Tag: news

TEACHING CANADIAN HISTORY

I have a bit of a concern with the education system, but I don’t want to come across the wrong way.  I only hope to articulate my thinking in such as a way as to not come across the wrong way.

History can be a complicated thing, mostly because it’s often a story told by the ‘winners” of the conflicts big and small that are woven through the tapestry of the human story.  For millennia, human history was often conveyed as oral storytelling, and as such, would often take on the feel of grand stories often involving the participation of deities, gods, merchants of evil as much as the actual doings of the actual humans who often serve as principals of these stories.

Recorded history tightened that up a bit, but only a bit, and it wasn’t really until Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press that recorded history was available to people in written form, that is, of course, if they knew how to read, which most didn’t.  And even with this, recorded histories were still subject to human bias in storytelling, so that even today there are often competing versions of events that some people interpret one way while others interpret differently.  Bias is still a big part of it, but it also comes down to the reality that if three people experience or witness the same event at the same time, you can count on three different versions that may be agreeable generally but differ on the specifics.

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WHERE DID ALL THE GOOD PEOPLE GO?

VISUAL PRESENTATION

Phil McGraw is proof of one indisputable fact.  That is that America has never met a jerk it didn’t ’t want to embrace.

Phil, also known as Dr. Phil, is another one of those Frankenstein’s monsters that Oprah Winfrey is responsible for foisting upon us, taking a small beer grifter and elevating him into a national phenomenon, much as she did with that other huckster Dr. Oz, or Mehmet Oz, purveyor of fine dietary supplements proven to do absolutely no good other than to line his very own pockets.  And for the record, Phil makes Oz look like a choirboy when it comes to the art of sleaze.

At his very core, Phi McGraw is nothing short of creepy, right down to the hand-holding exits from set that he makes with his wife, who seems to be thrilled with her own fame accrued by sliding through life on her scuzz-ball husband’s coattails.

This is America writ large.  We’ve been begging for replacements since Jerry Springer, Morton Downey Jr., and Judge Judy went the way of the Dodo, as in dead or just plain gone.  But as soon as we knock one down, another rises from the muck.  Now they have one as a president, again.

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PARKING GROUP IDENTIFIED

As I’ve indicated before, parking is a really big deal here in River City, and that impression has been more than validated by the creation of a parking working group, or a PWG, to grapple with the intricacies and complexities involved with parking in a community of some 8500 souls.

This appears to be a comprehensiveapproach to addressing parking issues, where stakeholders, vested interests, by-law enforcement, political actors, municipal staff, and industry experts gather to collaborate and weigh-in on subject that, if improperly handled, can lead to interventions by concerned citizens like Bonnie Mask and her photo album.

Under the general direction of Fire Chief Michael Guest, who also commands the parking desk over at Fort Renfrew, the committee, or working group, will likely sit down with a jug of Tim Horton’s coffee and some baked treats to identify parking needs in the community and hammer out a response that will please everyone.

Except if that were true, we’d be in no need of a working group in the first place, since all of this would have been resolved years ago.  But apparently, parking is a fluid issue, a shape-shifter of a thing, meaning it’s a son-of-a-gun of a thing to pin down.  Often it’s an exercise in the very best of intentions I suppose, but perhaps lacking the iron fist of enforcement in many cases, leading to a possible disconnect with respect to intentions and policy delivery.

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TOWN CONTRACT FOR IT SERVICES UNDER REVIEW. AGAIN.

I don’t know what it is about that radar of mine, but I have to say it’s been a mostly reliable asset of my twenty-some years of being an adult.

I noticed the most recent meeting agenda had a delegation scheduled for a Mr. Ian McFarlane, and surmised it had something to do with that IT contract that has bounced around back and forth, in and out, to and fro, and open and closed for the past month.

It turned out that’s exactly what the delegation was about.

According to Mr. McFarlane, there were a number of irregularities with respect to the awarding of that contract, irregularities that may have led to a different result had they not been present.

Go figure.

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AN EXCHANGE OF PASSION

I have to think that it was bubbling under the surface, irrespective of anything I might have to say.

Tuesday night’s meeting of Renfrew Town Council was plodding along, from one report to the next, going in such a way that fighting off sleep was a legitimate issue of paramount concern.  The atmosphere was rescued somewhat by Director Eric Withers, who undertook the responsibility of improving the air quality by grappling with the air circulation system headquartered right behind his spot on the the outer ring.  Had he not done so, we were looking at the possibility of a mass casualty event where several participants may well have nodded off during a back and forth featuring properties on Mutual Street and the Kumbaya experience offered by the ROMA — Rural Ontario Municipal Association — conference down in Toronto a couple of weekends back.

But then the clock began to wind down towards what many might legitimately consider to be the final minutes, the last trumpet call before go-home time.  Suddenly, a match was struck, and it was too close to the powder keg, and in fairness I don’t believe anyone thought there was a keg of powder nearby, or that close.  But apparently there was.  A big one.

