Monday, February 12, 2024

The Budget


On a long ago budget day, a procedural quirk
put a simple regional ward councillor
in a position to freeze the police budget.
Ward councillors don’t obstruct police budgets
because, as we all learned as kids,
the police(man) is our friend
does important and dangerous work
protects and keep us safe and
for all of this deserves to be well paid.

These are things that ward councillors,
even simple ones, should understand.
But since the common sense drumbeat
set the revolution in motion
we have come to know that the best government is
to have practically no government at all
and respect for hard earned taxpayer’s dollars
is the order of the day.
Others are compelled to run their ship tightly
while the law and order liner sails unimpeded
through the calm waters of political indifference.

On that budget day, the simple ward councillor
Having, for a time, ascended
to the lofty heights of budget committee member
advanced what was (by his own humble admission)
a particularly persuasive presentation
convincing the one colleague who needed convincing
that police spending should be apprehended and
it was a great day for local democracy
or at least it seemed that way.
But the votes aren’t counted
until the politicians raise their hands
and when they did
the police got their money, as they always do.

No media or public witnessed the sad event though
police brass made time in otherwise busy days
to behold the councillor’s misbegotten manoeuvre.
Following his 15 minutes of small town fame
our councillor drove his car like an undertaker.
Even now, my lane changes are by-the-book perfect
and inviolable police budgets escalate still.

This piece was originally published in the Dream, the Glory and 
the Strife edited by Raymond Fenech, Hidden Brook Press, 2018.

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Facts, Democracy and Alternatives

Years ago, I attended a training session that included a workshop on negative political campaigning.

The workshop was a “how-to” and there was a resource person, I think.  

It was a long time ago. I really only remember two things about the session. One detail I recall was that only a few of us questioned the ethics of such campaigns.   And looking back I sure was naïve.  I mean it was a “how-to” workshop, wasn’t it?   

The other thing I remember is that it was emphasized that if you were doing such advertising in our democracies you had to have your facts right.   That was because if you didn’t you would lose credibility.  And that meant losing votes.

Well things have changed. Today it seems that political campaigns and politics in general are all about saying negative things about your opponent.   And it doesn’t matter if those utterances are factual or bogus.

I thought about that long ago training session while reading Martin Baron’s excellent book Collision of Power Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post.  Baron was the top editor at the Post from 2013-2021.

The book shows the difficult decisions those in newsrooms have to make.  What to publish?  What to leave out?  What to include?

The work became more difficult beginning June 16, 2015 when a blustering, big-headed reality show host rode down a golden escalator in New York’s Trump Tower and announced that he was running for president.  From then on Donald Trump was relentless in attacks on any media that had the audacity to publish anything negative about him.

The issue of calling out a public figure by saying s/he is telling a lie was a controversial one for Baron and his colleagues.  It seems that getting a handle on the concept of truth is about as difficult as getting a hold of a Lake Erie Eel. 

Early in his presidency Trump advisor Kelly Ann Conway introduced the idea of “alternative facts” to a bewildered public. But Ms. Conway went one better when she claimed that “if you don't know what's true, you can say whatever you want and it's not a lie."

Baron believes that the role of papers like the Washington Post is to hold people who are in power accountable.  That’s becoming harder as resources for traditional reporting dwindle.  

Maybe it doesn’t matter?  Is anyone really paying attention?  Baron quotes New York Times columnist Carlos Lozada from his 2020 book, What Were we Thinking.

“First, we are asked to believe specific lies.  Then bend the truth to our preferred politics. Next, to accept only what the president certifies to be true, no matter the subject or how often his positions shifts. After that, to hold that there is really no knowable, agreed-upon truth. Finally, to conclude that even if there is truth, it is inconsequential.  Lies don’t matter, only the man uttering them does." 

There is no room for traditional Upper Canadian smugness, however.  “Alternative facts” practitioners are alive and well in Ontario.  Take Doug Ford, for example.  Here’s what he said recently about the health-care system: 

“I want to be clear — Ontarians continue to have access to the care they need, when they need it.”

Check that “fact” out with the residents of Clinton or Minden or Fort Erie.  Last month the Ontario Health Coalition reported 868 temporary or permanent emergency department closures; and 316 urgent care centre closures in 2023. That is, in fact, a fact.

Our democracy seems to be coming apart. We need to find a way to agree on facts and come together to address what matters in our communities.

