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The Citizen, 2018-6-14, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JUNE 14, 2018. PAGE 5. Other Views How soon we forget life's gains One of the amazing things about human beings is how quickly we can adapt to new circumstances. Of course it's easier to adapt when things are getting better than when they're getting worse. I was thinking about that after watching a morning news channel program a week or so ago. The person doing the weather asked the anchor of the news program what she thought was the ideal temperature for her at this time of the year. "Oh, about 28 (degrees) — maybe 32," she said. I looked at the woman and guessed her age and said to myself that this was a person who has grown up in the age of air conditioning. Extreme heat is a lot more inviting when you can take it or leave it — taking it at the beach or an outdoor cafe, leaving in your air conditioned home or car or while shopping. Those beyond a certain age remember when the heat of an Ontario summer was inescapable. I remember living in a downtown Toronto apartment the year after Jill and I were married. You went to work on subway cars that had no air conditioning, jostled against other sweating bodies as the train swayed. You walked the scorching street from the station to the apartment, seeking the minor relief of taking to the side of the street that was shaded by taller buildings. The apartment was stifling and as you tried to sleep, you opened every window you could, seeking the slightest breeze. Instead you let in polluted air and the sound of noisy neighbours screaming and throwing dishes at each other — their tempers no doubt made worse by the heat. And if anything, life in the summer was actually better by 1969. Go back further in old newspaper files and you'll see stories of Keith Roulston From the cluttered desk people dying from prolonged heat waves. People dragged their mattresses out onto fire escapes for relief as they slept. Some even carried bed rolls to nearby parks to sleep. We had a brief reminder of the danger of heat during the last heat wave a couple of weeks ago when the air conditioning broke down in a London seniors' building raising the temperature in the apartments close to 30° C and sending some residents to hospital. Even in the 1960s, air conditioning was enough of a rarity that businesses advertised it as an attraction to lure customers. Movie theatres were among the first to latch on to the new technology, offering people a couple of hours respite from the heat, as well as the latest hit movie. Jill, who worked in an office close enough to our apartment to be able to walk, used to detour on her way home through Eaton's College Street store for a couple of minutes of relief. Even in the late 1970s after the Blyth Festival began, I remember regretting that people were getting soft and didn't want to attend the theatre anymore unless we installed air conditioning in Blyth Memorial Hall at great expense. But after the Festival's first season when the heat in the building was so excessive that the old varnish on the wooden seats softened and people stuck to the seats, people would rather give up going to see theatre they'd come to love than spend two hours in a steam bath. The other thing about human adaptability is that not only do we accept change, but we quickly forget what it was like before the improvements came along. (I suppose the selective amnesia about the past is an essential human trait. If we didn't forget, there'd be a lot of single -child families as women remembered the pain of childbirth so vividly they decided never to do that again.) Even most of the older half of the population probably has forgotten just how unrelenting the heat of summer could be before we had the technology (and the affluence) to be able to beat it back in at least a few areas of our daily lives. Human adaptation is also so rapid that we quickly get to the place where we "couldn't possibly" live under conditions we previously simply accepted as reality. I remember I resisted for years the luxury of air conditioning in vehicles until Bob Richmond at McCutcheon Motors begged me to give in and get it on our new car because otherwise, if we ever traded it in, he'd never be able to find a buyer for a used car without air conditioning. I wouldn't argue these days. Every time we make a former luxury into an essential, (how many people "couldn't possibly" live without the smartphones that didn't exist 15 years ago?) we climb out farther on a limb and invite someone to saw it off. Though I hate the electrical interruptions that seem to be increasingly frequent lately, it's also a sobering reminder of just how much we take modern technology for granted. Maybe we need to be jolted out of our comfortable lives now and then to be reminded what privileged lives we lead. Playing the political blame The results are in and Huron -Bruce, like almost all of southern Ontario, voted for the Progressive Conservative Party under Doug Ford to lead the province for the next four years. The province, on the riding maps, looks decidedly more blue after the election than it has in recent memory as Ford and his party now have a majority at Queen's Park, giving the party the ability to implement all the changes Ford has promised. As I normally do in my writing here, I'm going to stay away from my own political affiliations, but I will say that I didn't expect this outcome. I did expect Ford to lead his party to victory, and I did expect NDP leader Andrea Horwath and her party to claim second place, but, beyond that, the results were very much a surprise. I anticipated a slim majority or minority for the Conservatives, looking at the polls leading up to the election. I expected the NDP to be closer in seats to the Conservatives than they were and I anticipated the Liberals would be third, but maintain their party status. That last part, however, could have been wishful thinking (not saying I'm a Liberal, but my family has a long history with the group). About the only thing that didn't surprise me on the election night were the numbers here in Huron -Bruce because, much to the dismay of some other natives to the area around my age, the NDP and the Liberals had kind of hung their Huron -Bruce candidates out to dry. The Liberals, for example, didn't win many friends in the riding with the many changes they made in the past several years including the minimum wage hike and all the other "free" initiatives (which, as all taxpayers