12 March 3, 2012 - ObserverXtra

More documents

Recommendations

Info

8 | COMMENT COMMENT Our VIEW / EDITOrIaL Harper needs to take fraud issue more seriously ScandalS are nothing new for the Harper government – they’ve been messing up since day-one. What would be new, however, is seeing something stick. If public reaction to the voter-suppression fraud is any indication, we might just be getting somewhere. Thanks to last week’s revelations that voters in some ridings received phone calls purporting to be from Elections Canada informing them that they’re polling station had been moved – sometimes to spots miles away – increasingly numbers of people are coming forward. The net is being cast wider. Guelph appears to have been a hotspot. Other area ridings, including Kitchener-Conestoga, were also home to victims. Targeting Liberal and NDP supporters, the so-called robo-calls meant to discourage voter turnout for opposition parties. Beyond that, the supporters of parties other than the Conservatives received annoying, repeated or late phone calls purporting to be from Liberal campaign offices, for instance, though that was not in fact the case. The goal again was to weaken opposition support. So far there has been no direct connection to the Conservative party, though there’s ample circumstantial evidence to warrant an investigation. Stephen Harper maintains his innocence at this point, employing his customary deflection and pointing everywhere but back at his party. Internal reviews have been initiated, but that’s not enough. An independent inquiry is in order, as even an RCMP investigation cannot be considered impartial, as the in-and-out scandal and other wrongdoings have shown. The government appears to be using the same tactics it employed with the in-and-out scandal: deny, deflect, delay. That case, you may recall, already ended in a conviction of breaking electoral law. Elections Canada declared that the Conservative party violated spending limits in the 2006 election by moving money into accounts held by 67 individual candidates, then using that money in the national campaign. Phony invoices were subsequently submitted to earn reimbursements for election expenses. Last year, four senior Conservatives, including two senators, were charged in connection with the incident. The issue was allowed to drag on for five years, long enough apparently for Canadians not to punish the party for breaking the law. We’ve seen these tactics in other questionable activities: Maxime Bernier’s classified documents, Peter MacKay's propensity for military taxi services, Bev Oda’s “not” sleight of hand, “Gazebo” Tony Clement’s handling of border infrastructure money, and the list goes on. Though all serious, it’s the possibility of election tampering that should be setting off alarm bells. Our democracy is already challenged by voter apathy, corporate interference, negative advertising and a host of dirty tricks, we don’t need to add outright fraud to the list. Again, judging from the comments and reaction in the media and online, others are of the same opinion. The whiff of things Nixonian is most unpleasant. This is a problem that deserves more than the usual flippant responses coming from the government benches. If the officials in power are as clean as they maintain, then they should be pushing hardest for full disclosure (think Paul Martin and the Gomery inquiry). We thinks they doth protest too much ... and act too little. ThE VIEW frOM hErE WOrLD VIEW / GWYNNE DYEr WORLD AFFAIRS i am not making this up. They’re going to paint Calcutta blue. Some firm of public relations consultants has persuaded the West Bengal state government that all official buildings and assets in Calcutta, right down to the lane dividers on highways, should be painted light blue. Taxis and other public services that require licenses will also have to get out the blue paint, and owners of private property will be asked to do the same, with tax cuts for those who comply. It’s all about branding, really. West Bengal got a new government last year, after 34 years of Communist rule, and the state’s new rulers decided that the capital city, Calcutta, needs a new colour scheme. As Urban Development Minister Firhad Hakim told The Indian Express newspaper, “Our leader Mamata Banerjee has decided that the theme colour of the city will be sky blue because the motto of THE OBSERVER | SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 JOE MERLIHAN PUBLISHER STEVE KANNON EDITOR DONNA RUDY SALES MANAGER JAMES JACKSON REPORTER COLIN DEWAR REPORTER PAT MERLIHAN PRODUCTION MANAGER LEANNE BORON GRAPHIC DESIGN JON SARACHMAN GRAPHIC DESIGN PUBLICATION MAIL AGREEMENT NUMBER 1004840 | ISSN 12039578 Used to tapping taxpayers' wallets, politicians have a little problem staying on target at a ceremony marking the beginning of maple syrup season. Red? In Calcutta they want to paint the town blue the new government is ‘the sky is the limit.’” Well, why not? If the state of Rajasthan can have both a “pink city” (Jaipur) and a “blue city” (Jodhpur), why shouldn’t Calcutta brand itself as “the other blue city”? However, Jaipur is naturally pink because of widespread use of terracotta, and in Jodhpur the residents got out their paintbrushes voluntarily, whereas the West Bengal state government is spending a reported 800 million rupees ($16 million) on the blueing of Calcutta. Calcuta’s leading