Different Alternatives

Baron writes about national media but there is a role for our local media which unfortunately is diminished and in danger of disappearing.   Two hundred years ago William Lyon Mackenzie, revolutionary, first mayor of Toronto began publishing a paper called the Colonial Advocate.  To be sure Mackenzie had his own views front and centre but the paper would also provide verbatim reports on meetings, proceedings of the legislature etc... so people could form opinions of their own.  

John McKnight has other ideas for local media. McKnight, is a community organizer and co-founder of the Asset Based Community Development Institute.  He has championed the idea that communities are places of strength; that solutions to some of our issues can be found by seeing the assets of our communities and neighbourhoods rather than the deficiencies. 

John McKnight

McKnight believes that our local newspapers should be “servants of citizenship.”  Big papers can’t do it as they “act on the hidden assumption that the large institutions of government, corporations and agencies provide the important news.”   The big papers hold up “a kind of mirror that promotes a disabling culture where citizens pull back from public life and grow cynical about their society,” he writes. *

Local media, on the other hand has the potential to engage citizens around real issues that matter in a way that can bring people together. Check out your local paper and you’ll notice the focus on citizen initiatives and community.

We need to find ways to support it.  Our Democracy requires it.

*Servants of Citizenship: Understanding the Basic Function of Newspapers in a Democracy (Learning Twenty-three) | John L McKnight (johnmcknight.org)


Saturday, December 16, 2023

Reports on Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Finally Released


The Ford government has kept secret a series of reports it commissioned on climate change impacts and the government action needed to protect us.

A group I belong to, Seniors for Climate Action Now (SCAN!), worked tirelessly to get these reports released.

SCAN!’s months-long Freedom of Information campaign finally achieved the release of these documents on December 8th. You can find the reports at https://seniorsforclimateactionnow.org/ontario-adaptation-campaign/

Earlier in the year I wrote about efforts to get the reports. See the following.
-----------

Looking for the Reports

I have just submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the Ontario government. This is a first for me.

The origin of the legislation that put FOIs in place goes back many years. It was part of the Accord adopted following the 1985 election when the NDP agreed to support David Peterson’s Liberals for two years.

The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) legislates access to information held by public institutions in Ontario subject to specific requirements to safeguard the personal information of individuals

Adapting to Climate Change

All governments brag about transparency. The current Ontario government is no exception. In fact, Premier Doug Ford, a chronic embellisher, claims there has never been a government as transparent as his.

So, you could say that my FOI request is a test of that assertion. My interest is getting information on Ontario’s climate change plans. With the country burning this summer, people losing their homes, firefighters being killed and extreme weather events now common one has to wonder what government has planned to respond to such conditions in the future. So that is what my FOI request is about. How does the government plan to adapt to climate change?

There is a bit of a story to this.

A group I’m involved with took some initiative. The Ontario Project of SCAN! (Seniors for Climate Action Now) has members knowledgeable about adaptation strategies. They were aware that the Ford government had done some work on this matter.

In fact, the Ford government has put together major reports on the urgent task of anticipating and reducing the impacts of climate change. In November 2019, the Ontario government appointed an Advisory Panel on Climate Change led by Paul Kovacs, a professor at Western University and an expert in the field of disaster risk reduction. The creation of this panel was no secret. It was announced publicly.

It seems most of the reporting was completed nearly two years ago. But the reports were kept secret until recently. One of them is now available likely because of public pressure.

This past January, Jennifer Penny, one of our members who previously worked as a climate change adaptation researcher, submitted a FOI request to find out what had happened to this reporting.

“Ontarians want to see these reports! But even more, we want to know what the government is doing to protect us,” says SCAN!’s Jennifer Penney.

She got a response of sorts.

FIPPA: “What is the name of the report?”
Jennifer: “We don’t know. It is being kept secret.”
FIPPA: “What was the date of the report?”
Jennifer: “Don’t know that either. It’s a secret.”

This seems to be how the FOI process works - transparent government in action, much like looking for light through a brick wall.

So, an open letter and petition entitled Release the Report was prepared and circulated. Over a few weeks in the summer more than 1,300 people signed the petition.

Then on a Friday afternoon in late August with no fanfare the Provincial Climate Change
Impact Assessment appeared on the Government of Ontario’s website.

Its 530 pages are filled with what the CBC called “grim details about the expected effects of climate change in Ontario.” We’ll have a soaring number of days with extreme heat, more extreme flooding and more frequent wildfires. The agriculture sector faces risks of declining productivity, Climate risks will be highest for Ontario's most vulnerable populations and this will “continue to amplify existing disparities and inequities."

