They fired a parliamentary page for saying something sage,
Our Prime Minister Harper wants no opposition, of any age.
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Answering the Allandale angst.
It is wrong to simply criticize others for not having any ideas. You need to first prove that you can come up with solutions. In that vein, we have been knocking our noodle to come up with the perfect use for the soon to be restored antique Allandale Train Station.
The Allandale Station in Babel has a rich history. It was a functional facility as a train station for the Grand Trunk Railway when opened in 1905. There had been other structures on the site from the time train service was first provided in 1853 by the Ontario, Simcoe and Huron Union Railroad. In 1923, the British owned Grand Trunk was morphed into the federal government’s Canadian National Railways.
CNR took its rails and left Babel in 1996. Considered briefly as a possible broadcast centre for CHUM Ltd., that plan fell through with the announced takeover of CHUM interests by CTV in 2006. The city got it back and has been trying to figure out what to do with the station since. Only a few developers have shown interest and, after a brief flirtation with a plan for the local YMCA, nothing has been proposed that sticks or seems to excite anybody.
Our first idea was that it would make a wonderful site for a chocolate factory. With or without the partnership of Warner Bros. studios that released the fanciful movies: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in 1971 and the remake, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005, a chocolatier’s world can be a wondrous place for young and old alike.
We have a chocolatier friend who can make a truffle that is out of this world. If we could offer him a shop that has been restored for some $4 million, he would not know whether to laugh or cry.
But we need more than a chocolate shop. A train station is a place for adventure. It speaks of journeys and new places, excitement and experiences. It has to entertain and involve. It certainly has to be something more than a travel agency.
What occurs to us is that it would make a fascinating entrance to a casino and convention hotel. We could run excursion trains from Toronto every day full of fun-loving gamblers. We could finally have the logical two-way traffic that GO Trains have always needed. We would become an Ontario destination of distinction. We could rival Niagara Falls.
If a tribe of 80 some Indians could pull it off in a backwater like Rama, it will be a piece of cake for Babel. And with a provincial election coming up in the fall, we could send someone to Queen’s Park with a purpose for a change.
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Comment for today.
Ontario law is for the rich, not for the poor,
If you like to slander, best pick on the poor.
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Babel can be an Ontario bully pulpit.
A bully pulpit is an expression coined by American President Theodore Roosevelt at the beginning of the 20th Century. It referred to the American White House being the best place in America from which to speak and affect change. Babel can also be a bully pulpit. Babel is the best platform in Ontario from which to speak and affect change for Ontario and for Canada.
Despite Toronto being the provincial capital, it lacks the identification Babel possesses as a microcosm of the province in its transition from an agrarian-industrial society into the global drifts of the information age. Toronto is already building Ontario’s future while Babel struggles with ties to the province’s past.
Babel is still white bread, slow to recognize the growing pockets of its multicultural future. This tardiness in recognizing the future helps Babel have the makings of a bully pulpit.
In the words of the Centennial Song for Ontari-ario, Babel is a place to stand and a place to grow. It is a place for ideas and yet with an ingrained past that makes it a rigorous testing ground for change. It can see the future. It can see a different Ontario. That does not mean Babel necessarily likes it.
When the Charlottetown Accord was supported by Conservatives, Liberals and NDP alike in October 1992, Babel rejected it. When Toronto said ‘yes,’ Babel and the rest of Ontario said ‘no,’ it added up to a 51 per cent to 49 per cent defeat. The accord proposed a Canada that Babel’s past could not accept.
Babel remains as contrary today. Its elected politicians define the contrariness. The city votes in defiance, not in favour. Babel voted against two previous mayors last year to opt for change. It was considered a safe change.
Babel has been seen as a bellwether riding by the federal and provincial political parties since the aberration of choosing the first Reform candidate in Ontario in 1993. This year, it voted solidly for the Conservative’s federal leadership and sent a nebbish back to Ottawa. The Babel riding will help choose an Ontario government later this year and, at this stage, it looks like a three-way race.
But to become the bully pulpit it has the potential to be, Babel needs leadership. It needs to be collected and motivated. It needs to take a stand. It needs the idea. Babel and its citizens could move mountains.
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Comment for today.
Pinocchio is in Kandahar visiting our military might,
If next he is in Libya, he can get into another fight.