newspaper, the Telegraph (in which this column has long had the honour of appearing), was so swept away by the wonderfulness of the concept that it wrote a fulsome editorial about it. “Finding the right colour combination is undoubtedly the crucial first step in making a city safer, healthier, cleaner and generally more user-friendly for its inhabitants,” the newspaper wrote, tongue firmly in cheek. “(Painting Calcutta blue) could, with as little doubt, sort out its core problems - chaotic health care, inabil- ity to implement pollution control norms, arsenic in the water, archaic sewers and garbage disposal, bad roads, killer buses for public transport, an airport falling apart and beyond dismal, priceless paintings rotting away in public art galleries, to name a few.” One wonders why more cities are not doing the same. Maybe they couldn’t afford the right consultants. I yield to practically everybody in my esteem for the overpaid consultants who are employed by unimaginative governments to “improve their image.” There is a better way for Calcutta to overcome its reputation for chaos and decay. By all means spend most of the available money on sewers and garbage disposal, roads and buses, pollution control, art galleries and the airport – but also restore the city centre. Calcutta was the capital of British-ruled India for two centuries. For much of that time it was the second-largest city in the British Empire, only surpassed by London. So the centre of the city was full of Georgian and Regency buildings that reflected the city’s power and wealth at that time. Most of them are still there. Calcutta was poor for a long time, so it hasn’t had the money to erase its past in the brutal way that is happening in most other Asian big cities. Almost all Chinese cities have already destroyed their architectural heritage, and beautiful cities like Hanoi are working at it full-time. But Calcutta’s wonderful buildings are in dreadful shape, and soon it will find enough money to start destroying them wholesale. It doesn’t have to end like that. Fifteen years ago I was walking up Bentinck Street, surrounded by the chaos of cars and trams and the crumbling buildings festooned with washing lines and movie posters. I came round a slight bend in the road ... and saw a miraculous sight. It was an four-storey townhouse restored to all its former glory: the stucco replaced, the balconies repaired, the whole thing repainted in the mustardyellow colour that was fashionable in the late 18th DYER | 10
THE OBSERVER | SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 thEiR viEw / quEStion of thE wEEK HOW TO REACH US PhonE 519.669.5790 | toll fREE 1.888.966.5942 | fAx 519.669.5753 | onlinE www.ObSERvERxTRA.COM ADDRESS 20-b ARTHUR ST. N., ELMIRA, ON N3b 1Z9 lEttERS Letters to the Editor should be exclusive to The Observer. Include name, address and daytime phone number. Unsigned letters must contact Editor for publishing consideration. Keep letters under 350 words. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. This newspaper declines announcements, poetry and thank-you letters. EDitoRiAl 519.669.5790 ExT 103 editor@woolwichobserver.com ADvERtiSing 519.669.5790 ExT 104 ads@woolwichobserver.com coPyRight The entire contents of The Observer and online edition are protected by copyright. No portion thereof is to be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the specific permission of the publisher. Reproduction rights can be obtained from ACCESS COPYRIGHT located at 1 Young St., 1900, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5 | 416.868.1621 PRoDuction 519.669.5790 ExT 105 production@woolwichobserver.com COMMENT | 9 Since the Toronto Maple Leafs are fading fast, what should their next move be? » Matt Lorentz Brian Burke has done enough and Ron Wilson is hot and cold, I think they should get rid of everyone and bring in new leadership. hiS viEw / StEvE KAnnon Excuses abound, but there’s no justification for Sansone fiasco EDITOR'S NOTES the justifications and excuses flying about in the wake of the Jessie Sansone affair is a perfect illustration of the bureaucratic mentality I recently discussed in a column about Parkinson’s Law. The 26-year-old Kitchener man was arrested last week after his daughter, 4, drew a picture of a man holding a gun: her daddy, who uses it “to shoot bad guys and monsters.” That precipitated a sequence of events worthy of the golden age of slapstick comedy, if what happened wasn’t the farthest thing from funny. A teacher going to a principal, who in turn involves the police and Family and Children’s Services. The father is arrested at the school when he arrives to pick up his three children. He’s strip-searched and interrogated. Possibly under duress, he agrees to let police search his home. There are, as one might guess, no guns. Well, there is a plastic » Shane Stride They should fire Ron Wilson toy gun, the kind found in millions of households. Sansone was eventually released and given an apology. Only after going through the traumatic ordeal, however, was he told why he’d been arrested for possession of a firearm: the picture and explanation of a four year old. Not surprisingly, he’s talking to a lawyer about compensation. Equally unsurprising is the response of all of the agencies involved: we’re just following policy. No one is admitting culpability or responsibility for what was clearly an