In some ways the report tells us what we already suspected. But such suspicions are confirmed by experts.

The report does "the best job that's been done to date describing the impacts of climate change and extreme weather," Blair Feltmate, head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo told the CBC.

SCAN! had been looking for two reports. One was released. Imagine our surprise. Turns out there are actually four reports. Three companion reports, including one on Best Adaptation Practices, are still hidden by the government.

Those reports are what I’m asking to see in my FOI request.

Bob Wood
October 6, 2023

Sunday, November 19, 2023

Up North

There is no doubt that some projects we work on are more memorable than others.   

As I clean up old files (so I’ll have room for new files) I stumble on ones I barely recall. But here is one well remembered completed project that calls out for an update. 

Thirteen years ago, I was asked to do a story on Chuck Ealey, a Canadian Football player who played in the seventies.  There was a one-hour documentary coming out on him called The Stone Thrower and a book with the same title written by his daughter Jael Ealey Richardson. *  

The occasion for doing this was the 100th anniversary of the Grey Cup.  I like many sports, follow some, but really don’t like writing those typical “he shoots, he scores” stories.  My interest is in the sociological side of sports.  So, this assignment was perfect.  You’ll see why.           

The 1972 Grey Cup held December 3rd at Hamilton’s Ivor Wynne Stadium was decided by a last-second field goal with the Hamilton Tiger Cats winning an exciting match over the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Rookie quarterback Chuck Ealey was the star of that game and that season for the Cats.

The game represented much more than the typical east-west Cup Final and this is why: Ealey shouldn’t have been in a position to earn the game’s MVP award, because in a just world he would have been quarterbacking in the National Football League.

Bowl victories and an undefeated college record (35-0) at the University of Toledo weren’t enough to get Ealey drafted by an NFL team. Prior to the draft, his agent sent a “well-thought-out, professional, not harsh” letter to all NFL teams, Ealey recalled. 

The essence of the letter went like this: “The only position I’m interested in playing is quarterback. Thank you for your consideration.”

He wanted to play QB because clearly, that was the position where he excelled. But an Afro-American had no chance to compete for a quarterback position in the NFL of the seventies. There were no takers among NFL general managers.

“There was an overall stigma in the NFL at that time that African Americans were not to be playing quarterback,” recalled Ealey. And so, Ealey, the quarterback, moved on.

This story isn’t unique, of course.

Charles Officer directed the movie, The Stone Thrower.*  Officer had considered doing a “bigger picture” that would have looked at other Afro-American quarterbacks who came up here to play. Standouts like Warren Moon, Condredge Holloway, Damon Allen and Bernie Custis all had to come north for their opportunity.

In 1951, Custis, a star quarterback at Syracuse University, was drafted sixth overall by the Cleveland Browns. But the Browns had no intention of letting him play the pivot position so let him go to Hamilton. Custis became the first Afro-American regular starting quarterback in North America. Earning all-star recognition in 1951, he was moved to halfback the next season.

“It’s the same story,” said Officer. “Bernie Custis coming up here and then getting switched over. He had to come here for a reason.”

Officer, an Afro-Canadian actor, writer, director and former semi-pro hockey player, believed that by documenting Ealey’s journey he could tell the bigger story of what was going on in American society in the seventies.

Meanwhile, Jael Richardson, Chuck’s daughter, had been on a journey of her own, recounted in her 2012 book, similarly called The Stone Thrower: A Daughter's Lessons, a Father's Life.**  Richardson was born after her father’s football career had ended. As an adult, she would go to Ohio with her dad.

“When we went back to Toledo, people would start screaming ‘Oh there’s Chuck Ealey’ and ask for autographs,” Jael’s father recalls. “She’d go, so who are you? What did you do?”

Ealey acknowledges that he “never shared a lot of the story of how I got here.” 

It is hard today to fully appreciate the barriers Chuck Ealey faced growing up poor in the racially divided city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a typical American small town. Portsmouth was the kind of a place that valued football players but didn’t let black children swim in their public pools.  Located on the Ohio River and bordering Kentucky, the city was a significant pass-through point on the route of the Underground Railroad and the opportunity for freedom in Canada for fugitive slaves.

Ealey remembers the prejudices that held him and others back and contrasts that with the freedom “to do things a lot differently” that he found when he arrived in Hamilton.

There were none of the issues that socially held you back or that seemed to hold you back in the States,” he stated. And so, Ealey was able to continue with his winning ways that memorable rookie season, 1972, in Hamilton, all the way to the Grey Cup win.