know, aren't really free). The NDP, with plans to prevent the deep geological repository and accelerate the closure of the Pickering nuclear plant, probably weren't going to gain much support from anyone connected to the Bruce nuclear plant. Of course, that's just a somewhat - educated guess from me. The platforms presented (or the practices employed, when it came to the Liberal Party), in my opinion, lacked any definitive benefit for rural Ontarians, like us. All of that preamble is just to show that, as a voter, that's the information that I was presented with. As I discussed in last week's column, I didn't find a particularly compelling reason to vote for any of the political parties, or at least any compelling reasons that countered some of the big problems I had with them. After the election, I saw a great many people, including natives of Huron who have since moved away, saying derogatory things about the outcome of the election. Posts saying "Ford is #notmypremier" and people blaming Huron for "being part of the problem" filled my social media for a few hours. That kind of sour grapes frustrates me as a voter because it reeks of entitlement. Many people were more than ready to complain about the outcome of the election when it didn't go the way they hoped, but were they involved? Did they call their friends and family in Huron -Bruce to try and convince people to vote a certain way? I can only assume not because I didn't receive a phone ame call, text message or e-mail encouraging me to consider this party or that party. I was always taught that you can't complain about an election if you don't vote, but I think that's only half the lesson. If you're going to complain after most of the province, population -wise, elects PC representatives, then maybe you should have done a better job of getting involved to try and change people's minds. Huron -Bruce residents didn't vote for PC MP Lisa Thompson for a laugh, they chose her because the voters felt she would best represent them on the provincial stage. Ontario didn't vote for Ford, through their various candidates, because of name recognition, they did it because they wanted a change. The old adage of one finger pointing resulting in three pointing back is no more appropriate than it is with this election fallout. Whose fault is it that the PC Party won? Well it's partly the PC Party's, but you can't discount the fact that the NDP didn't present a convincing enough argument to change that. You also can't discount the damage the Liberal Party did to itself in the years and months leading up to the election. You also can't discount the entitled people out there who assumed they knew who should have won and decided to berate people after the election instead of preemptively trying to convince them. Regardless of whether you were happy, vocally unhappy or stoically frustrated after the results of the election, this is the way life is going to be for the next four years. So, instead of complaining, be proactive. Convince your MPP to work for you, regardless of party affiliation, and, when the next election rolls around, get involved. Then you can complain if the party you support doesn't win. Shawn Loughlin Shawn's Sense Time to `power up' When you say someone has "power" it can mean a million things to a million people. What does it truly mean to have power? And what is the best way to wield that power? After last Thursday's election, one could deduce that Huron -Bruce MPP Lisa Thompson has power. Not only has she won the election in her riding, thus, retaining her seat at Queen's Park; however, for the first time, Thompson's party is in power, meaning that she has — you guessed it — power. Since she was first elected in 2011, Thompson had power. She was the elected Member of Provincial Parliament for the Huron -Bruce riding. However, with the Liberal Party in power, Thompson was largely handcuffed in terms of her ideas and initiatives. With party politics, you vote along party lines or you risk falling out of favour within your party. So, while Thompson represented our riding, her role was basically to criticize what the Liberals were doing and bring forward proposals that she felt would best serve her residents, but never saw life beyond that. Now, with her PC Party in major -majority power throughout the province, Thompson stands a better chance of doing her job and enacting change in the way she sees fit without being shot down by the party in power. I imagine it will be a different world for her, discovering this newfound path to power and bringing the concerns of Huron -Bruce residents to Queen's Park where she stands a chance of putting her ideas into practice. The inverse can be said of our other local representative, Huron -Bruce MP Ben Lobb, who is now under Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. When Lobb was first elected in 2008, it was under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the leader of Lobb's party, albeit in a minority government. However, in subsequent elections, Lobb's party formed government under Harper again in 2011, this time yielding a majority government. For two terms in a row, the leader of Lobb's party was the Prime Minister. So, when he had something to say or something to bring forward, he had the ear of the most powerful politician in Canada. It must have been easy to get used to that kind of power, which is why it must have been devastating to him to have it snatched away in the 2015 election. After being used to having a party in power for two terms, Lobb went to being part of the official opposition. While Lobb's job as Member of Parliament may not have changed on paper, no doubt he quickly realized that it had changed in practical terms. Just as it must have been invigorating and thrilling for Thompson to wrest power for herself and her party in last Thursday's election, it must have been equally frustrating for Lobb to have it slip away, despite his own re-election, after so many years in power. The very concept of democratic politics can be fleeting for those involved. A representative making a very handsome salary can find himself/herself unemployed in the blink of an eye, depending on the whims of their voters at that particular time. However, with that same power, the voters can hand representatives decision-making ability the likes of which they've never known. A true politician has to have the ability to thrive in both environments and represent those who voted him/her into office, no matter what happens in the rest of the election.