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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2018-5-31, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MAY 31, 2018. PAGE 5. Other Views At least we can trust the results No matter which party wins the June 7 provincial election, we can trust that our electoral system has conducted a fair election. It's something we take for granted in Canada, but we shouldn't. While there may be a call for a judicial recount of the final vote tally for the odd riding too close to call, we're unlikely to hear a losing candidate complain that "the vote was rigged", as U.S. President Donald Trump seemed prepared to do in the 2016 presidential election until he surprised even himself by squeezing out a victory, even through he had more than a million fewer total votes than his opponent Hillary Clinton. Canadians have a basic trust in the integrity of our system. Elections Ontario and Elections Canada are the arm's-length organizations that set the rules and run the elections at the provincial and federal levels. No doubt there's a considerable cost to us in maintaining these organizations 365 days a year so that they'll be ready for the one day every four years when we have an election, but the distancing of this organization from the influence of the party in power is worth the price. When a new riding is to be created because of rising or falling population, these organizers will redraw the map based on what makes sense, not what will give the best chance for the party in power to get the best advantage. Things are different south of the border. There they have a practice called gerrymandering, named after the Massachusetts Governor Eldridge Gerry who in 1812 developed a system of arranging voting districts to concentrate known voter preferences to maximize support for the governing party. Lines are drawn in a way that will make sure the governing party has a L—Keith - , Roulston From the cluttered desk majority in as many districts as they can while opposition voters will be concentrated as much as possible in fewer districts. In some cases the opposition will win a few districts overwhelmingly, but lose a lot more by a slim minority. This rigging of the voting map can lead to some extremely irregular voting boundaries (Gov. Gerry's first attempt ended up looking like a salamander). Of course with modern polling and computerized data collection, predicting voters' intentions can be more accurate than ever. That means voting boundaries are often even more bizarre. In the last U.S. presidential election, where boundaries are drawn by the party in power in each state, maps of some voting districts looked as if the map -maker had had an epileptic seizure in the midst of drawing the line. Another function of Elections Ontario and Elections Canada is to maintain a permanent voters list. If you've lived in the same house for the past 10 years, you simply expected to receive a voter information card prior to the election with your name on it and the location of the poll where you may vote. Those who have moved recently or have turned 18 will need to make sure they are registered to vote but for the vast majority no effort is required. In the U.S., people need to register to vote. Who is registered determines who can vote. In the past this had led to a history of abuse. In the former slave states of the southern U.S. registering voters proved a useful way for whites to prevent blacks from voting, even after they had been granted the right to vote. Everything possible was done to hinder blacks from registering, including "literacy" tests in which the people registering, if they were black, were asked to prove they were literate by answering a ridiculously difficult question that probably no white person in the area could answer. These are only the flaws in the electoral system of our neighbours to the south. In some countries that conduct elections, current governments have so much control over who's allowed to vote and how the votes are counted, that international observers throw up their hands in futility at being able to verify results. Ever-present cell -phone video sometimes shows ballot boxes being stuffed with ballots. It's the integrity of the electoral system, not the integrity of Canadians, that gives us confidence that votes will be tallied properly. Revelations, recently, of some questionable voting irregularities at nomination meetings where parties choose the local candidate to represent them in the election show that Canadians are not above cheating the system. Then there are the attempts to subvert a non-partisan electoral system by sabotaging it. A few years ago there was the case of the man who set up an automatic dialing system that would call people who seemed likely to vote for his opponents, informing them their voting poll had been changed, so that when they arrived to vote, there'd be no one there. There are still many frustrations about elections in Ontario and Canada but at least the basic system is non-partisan and well run. I forgot to write a pithy headline Memory can be a funny thing: often we can recall childhood memories vividly but yesterday's lunch can be muddier than melted chocolate ice cream. I mispoke in my column last week when I was telling the story of how I came to Blyth: I'm not originally from Goderich. I was born in London and, until I started Kindergarten at the ripe old age of five, I lived in Seaforth. Actually, if you want to get specific, I lived in a beautiful two-storey brick house in Seaforth, a scant few blocks from my maternal grandparents' front door, but I digress. When I was called on my statement, I tried to explain that, when I say I'm from Goderich, I do so because that's where most (if not all) of my memories were made. Maybe I suffered one too many knocks on the head, but the first dated memory I can remember is being put on a bicycle and told to explore my new neighbourhood while my parents unpacked our things after moving to Goderich. At the time I was likely five years old (I remember it being warm and, with a March birthday, anytime it's warm is after I mark another trip around the sun). There are other, foggier memories of my childhood but I can't place a time to them — or even a location unless it was in Florida at my grandparents' "Snowbird" home. That place always had a definitive feel to it. Hearing that made the person who called me on my mistake wonder if there was something wrong with my memory. I was told, basically, I should remember things from before I was five years old, and that concerned me. Maybe I have some kind of brain injury (I went into the boards a time or two playing hockey) or maybe I have some kind