Director Officer documents how Ealey, denied the opportunity to play quarterback in his native land, essentially followed that same path that slaves had taken to get to Canada. As Officer told me of his movie: “It is a significant Africo-American story that has everything to do about being Canadian.”

Today nearly half of the starting quarterbacks in the NFL are Afro-American.  However current research shows that from 2010 to 2022, teams were chronically underrating Black quarterbacks in the draft and significantly underpaying them when they were signed. *** 

*Officer’s movie Stone Thrower can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmL1EvtQy3E

**Jael Richardson’s successful debut novel Gutter Child was published in 2020.  

*** https://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/nfl-draft-analysis-racial-bias-quarterbacks-18355172.php

Monday, November 06, 2023

Media Release - SENIORS’ GROUP FORCING ANOTHER FORD CLIMBDOWN

I'm involved with a Senior's Climate group called SCAN!  This morning SCAN! put out this media release.  

--------------

For immediate release, November 6, 2023

The Ford government is finally going to release climate reports it has kept hidden from public view. 

Thanks to the efforts of members of SCAN!(https://seniorsforclimateactionnow.org/), the Ford government is finally preparing to release four reports on how it should be protecting Ontarians from climate breakdown. One has been hidden for two years. The others were kept hidden for the better part of a year.

Late Friday November 3, SCAN! adaptation expert member Jennifer Penney was notified that the government will soon be releasing them in response to several Freedom of Information requests she has made.

It took the retirees more than a year of direct requests to the Ministry of the Environment, Freedom of Information filings by multiple individuals, media interviews, and an open letter signed by 1,400 Ontarians to get the government to show us what it should be doing about adaptation to climate breakdown.

“These reports provide expert advice for Ontarians, for our communities, for our governments, to guide efforts to protect us from the impacts of severe climate events” said Dr. Penney.

“Scientists have long called on governments to implement comprehensive adaptation programs. It is unconscionable that the government has sat on this guidance for so long. It shouldn’t take a bunch of retirees making a fuss to get it to move.”

One of the reports is from the Advisory Panel on Climate Change, appointed by the government in 2019. It was led by climate change adaptation expert Paul Kovac and was submitted in November 2021. But it has not been seen since.

 The Technical Report of Provincial Climate Change Impact Assessment (PCCIA), dated January 2023, was quietly released in late August, seven months after it was submitted. It only hinted at what needs to be done to protect Ontario from climate breakdown.

Among these hints, the PCCIA Technical Report emphasizes the need to “protect and strengthen the Conservation Authorities Act and Environmental Assessment Act”.  This advice runs counter to Premier Ford’s mandate letter to the Environment Minister, which required a review of environmental legislation that impacts businesses to ensure it didn’t place “undue burdens” on the private sector.

“As the PCCIA Technical Report insists, we need ‘accelerated action’,” said Penney. “I sincerely hope this government soon shares what that action will be.” 

Seniors for Climate Action Now! Is a rapidly growing voluntary organization mobilizing seniors to call for emergency climate action at all levels of government.

Further information: Jennifer Penney, jp1146@gmail.com, 647-458--0404

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Encampment Update

Earlier this year I wrote about a legal case pertaining to homeless encampments.

Justice M.J. Valente of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice had ruled that the Region of Waterloo couldn’t evict people living in tents from a vacant lot the Region owns. https://whenthemayorsmiles.blogspot.com/2023/03/encampment-precedent.html

At the time I understood that the ruling was precedent setting and would impact other municipalities.   It seems I was overly optimistic.

According to the Advocacy Centre for Tenants of Ontario (ACTO) municipalities are responding to the needs of their residents in different ways. 

Some are using enforcement and displacement as a last resort.

And some are taking a different approach. Take Cambridge, for example.

They are “focusing on clearing and forcibly removing residents, resulting in people being displaced with nowhere else to go,” claims ACTO, an Ontario specialty legal clinic.

"Some of these people were evicted three times in a matter of two months,” Ashley Schuitema, staff lawyer at Waterloo Region Community Legal Services (WRCLS) told Cambridge Today’s Joe McGinty.  https://www.cambridgetoday.ca/local-news/legal-action-in-the-cards-after-cambridge-encampment-evictions-7652134

Up North, Sault Ste Marie looked at other City’s bylaws and figured they could amend theirs.  Just in time for winter they decided to protect their parks. The only Council opposition came from Ward 3’s Angela Caputo according to CBC News. 