overreaction of epic proportions. Everyone by now will have been advised by lawyers to maintain the party line: admit nothing, plead innocent. For the rest of us watching from the outside, Sansone has clearly been wronged. He deserves compensation and, more importantly, we need to replace existing policies with a more common sense approach. The little girl’s use of the word “monsters” should have been a clear giveaway that no one in the house » Ryan Lorentz The Toronto Maple Leafs need better players was running around with a real gun or leaving firearms strewn about the house in reach of the children. The teacher could have easily followed this up by talking to the principal, who in turn could have contacted the parents for an explanation. No fuss necessary. No trampling of anyone’s rights. Instead, we had the fiasco that unfolded. The Sansone family has undergone a trauma. The institutions involved all have black eyes. And the public is worse off, taking a hit in the wallet and in its freedoms. One thing we can count on is that this is going to cost us a lot of money. It already has if you measure the staff time and expenses racked up in the wrong that was done, from the school itself through the police process. Yet to come are legal bills – everyone will be lawyering up – and costly reviews of existing policies. Then there’s the issue of compensation. Costs could be reduced if the family is offered a settlement rather than dragging it out, but bureaucracies often don’t behave so rationally. Nor are they spending their own money: it’s the taxpayers that are on the hook. It would be nice to think the costs would be extracted directly from those involved – payroll deductions, perhaps, or commensurate cuts to budgets – but that’s dreaming in colour. The money will come from taxpayers rather than holding anyone accountable. More pressing, however, is making sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. In this instance, we have policies that clearly go against the public good: the unreasonable excesses that followed the child’s drawing can’t be defended on any grounds. Those involved had trotted out the “if it saves just one child” argument in defense of what happened, but that doesn’t cut it. That line of reasoning is insidious, glossing over a multitude of sins with what sounds like a rational argument. After all, who’s going to say a child shouldn’t be protected? Well, as Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’s recent arguments in favour » Mackenzie Sanders They need new and better players, that is how they are going to win of stripping away the rights and privacy of Canadians – siding with the government or with child pornographers – clearly indicates, there’s no stooping too low for those who would take liberties with our, well, liberty. We can, hopefully, assume all of the officials and bureaucrats involved meant well, but you know what they say about the road to hell? Good intentions don’t excuse what happened. At a minimum, there was a lack of due diligence. It would be an understatement to say drastic measures were taken in the absence of credible evidence. And it wouldn’t be overstating things too much to say the child-safety card being played in defense of those measures should be countered by the words of Thomas Paine (1737-1809): “The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.” It’s no coincidence that some of the most memorable quotes about rights, freedom and democracy come from a time when » Devon Decopte I think they should fire Brian Burke. Do what the fans want. "In my mind, I picture every one of Canada's MP's rising in rage demanding that those responsible be rooted out ..." PAUL MARROW | Page 11 they were in much shorter supply. Take, for instance, writer and abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s (1811- 1884) reminder that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Today, when we have far more liberties, at least on the surface, we have given up our vigilance. As a result, our freedoms are being eroded. I’m not talking about just the actions of a federal government that has been undermining democracy as its standard operating procedure – from proroguing Parliament and using closure to limit debate, from the G8/G20 fiasco to stealing away your privacy – but about a wider misuse of power by governments and bureaucracies. While what’s coming out of Ottawa these days is malicious, many of the problems stem from rather misguided notions, self-serving tendencies or outright incompetence, fueled by public apathy and the assumption that those “in charge” have both the public’s interests at heart PubliShER 519.669.5790 ExT 107 publisher@woolwichobserver.com EDITOR | 10 PRESS comPlAintS & ASSociAtionS The Observer is a member of the Ontario Press Council which considers complaints against member newspapers. For more information contact www.ontpress.com. The Observer is a member of the Ontario Community Newspaper Association [CCNA], Canadian Community Newspaper Association and The Greater KW Chamber of Commerce.
Page 1 and 2: comment PAge 10 Re-Discover Re-Disc
Page 3 and 4: THE OBSERVER | SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2
Page 7: THE OBSERVER | SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2
Page 17 and 18: 17 | VENTURE Venture New busiNess /

12 March 3, 2012 - ObserverXtra

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?