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Comment for today.
Tim Hudak gets most of Dalton McGinty’s wrath,
It might be a mistake to ignore Andrea Horwath.
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Where hookers wear hardhats.
Welcome to Babel. This town is an adventure that lurks in waiting for the unwary. You think it is a sleepy little rural way station on the way to Muskoka. You are wrong. It is a bustling place where happenings happen and nothing ever gets finished.
From the vantage point of our aerie, 15 stories above all, we see it all. From the condom-wrapped historic Allandale train station to the scurrying streams of cars and trucks on the provincial highway, we are witnesses to Babel.
For the past seven years we have been in the midst of the action. Next door at the Water Pollution Control Centre, they spent years driving piles into the marshy soil to hold the settling tanks for our night soil. In front, down the Lakeshore, they buried the mother of all sanitary sewers—as though for a re-enactment of the Phantom of the Opera.
Not content to gift wrap the old Allandale station—which they have absolutely no idea what to do with—they are building a new GO Train station on the other side of the property. As it is on the other side of the property, the new station seems to require a tunnel to get you to and from where you have been or where you are going. Why they cannot convert the old train station into a new train station is not considered a fair question by Babel politicians.
In all this construction over the years, there has been something of a bottleneck in logistics. The constipated thinking of the planners has often left the town with very few routes between the north and south and anywhere else. Thank goodness for the provincial highway. As congested as it might be, it is a reliable connection for the town.
The main street of Babel, Dunlop Street, has been undergoing construction and destruction for years. Babel is the only town in Ontario where the hookers have to wear hard hats to ply their trade.
Nobody seems to care about the retail businesses trying to make a living in Babel. Our barber has a small shop near the new GO Train station. For the past month, her customers have had to climb mountains of earth and risk life and limb to get a haircut.
Babel is still building the Taj Mahal of community theatres in the main intersection of town. It will replace the auditorium at Central High that Simcoe County School Board is so intent on closing down. (Nobody has ever explained why Babel is not considered competent to have its own school board to make these decisions.)
If there were one thing that is really bugging us currently, it is the lackadaisical attitude of the town and its contractors who left a deep ditch between the Lakeshore and the Water Pollution Control Centre property. The water in that ditch is stagnant and produces some of the biggest mosquitoes we have seen in a long time
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Comment for today.
Imagine Harper? A senior member of the G8?
Telling world leaders that his majority’s great.
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You can have communication or speculation.
There is a line in the Paul Newman movie Cool Hand Luke when first the villain explains that the problem is a failure in communication and then, towards the end, it is repeated by the film’s star. In the first case, the line is used as a replacement for an apology. In the second use, it expresses hopelessness. And a failure to communicate is both.
What some people do not understand is that a lack of communication from a person or organization says a great deal about that person or organization. It allows others to speculate on their intent, motivation, capabilities, manners and fortitude. The truth is replaced with rumours.
Some time ago, Babel-on-the-bay received a complaint that something we had written annoyed this individual. The person told us that they did not have time to read what we write but someone had told him what we had written. Since he failed to communicate what specific item was not to his liking (or his informant’s), we were left very much in the dark. All we could do was thank him for his communication. He had failed to communicate.
This is not to suggest that communicators will always win kudos for what they communicate. There is still a tendency to shoot the messenger.
While we do not always listen to our own good advice, we do have some tips for the neophyte communicator.
First and foremost, you must always know your audience. Woe onto him or her who takes the wrong approach with the wrong audience. If you do not know the audience are you going to speak down to them or accidentally use words they might not understand? A writers’ tool such as the Gunning fog index can help a writer by ensuring that you are communicating to as broad an audience as possible.
And if the audience does not know you, it is strongly recommended that you refrain from telling jokes. Joking can get you in trouble.
If you have not been introduced in a way that emphasizes your authority with the subject, try to work in your qualifications (as modestly as possible).
Keep your communications brief. Keep your sentences short. Keep your paragraphs short. Keep your items short. Keep your speeches, newsletters and letters short. One, two-sided sheet of paper makes a reasonable length, general information newsletter. Lengthier material will be set aside to be read later and never read.
In addition, stick to the subject. There always seems to be that urge to stretch a newsletter with material that has nothing to do with why you are communicating. And when you are done, stop.
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]