"I think it's imperative that we shift our attention to creating and advocating for a system to end homelessness rather than enacting laws to try and police our way out of it," said Ms. Caputo. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/social-services-legal-challenge-poverty-issues-1.6952421

Some cities like Kingston are in court where the arguments revolve around how much housing is available.  There is always lots of debate on such numbers. 

Let’s get real here. It is obvious to anyone that rental rates and availability are beyond the means of increasing numbers of people in the province.

Municipalities are spending taxpayers’ dollars on fighting our fellow citizens in courts.  The Hamilton Spectator reported today that lawyers representing Hamilton tried to recover court costs from those without housing who are in an ongoing human rights battle with the city.  Instead, Justice James Ramsay ruled the City should pay costs of $5,000.  

The last word today goes to ACTO:

“The Charter dictates that unless and until encampment residents are provided with truly accessible accommodation, evictions should not occur. Moreover, encampment residents deserve to be consulted and involved when municipalities are attempting to find solutions for them.”

Friday, October 06, 2023

Looking for the Reports


I have just submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the Ontario government.

This is a first for me.

The origin of the legislation that put FOIs in place goes back many years. It was part of the Accord adopted following the 1985 election when the NDP agreed to support David Peterson’s Liberals for two years. 

The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) legislates access to information held by public institutions in Ontario subject to specific requirements to safeguard the personal information of individuals

Adapting to Climate Change

All governments brag about transparency.   The current Ontario government is no exception.  In fact, Premier Doug Ford, a chronic embellisher, claims there has never been a government as transparent as his. 

So, you could say that my FOI request is a test of that assertion. My interest is getting information on Ontario’s climate change plans.  With the country burning this summer, people losing their homes, firefighters being killed and extreme weather events now common one has to wonder what government has planned to respond to such conditions in the future.  So that is what my FOI request is about.  How does the government plan to adapt to climate change? 

There is a bit of a story to this.

A group I’m involved with took some initiative.  The Ontario Project of SCAN! (Seniors for Climate Action Now) has members knowledgeable about adaptation strategies.  They were aware that the Ford government had done some work on this matter.

In fact, the Ford government has put together major reports on the urgent task of anticipating and reducing the impacts of climate change. In November 2019, the Ontario government appointed an Advisory Panel on Climate Change led by Paul Kovacs, a professor at Western University and an expert in the field of disaster risk reduction.  The creation of this panel was no secret.  It was announced publicly.

It seems most of the reporting was completed nearly two years ago.  But the reports were kept secret until recently.    One of them is now available likely because of public pressure.

This past January, Jennifer Penny, one of our members who previously worked as a climate change adaptation researcher, submitted a FOI request to find out what had happened to this reporting.

“Ontarians want to see these reports! But even more, we want to know what the government is doing to protect us,” says SCAN!’s Jennifer Penney.

She got a response of sorts.

FIPPA: “What is the name of the report?”
Jennifer: “We don’t know.  It is being kept secret.”
FIPPA: “What was the date of the report?”
Jennifer: “Don’t know that either.  It’s a secret.”

This seems to be how the FOI process works - transparent government in action, much like looking for light through a brick wall. 

So, an open letter and petition entitled Release the Report was prepared and circulated. Over a few weeks in the summer more than 1,300 people signed the petition.

Then on a Friday afternoon in late August with no fanfare the Provincial Climate Change Impact Assessment appeared on the Government of Ontario’s website.

Its 530 pages are filled with what the CBC called “grim details about the expected effects of climate change in Ontario.”  We’ll have a soaring number of days with extreme heat, more extreme flooding and more frequent wildfires. The agriculture sector faces risks of declining productivity, Climate risks will be highest for Ontario's most vulnerable populations and this will “continue to amplify existing disparities and inequities."

In some ways the report tells us what we already suspected.  But such suspicions are confirmed by experts.

The report does "the best job that's been done to date describing the impacts of climate change and extreme weather," Blair Feltmate, head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo told the CBC.

SCAN! had been looking for two reports.  One was released.  Imagine our surprise. Turns out there are actually four reports. Three companion reports, including one on Best Adaptation Practices, are still hidden by the government. 

Those reports are what I’m asking to see in my FOI request. 
----------

More information on SCAN! can be found at  https://seniorsforclimateactionnow.org/

Listen to the story of the hidden reports on  All in A Day with Alan Neal at https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-92-all-in-a-day/clip/16009552-seniors-climate-action