It would be good to write about the provincial race in Babel.
To-date, there isn’t one.
It’d be so great to write about the Liberal candidate in Babel.
To-date, there isn’t one.
A year ago our mayoralty candidate was canvassing in Babel.
And, with hard work, he won.
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A NIMBY is an urban phenomenon. The word means ‘Not in my back yard’ and applies to those people who appear suddenly when a developer attempts to improve a neighbourhood by building something new or novel, or unusual. Whatever it is, they will object to it. This is so prevalent at times that if someone tries to get a building permit for a respectable doghouse in their own backyard, there is an immediate line formed of neighbours complaining about possible disruption, noise, smell or possible loss of sunshine on their homes.
At Babel City Council, the other evening, we got ourselves mistaken for a NIMBY. It was accidental. The real concern is that access and egress from where we live, which is by way of a very narrow street. It is not only narrow but the street ends at the creek in a cul-de-sac.
A developer is planning an even higher condominium tower on the other side of our narrow street. The proposed building, which looks very good, by the way, was an excellent excuse to remind City Council that we voters, who already enjoy the neighbourhood, would like to have assured access to our property for ourselves, our visitors and for emergency vehicles.
The problem is not the new development but is the tendency for tourists, when enjoying some of our lakefront events, to ignore posted restrictions when parking their vehicles. In fact, they park anywhere they damn well please. They scale fences. They fertilize our bushes. The adults and their litters, litter. We welcome them as visitors to Babel but we sometimes lack a warm feeling towards them when they are disrespectful of our laws and our sense of decency.
The presentation we made to council was light on comment about the proposed development and heavy on discussion of the parking problem. We concluded our brief dissertation with an admonishment to council to take better care of our street for us.
But you still get branded a NIMBY. It cannot be helped
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Oh how we yearn to be young again an’ carefree,
When sex in the morning was better than coffee.
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There are two things that a blogger needs. Bloggers need ideas and audiences. As a blogger, you always strive for that million-dollar idea that will send your readership soaring. A recent example of this was putting the idea of hookers in hard hats in a title. It was not that novel an idea, but it increased our audience. The line on the graph went north. Our readership has yet to move into the thousands but we have been pleased with the loyalty of hundreds of readers every month.
While we always put something fresh in the blog every day, we explain to readers that dropping by this site two or three times per month is more than enough to provide you would with fresh insights and something interesting to read. We can hardly be all things, to all people, all the time.
Nobody has given us an answer to our ongoing question as to whether we should run the occasional picture. Would it give the site a little more class? It might be fear that we will run our own picture. We can assure you, there is no danger of that.
To our chagrin, a reader has yet to suggest a topic for us. That is the writer’s struggle.
Mind you there is the occasional suggestion by a non-reader. We have some of those, believe it or not. One non-reader, whom we consider a friend, told us that he had absolutely no time to waste on reading useless things like blogs. And yet the same person, handed a printed copy of some 30,000 words we had written, called the other day to say he had read the piece and considered it most interesting. Go figure?
By the way, we have copies of The Babel Manifesto from the printer and a review copy is yours by mail if you promise to give the manifesto some thought and share those thoughts with us. How we are going to put the manifesto into broader circulation, has yet to be determined. We will, of course, promote it at times this summer when the news media are gushing about the silly royals being in Canada. The monarchy is just one of the many reasons why we must have an elected constitutional conference.
We know very well that there are people who yawn at the suggestion. W.A.C. Bennett, when he was Premier of British Columbia, was said to have made the comment that of the most important 100 things he could think of that needed doing in Canada, rewriting the constitution was item number 101.
One of the reasons, we are so polite about this is that there is a bit of a family tradition of tilting at windmills. Brother Edward and our father are and were ardent crusaders. Our late father was an expert on—of all things—trajectories. As an expert marksman, he knew how a bullet travelled in flight and the twists and turns that it might take. He applied this knowledge to the curved ball of baseball fame and felt that he was hard done by in trying to explain by the owners of organized baseball. What really annoyed him, we all knew, was that they did not care.
If the sports writers and broadcasters wanted to call a dropping fast ball, a ‘curved ball,’ that was their problem. Father knew damn well that the ball did not curve. That was an impossible feat.
Brother Edward tilts at more modern windmills. We should first explain that brother Edward is the smartest person we know. He is certified as a genius. He is a guy who had a career creating software languages. He does not write code. He writes the language for the code. Despite decades that both of us spent working with computers, he often talks of computer intricacies in terms that we have a hard time understanding.
