club and North Huron
Council gives me those Joni Mitchell vibes.
The village has one park and politicians want
to erode it for housing development needed,
predominantly, for industry in Wingham.
I am a member of the Lions, for the purposes
of full disclosure, but one doesn’t have to be a
Lion to see the merits of park expansion. Even
putting aside the he said/she said of who might
have a proper claim to that land, the Blyth
Lions Park expansion just makes sense.
While it’s true that Huron County has lit a
fire under its lower-tier municipalities to
increase housing stock, Blyth has been lucky
to attract significant development investment.
Between the new subdivision in the north end
and the progress at the former Blyth Public
School property, Blyth will soon be home to
dozens of new houses with the potential for
dozens more. And far be it from me to dispute
a Huron County report, but while I know
housing is limited, as a journalist, I’m still
waiting on that wave of e-mails from people
who desperately want to live here but just
can’t. Those who want to have found a way.
At North Huron Council’s Oct. 7 meeting,
council weighed the housing need against
doing right by the Lions. The Lions, however,
are a volunteer organization proposing to build
a recreation facility for the youth of the village
with their own time and money. It’s not meant
to facilitate a game of H.O.R.S.E. between me
and Steve Howson or the three-on-three road
hockey tournament between the Stewart and
Lee families we all secretly want in our lives,
it’s to improve the village’s only park for kids,
young parents and grandparents, not the Lions.
Once all these houses are built, what kind of
village are we selling to potential buyers? A
village full of houses? Blyth has now lost its
school, its bank and three of its restaurants. We
need to put our hearts into what we do have.
We have a campground, a park, an arena and
the Blyth Festival, as well as a number of
business owners committed to this community.
Do we want a village where children can
play together, or a bedroom community where
residents wave to one another as they leave for
work in the morning and return that night? No
one has ever bought a house in a village on the
strength of its many other houses, but a rich
recreational infrastructure works every time.
I hope council will look to the future and not
panic under the weight of pressure from the
county. We will soon have plenty of houses,
but we only have one park. To chip away at its
footprint and potential for future generations
for low-hanging development fruit is an easy,
shortsighted decision destined to age poorly.
With our search-and-destroy culture of
digging up misdeeds of the past
about people and branding them
with it for all time, it’s interesting to see
how many times the past can’t predict the
future.
I was thinking of that recently when I
rewatched the movie The Butler, based on the
true story of a butler who served under seven
presidents in the White House. Among those
presidents was Lyndon Johnson who was a
crude man, known to have used the “N” word
in describing black Americans. Yet it was
Johnson who signed into law civil rights bills
that banned racial discrimination in public
facilities, interstate commerce, the workplace
and housing, as well as the Voting Rights Act
which prohibited certain requirements in
southern states used to disenfranchise African
Americans.
By contrast, John F. Kennedy, darling of
liberals to this day, had to be convinced before
he finally took the civil rights movement to
heart mid-way through his short presidency.
With leaders like Ontario Premier Doug
Ford and Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, we
tend to think of Conservatives as toe-draggers
when it comes to environmental issues. Yet it
was a Progressive Conservative Prime
Minister, Brian Mulroney, whose government
gave Canada some of its most progressive
environmental legislation. He passed a law
banning the use of chemicals that were
thinning the ozone layer in the atmosphere
which protects us from the sun’s harmful ultra-
violet light.
Mulroney also twisted the arms of
Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W.
Bush to convince them to sign a treaty to
reduce pollution that was causing rain to
become more acidic, damaging lakes and
forests.
There are surprises the other way, too. In a
review of Back to Blakeney, a new biography
of former Saskatchewan Premier Allan
Blakeney, I was reminded that progressives
can sometimes get it wrong. While he carried
out nationalization of Saskatchewan’s potash
industry and created the provincially-
owned Saskatchewan Oil & Gas Corporation,
typical New Democratic Party goals, his
party nominated fewer women candidates
than the Liberals or Conservatives during
the 1970s and failed to elect a single female
MPP.
Blakeney played a significant role in the
tense negotiations between the federal
government and the provinces leading up to the
new Constitution Act in 1982 but he opposed
the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He
thought legislatures would do more to protect
minorities than judges who he feared would
degrade democracy.
The reality has been, of course, that in
interpreting the Charter the Justices of the
Supreme Court have had a huge role in
expanding protections for minorities,
particularly Canada’s Indigenous peoples.
And what about the man who stubbornly
drove that Charter through, past the resistance
of many premiers? Anyone who had studied
the youthful student years of Pierre Elliott
Trudeau would never have prophesied that one
day he would have fathered such progressive
legislation.
Writing recently in the Globe and Mail,
John English, who wrote a biography of
Trudeau, noted that the Prime Minister who
created the Charter of Rights and Freedoms
later in life, wrote an anti-Semitic play while
he was a student at Brebeuf College in the
1930s.
On another issue, like many young
Quebecers, Trudeau was bitterly opposed to
the Second World War, to the point of
associating with a group of separatists who
stockpiled guns for a revolutionary uprising.
This became the man who quashed Quebec’s
violent separatist movement during the
October Crisis in 1970 and refused to leave his
seat to take cover at a St. Jean Baptiste parade
when he was pelted with stones by separatist
protesters.
Then there was another Prime Minister,
Lester B. Pearson. English, who also wrote
Pearson’s biography, talks of how Pearson
always deprecated his World War I war record,
laughing that he had been hit by a bus and sent
home because of his injuries. But in his
research, English discovered that Pearson
suffered what we would now call post-
traumatic stress disorder. We’re understanding
of this today but during World War I it was
called cowardice, and men were sometimes
shot who suffered so badly they refused to go
into battle.
If someone had shot Pearson instead of
compassionately sending him home, we
wouldn’t have had the flag, the adoption of O’
Canada as our national anthem, a national
medicare program, student loans and so much
more.
So the past often can’t predict the future.
Human beings are amazingly adaptive and
many of us today are different than we seemed
to be at one point or another. People, including
politicians, can surprise you.
Keith
Roulston
From the
cluttered desk
Debating the virtues of politicians