Unsupervised and adrift

On Friday morning, I took my lovely wife and my astoundingly delightful 4-year-old son to the airport for their trip up to Thunder Bay for a 5 day visit. I don’t want to read any kind of ominous foretelling into anything, but I did receive a wretched paper cut on the inside crease of my left index finger while removing the old baggage tag from their suitcase, so I was physically wounded by the process of their departure. Once I left the airport, I started to notice an odd absence of direction and purpose.  It turns out that I am so very happy with the routine of my normal life and my happy family, that I have no back-up programming to use in case of bachelorhood. There’s really nothing I can’t do when they’re around, so the freedom of being unrestricted is pretty uninspiring. The only thing I could think of was eating terribly.

And eat terribly I did! In the course of the rest of my mopey Friday, I ate about a pound of ju jubes, a big hunk of ribs, a can of Pringles chips, several diet colas, 5 cups of coffee all before 6pm. When I’m only finding for myself, I have astoundingly low standards. By the time I met up with a couple of friends downtown, I was bloated, nauseous and still pining for my family. I did manage to pull out of my culinary nose dive and avoid ordering deep-fried pickles, so there was that, at least. And when I woke up this morning, the abused lining of my stomach cried in misery and upset for a good long time. I had to gently negotiate a peace treaty with my digestive tract so that it would allow me to have a cup of coffee. It’s funny that eating terribly can punish your gut the same way a night of boozing does.For the rest of the day, thankfully, I have been restrained and wise in my food choices.

And don’t be fooled into thinking I’m not trying to be productive during this brief monastic adventure. I’m trying my best to assume the guise of the manic and productive writer, who slaves away at the word machine from the moment he wakes up until the tallow burns so low that the eyestrain brings terrible visions and miserable migraines. So far I’ve had some qualified success at this. I’m still, at the young age of 37, learning how to hold my nose to the grindstone and keep at a task well past the point where the joy and fun has vanished. The big ideas and bits of dialogue that pop into my head out of nowhere are the fun bits of writing, but the rest of the iceberg, the part that makes it a career and not a casual hobby, is the grind.

It’s a strange circumstance I find myself in. I’ve made some progress in creating an actual writing process that isn’t “sit down, start panicking, and write until I get stuck”. Each day that I follow my new routine, I feel like I’m more aware of the story I’m working on, and I’m starting to accept all of the advice people give writers about the importance of doing revisions and multiple drafts of a story, and that is some good stuff to buy into. However, as I develop a better system of working on a story, I’m realizing that it take s a lot more time than I usually anticipate. To be fair, my previous timeline estimates have been wild guesses designed only to push me forward into writing, so they really shouldn’t be taken as accurate predictions of when the work will get done.

Another wrinkle that I didn’t see coming: after finishing an 8 hour day of writing, it would be really nice to have the family here and not just the useless cat. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced this level of solitary loneliness, especially in my own house. It’s a good reminder of how essential my wonderful wife and boy are, and how very very lucky I am to have my family. I hope I can stick to my industrious plan and have a real sense of accomplishment to share with them when they come back. Oh, and I’ll have to buy some more treat candy for the lad, to replace what I ate while he wasn’t here.

A clinic in bad municipal government

What a fun time was had by the audience at last night’s city hall meeting. This was the meeting to discuss and decide on what will be cut to achieve the poorly thought out promise of a zero % tax increase. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again-painting yourself into a political corner with an absolute and inflexible promise is a dumb move. But, dumb or not, it won the election for the gang of zeros. So now it’s down to the ugly part of the budget process.

To reach this year’s zero, city council voted to reduce the contribution to the new affordable housing reserve fund by $1 million. This proposed cut was introduced at the last minute to the agenda last night, without giving the citizens a chance to speak up and object to its inclusion on the cut list. The councillors in favour of the cut have tried to reassure people that there will actually be more housing units available in the near future despite the cut, through some kind of planning magic that they are reluctant to explain. They also found $2.3 million in secret staffing savings. No really, it was secret-that element of the budget was decided “in camera”, with no transparency or accountability. Will this $2.3 million come from layoffs? Only the secret council knows.

