Loading...
The Citizen, 2003-05-21, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MAY 21, 2003. PAGE 5. Other Views Blunt truths made painfully evident O, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the sky on laughter-silvered wings... -From "High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee Jr. om Cochrane was right: Life is a highway. What he forgot to mention is that it’s also a one-way street. I have reached a stage of life in which a few blunt truths have made themselves painfully evident. There are certain things I’ve always dreamed of doing which, due to advancing decrepitude (mine) are simply Not Going to Happen. To wit: Pat Quinn is not going to call me up to plug that hole in the Maple Leafs defensive corps. The only way I’ll ever see the summit of Mount Everest is on a National Geographic travelogue. I can stop waiting for a late night phone call from Jennifer Lopez complaining that she’s lonely and would I like to go out dancing. And now I realize that I might as well give up on another long-nurtured dream. I am never going to get to fly on the Concorde. The obituaries for the Concorde briefly fluttered across the front pages of the national press late last month. The delta-winged supersonic luxury airliner is being mothballed after barely a quarter-century of commercial service. Tory gaffes happen at wrong time Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government has fallen into a dangerous habit of saying the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time — just before an election. The Tories led by Premier Ernie Eves through slips of the tongue and in one case the hand, have got themselves in a succession of mostly unnecessary controversies that make them look insensitive and untruthful and is unprecedented for a government about to call a vote. The gaffe voters will best remember, because it was pictured on many newspaper front pages, was backbench MPP John O’Toole waving a finger at opponents who objected to his party’s unveiling a budget on TV in an auto-parts plant instead of the legislature to reduce opposition parties’ forum for criticizing. Most people view this gesture as obscene and manage to express disagreement without using it. The Tory MPP also was exposed as untruthful when he claimed he had not made the gesture and was merely shuffling documents, but the cameras that broadcast the legislature caught his action and he admitted it. Another Tory backbencher, Joe Spina, was accused of shouting the Italian equivalent of #?@$ off at Liberal MPP Dominic Agostino, who was heckling. Spina tried to fob off reporters by claiming he was not in the legislature long enough to say anything, but Liberal Marie Bountrogianni, who speaks Italian, said she heard him say it clearly. A third Tory backbencher, Ted Chudleigh, commented “bullshit,” another word most residents would not use in front of their children, when Speaker Gary Carr ruled the Tories showed contempt by staging their budget outside. Finance Minister Janet Ecker said at one stage, when insisting her budget outside the legislature was proper* she would do the same again. But as the heat built up, she denied saying it Arthur Black The eulogies ranged from the rhapsodic: “Never before has such a beautiful object been designed and built by man”, to the less charitable: “the largest, most expensive and most dubious project ever undertaken in the development of civil aircraft”. Beautiful? Well, I suppose so - although from some angles the Concorde looked like an albino praying mantis wearing a Batman cape - but she was unquestionably expensive. Only a handful of Concordes were ever built, but the price tag for development costs alone crested above $5 billion - and that’s in 1960’s dollars. More like $25 billion in today’s currency. And it’s not like the plane ever made back its investment in passenger fares. It could only carry 100 passengers per flight. By the time Concorde’s owners pulled the plug, flights were running at 20 per cent capacity. Which is to say four out of every five seats were empty. Why? Pick your poison - ear-cracking sonic booms; lingering air travel chill from 9/11; Eric Dowd From Queen’s Park and a TV reporter dug up a tape showing she had said she would hold it outside again, and an aide explained she forgot. Voters must now wonder if Tories regularly fail to tell the truth unless forced by cameras. Eves contributed when he was asked why he was golfing in Arizona when the World Health Organization issued a warning against travelling to Toronto because of SARS. He scoffed it would not have changed anything if he had been “hunting for Easter eggs on Easter Sunday in Toronto.” Voters would not expect the premier to stay looking for Easter eggs, but would expect him to be in the province, helping co-ordinate the response, reassure residents and encourage healthcare workers in its worst health crisis in memory. Eves also told reporters he supported precautions against SARS and wore a surgical mask, but his face must have gone red when he discovered the city of Toronto had already advised wearing a mask was unnecessary and could even raise fears. Energy Minister John Baird joked he had just enjoyed a trip to Asia at a time there were fears of SARS originating there and could Final Thought Nothing in life just happens. You have to have the stamina to meet the obstacles and overcome them. - Golda Meir skyrocketing fuel prices; a spectacular crash into