Brother Edward knows that computer software that is produced today is just not up to snuff. He knows that it is based on concepts developed more than 30 years ago and is easily corrupted. He is most concerned that we let this corrupted software fly airplanes, control automobiles, produce cheques, run governments and do all sorts of things that might stop working because the software just collapses of its inadequacies. He worries about that and feels we should also worry about it.
Who can compete with that?
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Fair Vote should add its voice to Constitutional reform,
Just to nag about proportional voting is not good form.
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This is the seventh of the Democracy Papers written in 2007 in answer to the Ontario referendum that year on electoral reform. The referendum was defeated but the need for reform continues to rankle. We believe Canada must have an elected Constitutional Conference. Electoral reform is just one of the topics to be brought to the gathering. For this reason, the Democracy Papers are being updated and rerun.
In the 2007 provincial election, Ontario voters were presented with a referendum question that was not just a choice between one electoral system and another. It was a challenge to the democratic principle of one person: one vote.
The referendum question was whether you favoured the current first-past-the-post electoral system or would you like to have something called mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting that was proposed by Ontario’s Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform?
Superficially, the citizens’ assembly proposal could be seen as fairer. It was not.
The first and most basic difference about the proposed system was that voters would get two votes, one for an individual candidate and one for a political party. If you vote for the individual, are you not, in fact, voting for that candidate’s party? Think about it. Under what circumstances would you, as a voter, want to vote for a candidate and then vote for another party?
This can produce a frown on a thinker’s face.
‘Ahh but,’ a little ‘idea light’ comes on. ‘Maybe,’ you think, ‘I can vote for the individual and then for a party that I would like to see represented in the legislature.’
That idea produces an even deeper frown. This ‘why’ is confusing. It is ‘why can’t this party get anybody elected to the legislature? Will their members not be as good legislators as the candidate I already voted for? Are they going to be a second class member of the legislature, members with seats but who do not report to any constituents other then the party bosses? Do these appointed people represent their party or me?’
And the questions continue. They become even more complex. And there is really nowhere to turn with questions where you might expect an unbiased answer.
To be fair, and Ontario voters are fair, they might ask questions of some of the cheerleaders for the citizens’ assembly idea. The citizens’ assembly web site can explain that now a party with ten per cent of the popular vote can be topped up to have ten per cent of the seats in the legislature. ‘That is generous,’ you respond, ‘but why does your proposal, in turn, take the win away from a party with 53 per cent of the elected seats but only 40 per cent of the party vote?
The mathematical implications of MMP voting are staggering. There are many permeations and scenarios that can be as intriguing as they are frightening. The conclusion is that the most likely split of candidate and party vote is where there is a strong candidate who has earned a personal following but whose voters usually support other parties. This scenario can only work against the smaller parties.
The MMP cheerleaders such as Fair Vote Ontario will also tell you that more women and minorities can be appointed to the legislature from the party lists. That evokes a very big ‘why?’ If you look around the legislature as it is at the present, you will see women and various minorities already there. Many of these people will be insulted if you suggest to them that they could be appointed instead of elected.
The MMP cheerleaders also tell you that the at-large, supernumerary appointees to the legislature under MMP will be eager to represent voters in ridings that are not represented by their party. That is a very nice fairytale but reality is that there is no incentive for persons who are representing a party to waste time looking after voters’ needs. (In Germany where a mix of proportional representation is used, they had to create a petitions committee of the Bundestag to make sure voters’ concerns were heard.)
The appointed members under MMP are chosen by their political parties. They would probably be chosen in very much the same way as Canadians choose the Senate of Canada. They are just not as likely to be as useful. These are the losers in the ridings and party hacks who do not want to have to run for election. Under MMP, they would be mixed in with the general population of members. We would never know if they do anything. If we simply gave the party leader the number of votes to cast as these people would have exercised, it would be a far cheaper solution.
But the cheerleaders tell us that in the new MMP legislature, the parties will have to work together in coalitions and that the system will reward cooperation, compromise and accountability. This seems based on the supposition that there would no longer be majority governments. They think that minorities spell an end to partisan rigidity, trivial bickering and narrow thinking. They obviously had not been to Ottawa lately to see how that minority government was getting along!
©Copyright 2007, 2011, Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
They fired a parliamentary page for saying something sage,
Our Prime Minister Harper wants no opposition, of any age.
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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]
Ontario law is for the rich, not for the poor,
If you like to slander, best pick on the poor.
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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]