And to scrape their way to the zero finish line, council voted to divert $1.3 million from the city’s various reserve funds. Yes, I know that the word ‘reserve’ can be mistaken for ‘extra’ , but it’s not. This is the money that is set aside each year to make sure the city can pay for upcoming maintenance costs, both planned and unplanned. The city staff had warned council that doing this would cause problems in the upcoming year, but the warnings were ignored. Our Mayor, Joe Fontana, declared that the reserve money must be used “It’s for a rainy day, and ladies and gentlemen, it’s hailing out there.” Keep in mind that the crisis Mr. Fontana is trying to use to justify the reserve spending is one he made. He doesn’t want to use the reserve fund to pay off some of our city debt and reduce the $60 million we have to pay to service that debt this year. Nope, he wants to shortchange our long-term strategic and financial stability to make himself look good.  And to save me, the home-owning taxpayer, 26 bucks. That 26 bucks sure will come in handy when my car falls into a sinkhole downtown, though.

And while I’m casting blame about, let me send a special “thanks for opting out” to the 160 000 eligible London voters who just couldn’t be bothered to vote in 2010. Congratulations! This is the kind of government your apathy bought and paid for. If 117 of you in Ward 14 had gotten off your asses and voted against Sandy White, the vote to cut affordable housing would have failed. But who cares about the 8+ year wait for affordable housing, when I have an extra 3 bucks a month to blow.

 

 

Assigning blame instead of offering help

The Electro-Motive lockout ended today with the parent company, Caterpillar, announcing that they are going to close the plant. 450 workers are now unemployed, and that number will increase as the effect of the plant’s closure is felt in the companies that supplied Electro-Motive. The most immediate concern for all levels of government should be: how can we most efficiently and effectively assist these workers in accessing the services they’ve paid for , and help them return to the labour market? No matter what the political ideology that drives your particular party, your job as an elected representative is to provide the service that the citizens have paid for. In my opinion, there are concrete and reasonable steps that can be taken: The federal government should ensure that there are additional resources allocated to Service Canada, so that the EI claims of the locked out workers can be processed quickly. The provincial government should facilitate access to the Second career program, so that the workers can find retraining as quickly as possible. And the municipal government should extend a limited term property tax amnesty for the affected workers, to give them the financial breathing room to regroup and re-enter the workforce.

But instead of offering assistance, we have several groups jockeying to assign blame instead. The Prime Minister has officially pointed the finger at the Provincial Liberal government for being ” unable to mediate a solution to the dispute between the company and its employees”.  As a private dispute between a company and its employees, there was no legal ground for direct governmental intervention, and Mr. Harper knows that. He then tells these people who are wondering how they’ll pay the bills that “Our Government will continue to work on a plan that will generate new jobs and opportunities for those affected by this closure, including implementing strong measures to protect Canada’s manufacturing sector”. I would ask Mr. Harper to explain, if his government has such a clear vision of whats needed to protect the manufacturing sector, why hasn’t he put those measures in place already?  His non-offer of help amounts to nothing more than “walk it off and find another job.”

And the NDP have responded by blaming both the Provincial Liberal and the Federal Conservative government for offering tax cuts without job guarantees. This is a very good example of the NDP’s habit of identifying a problem and hurtling past a reasonable solution towards an unsustainable, economically damaging and interventionist solution. Guaranteeing jobs sounds like a good thing at first, but once you start examining the complexity and difficulty in establishing a method of monitoring and enforcing such a requirement, and the once you consider the chilling effect it would have on international investment in Canada, you start to see why the NDP are still not ready to lead the country. Putting arbitrary restrictions like job guarantees into a business agreement impedes business growth, and the only jobs that would be saved would be at the law firms hired to find a way around the restrictions.

There was a real opportunity for all levels of elected officials in London to put aside their party talking points and work together to offer aid and comfort to a traumatized community. It’s a shame that Conservative MPs Ed Holder and Susan Truppe, NDP MP Irene Mathyssen and NDP MPP Teresa Armstrong couldn’t manage to put their partisan campaigning to the side to help the people they represent.