a Paris hotel three years ago that killed 109 people on the plane and four people on the ground... And the relative scarcity of people willing and able, to shell out roughly 15,000 loonies for a three-and-a-half hour jaunt from New York to Paris and back. Truth is, the Concorde was an airborne white elephant. It never did have a lot of fans - just a few star-struck aviation Big Dreamers and a handful of wallet-heavy thrill-seekers - but it caught our attention for all that. Sort of like Madonna. And The Osbournes Still, the idea of the Concorde had its alluring charms for earth-bound grunts like me. The thought of breakfasting on the Champs Elysee, hopping a cab to Charles de Gaulle airport, sipping Champers and nodding to Sting, Diana Ross and Linda Evangelista over the finger foods at 35,000 feet, then winding up at JFK just in time for lunch... Yeah, that appeals to the unnourished Sybarite in me. But the truth is, I hate flying generally - whether it’s a luxury airliner or a single­ engine Beaver. Flying always makes my ears pop. A stewardess told me that chewing gum would take care of that problem, so I bought a package of Dentyne and tried it. It sort of worked. But it took me days to get it out of my ears. have caused Ontario’s Asian community to feel it was being further stigmatized. He later acknowledged he was thoughtless and insensitive. Spina also belittled his Liberal opponent in the election as a “that little girl,” a chauvinism not heard in the legislature for years, and acknowledged she is a woman after Liberals objected. The comments by Tories were mostly gratuitous — they would not have helped their party even if they had escaped without protest. All parties make offensive remarks, but the Tories including O’Toole and Chudleigh, normally among the most polite and proper MPPs, are running up a record number because they are rattled with an election close and the Liberals far ahead in polls and at this stage showing no signs of collapsing. The election also will be decided more on policies than slips of the tongue, but the slips hurt the overall image of the government and, if the race is close, could make a difference. Bonnie Gropp The short of it For their protection To call myself a nervous mother is as much an understatement as calling Niagara Falls impressive. From the time 1 gave birth to my first child 1 have been in an almost perpetual state of fretfulness. It was a condition that was lukewarm in infancy, a phase when 1 was confident in my parenting, helped by the fact that at least at this time in my child’s life 1 had some control. The nervousness heated up when they became toddlers, little angels suddenly pushing the boundaries, experiencing and experimenting. As they tested the limits and my patience I kept a wary eye posted while their clumsy gait carried them with implausible speed into the unknown. I was soon to learn that despite my watchfulness 1 couldn’t always keep them safe. They would find the hole in my protectiveness and climb, race and stumble through. My edginess simmered as they reached (he ages of pre-adolescence. Now too old for mothering, and too young to not be, 1 was ever concerned over their whereabouts. Five minutes late and my imagination was whipped to a frenzy. Needless to say by their teens my fears were at a rolling boil. The years had come to show me that while my need and desire to keep them safe was no less intense, my ability, as my control, was limited. Holly Jones’s parents were described as involved and protective. Her father often walked her to school. Her mother worked pan­ time so that she could be home for her children when they needed her. And yet, 10-year-old Holly was abducted, murdered and dismembered, portions of her body discovered in Lake Ontario last week. The Toronto girl had been just a few blocks from her home. Today the loving care that a mother once gave to a daughter, is given to tending the flowers and gifts at a memorial outside her home. People are rivetted to the Holly Jones story, not just to be there when the depraved animal who did this is made to pay, but because most of us are parents. To give life to your child, to nurture them then have them taken from you with a viciousness that defies human logic, is the ultimate terror for a parent. The question of this child’s final hours, the horror the answers offer, will be an ever-present torment for her parents. There is no comfort, no solace. And as one person was quoted as saying in The Toronto Star, this could happen anywhere. As of late last week police had not reported whether Holly had been sexually assaulted. However, they had said that 200 of the 1,000 names on Ontario’s sex offender registry live within three kilometres of Holly’s home. Even given the population density it’s an overwhelming bit of information. Worse yet is the fact that this doesn’t take into consideration there may be sexual predators from out of the province residing in the area. The federal government has dragged its feet in passing legislation which would see the creation of a national sex offender registry With the formidable number of sexual deviants residing so close together in one area, we have to question if the secluded, tranquility of rural areas are any less represented. After all, what better place to lose your past and begin again. Not only should police know who they are, but so should the public. Protection from them is far more important than their privacy.