of neurological condition. Fortunately for me and my bad memory, there is one place to find the answers to these questions: the internet. A little bit of quick research indicated that, anecdotally, the ability to retain long-term memory sort of matures between four and six years old. That's why children who are around that age can remember people, places and events from as early as their second birthday, but those memories fade because they were encoded prior to the "upgrades" the brain receives as people develop into maturity. The best analogy I found is that having "episodic" memories, the kind where we recall an event during a specific time at a specific place with specific people that created a specific emotional response, is similar to a family's home movies. When we're very young, less than five years old, the memories we produce are stored a little differently than those we create after our brain starts to head towards maturity. If you consider the earliest memories a person has, those they likely recall or can't remember vividly at, say, 33, as a VHS tape, that same person's memories later in life would be more like a digital video file. We can't access the information on the VHS tape because our brains have evolved from a VCR to a computer in the years since. As a result of that, memories made prior to school aren't as readily available as others. Beyond that, the focus you place on experiencing an event also affects the ability to remember. Essentially, the more information that is recorded, the easier you can go back and find it. Emotion also plays a part. The more heightened the emotions, the clearer it can be remembered. Finally, it turns out that those rose-coloured glasses everyone is always talking about may be more genetic than some people realize. Once people reach the age of 35 or 40 (the experts disagree a little on the exact time), the bulk of most people's easily -recallable episodic memories are from between their adolescent years and their late 20s. The reason for this hasn't been discovered, however, what has been discovered is that while other types of memories (say muscle memory) and memories from other ages (under the age of nine) fade as people get older, the memories people have of their pre -teen, teen and 20 -something years tend to be recalled in the clearest terms. What that means is that someone who is 50 may be able to better recall memories from their teenage years than their 35th birthday party, despite the age gap. So where did we start? Sorry, I forgot. Oh right, my faux pas in saying I am originally from Goderich. Technically, I spent some of my first years on this planet in a house on High Street in the village of Seaforth. However, I can't point to a single memory I have there and definitely say it happened during that time period. The first definitive memories I have are of biking around my neighbourhood, freezing my fingers off carrying my skates to a friend's pond, inviting friends over for Nerf wars in my basement at lunch and my first awkward attempts at talking to girls (to be followed by many other awkward attempts), all of which happened after I moved to Goderich. Where am I from? Let's split the difference and just say I'm from Huron County. Shawn Loughlin Shawn's Sense Locally -sourced There really is something to be said for the ability to buy something that's both sourced and produced locally — and I think sometimes we forget how lucky we are. Just last week a long, tubular package arrived for me in the mail. It was one of Mitchell Godkin's Leadbury baseball bats. Sourced from local maple trees and handcrafted by Godkin, it came from his Walton -area home to me here in Blyth. I know the person who made that bat for me. And while using that example for a baseball bat may be a bit of an outlier for Huron County, it's the norm when it comes to our food. Whether it's farmers growing meat and produce that we eat every day or chefs we know preparing that food for us, there are very few "middle men" in Huron County. Funny enough, I actually sat down and started writing this column on Thursday of last week, one day before I would embark on an 11 -stop tour for the new Taste of Huron. So with what I wanted to say with my column in mind, this tour proved me right over the course of 11 stops throughout the county. Not that I needed to be proven right. I would imagine that the vast majority of county citizens would agree with me on this. But it was just nice to see the idea in action. When my mom and sister come to Blyth for a visit, I always make a point of stocking up on food for them. Whether I'm telling them about maple syrup or barbecue sauce made by Jeremy Hanna near Auburn or honey from Mike Scott and Arden Farrow near Westfield, they get a kick out of holding something they can eat that was produced by someone I know. They are actually lucky compared to many of their GTA counterparts. They aren't far from Courtice, Bowmanville and Newcastle, which is when the GTA starts to get a bit rural. If they drive a few extra kilometres, they can find farmgate stands and farmers' markets, but they aren't as prevalent as they are here. In most food -producing industries, there is a farm -to -table movement that has been growing in recent years. Many restaurants have begun including kilometre counts on their beer and wine lists so diners know whether their favourite beverages were sourced nearby. The same is being done for many regular menus. Rather than a bland list of ingredients, many restaurants have begun telling you the story of what they're putting in your food. For meat, chefs are telling you where the animals are from. Sometimes chefs, like Antler's Michael Hunter, are hunters (funny, right?) and obtain wild game themselves. Other times, chefs work in concert with specific farms and can tell customers how their meat was raised and maybe even what it ate. Then there is the practice of foraging that has become all the rage. Chefs go out and hunt, in a way, for wild vegetables, herbs, mushrooms and succulents and if they do so, they usually tell you. If not, there's usually a farm attached to vegetables on menus now. People want to know where their food is coming from. It's important to them. Here, we've never had that problem. In Huron County, we've always known where our food is from and it's not usually very far. That goes for a lot of stuff around our houses produced by skilled local folks. Whether it's wood furniture, pottery or art, no doubt many of us have things in our homes skillfully made by people we know. We're lucky in Huron County; whether it goes in our mouths, our bedrooms or a team's dugout, we're surrounded by talented people and we need to show them off more often.