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RENFREW STAFF PROVIDE POLICY FOR “CUSTOMER SERVICE”

Kelly Latendresse has tendered a document as part of Tuesday night’s meeting agenda, one where she shares with us her exhaustive review of the town’s  customer service policy, a rather generous term to apply to the rather arbitrary nature by which town employees and many elected officials give the public the municipal stiff arm when anyone has the temerity to ask a question.

Finally, at least, thanks to Latendresse, we have a desk identified as the one where the buck stops, and that would be the one occupied by CAO Gloria Raybone.  Before this, everyone just sort of looked at everyone else when asked who it was that made the final call on these things.  At least now, we have an identifiable in-office postal code.

For a while there, it was tough to figure who exactly Ms. Latendresse was in terms of title and responsibility.  I know that she’s a member of Renfrew’s senior administrative staff, that much is clear.  But every time I see her, she’s wearing a different hat.  And sitting in a different chair.

If this was baseball, and these were the Blue Jays, she’d be the ultimate utility infielder and positional generalist. Can’t hit worth a lick, but a great glove.

A betting line could be opened up for tonight’s meeting to see which of the many possible hats she’ll be wearing this evening.

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IT CONTRACT AWARD UNDER SCRUTINY?

The agenda is out for Tuesday’s Renfrew Town Council Meeting and I didn’t get to the bottom of the first page of the thing before I saw something that made my political radar start to ping.

A certain Ian McFarlane will be making a deputation at the beginning of the meeting, and for ten minutes or less he’ll be speaking on something having to do with the procurement of IT services for the town.

At an earlier meeting back in December, a staff recommendation to give a tendered contract to OnServe was shot down by council since, as councillor Kyle Cybulski said, “I don’t know what it is that I’m voting for.”

So, as is the case for most things that are of high interest, it was resolved that the whole thing would be hashed out in-camera, behind the closed doors they love get behind when there’s any chance that somebody might end up looking stupid or appear to have done something not exactly according to Hoyle.

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POILIEVRE

Am I detecting a little bit of discomfort with Pierre Poilievre?

I sure hope so.

The adolescent leader of the federal Conservatives had the prime minister’s chair all sized-up and had already pictured the office furnishings and drapes, although there are blinds in the prime minister’s Parliament Hill office.  But what a corker it would be if this guy gets nowhere near that office, ever.  But that might be asking an awful lot.

That I don’t like him is obvious.  That I’ve never liked him is more obvious still.  That’s because there is absolutely nothing to like about this man, who behaves like a miserable little bully who loves to throw insults and taunts on the school yard but somehow manages not to get beaten up.  Or reined in by whoever has yard duty or answers the phones in the office.

He’s had a bit of a crisis recently, but not one that he’d ever admit to.

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HEALTH RENFREW

What is Health Renfrew?

Or just as importantly, who is Health Renfrew?  Is there even a “who” in Health Renfrew?  Instead of bodies sitting around a board room table, is it only a chequing account?

As officially as I can find out at present — and admittedly I haven’t really looked all that hard yet — It’s an adjunct board of the Renfrew Victoria Hospital, or RVH.  For the longest of times, it apparently existed as some sort of shadow entity with some sort of financial affiliation with its larger parent, RVH.  In recent times, however, the spotlight of accountability has fallen upon it more intensely and it looks like there might be hell to pay.

What kind of hell?  And for what sins did we end up here?

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TENURED POLITICIANS

There are two types of politicians that walk the floors of town halls, city halls, legislative halls, or agency halls.  A third type frequents the boards constituted by the first two, giving us a full compliment of three very different forms of political figures.

The first, and most obvious, are the elected politicians, the ones who got to where they are the old-fashioned way, by doing all the grunt work, working the phones, knocking on doors, hammering in lawn signs, kissing hands and shaking babies.  The ones who are up front-and-centre when the public gets its dander up and is looking for answers to difficult questions.  The people who have all sorts of things thrown at them, whether it be criticism, profanity, rotten tomatoes, any of it or all of it.  These are the people elected by the other people, the public, and are the forward-facing tier of democracy.  They have something called legitimacy.

And then there are the tenured politicians.

They’re the ones who got hired by the first group, probably with educational credentials out the ears, plucked out of nowhere to be given the task of steerage, of keeping the ship both afloat and headed on the desired course as directed by the captain and other ship’s officers.  They are the ones with their hands on the wheel.

Perhaps the best way for me to make my point is to use Granny, the most wonderful woman in the world, as an example.  Always a warm and encouraging smile, thoughtful to a fault, spoils the grandkids shamelessly to their delight, a member of her church and volunteer for numerous church and civic causes.  She is the apple in the apple pie.

But put her behind the wheel of a car.

This beatific human being becomes something completely different while she navigates the Costco parking lot.

So it can often be with tenured politicians.  They start as one thing, but inexorably make their way up the ladder, in competition with others, but with no need for term limits and things like elections to get in the way.  They become entrenched.  

They aren’t part of the system.  They become the system.

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