Monthly Archives: November 2011

Last week my happy internet wanderings took me to the Kingston Whig Standard, another fine old paper taken over by Sun Media. Laid out just like our own Northumberland Today, it's fascinating to compare the two. My attention was grabbed last week by an article titled City OKs 3.5% Tax Hike. What was going on in Kingston that municipal taxpayers would allow such a thing, I wondered. No way that could happen here.

Reading on, the November 23rd story contained more incredible details that made this Cobourger shake her head, including that the city had set aside five nights to debate the budget, but wrapped it up in only two. If there had been public input it was not mentioned here. The 3.5% rise in property tax is a repeat of last year, and will mean an increase of $98 for a home assessed at $2,800. Water rates will rise by about $60. The total operating budget approved for 2012 is set at 301 million, for capital at 47 million. The Utility Division budget rises by a healthy 4.9% to bring its budget up to 28.6 million.

In a most trusting way, the City approved just budget estimates for public agencies like their health unit and Frontenac County, which manages their land ambulances and home for the aged. Imagine, a budget increase granted with no concrete, detailed final numbers to justify it provided first. They were warned that if they wanted more later, they would have to ask for it. Guess that is Kingston style tough talk.  Stan Frost would never stand for that kind of sloppiness here. It appeared that every department, from Police to Economic Development and the Library, got the increases all requested.  

Since the article appeared I have monitored their Letters to the Editor section, and there is not a word, not a single peep, from any outraged citizen demanding the heads of the Councillors responsible. The Comment section following the article though was a different story, with fifteen posts all condemning Council for their spendthrift ways.  Hardly a groundswell of opposition though, with some complaining that new garbage rules would only allow them one free bag a week.  One group sure to be pleased is city administrators for whom this early Christmas present has to be a dream come true. No doubt much champagne was consumed in celebration of their success in managing their bosses so well, and their top dog congratulated Council for their achievement at the close of the meeting.

Cobourg Council and staff can only imagine how sweet life would be if residents here were that accommodating about tax increases. If they could count on our acquiescence for their monument building proclivities maybe then we would see more public consultation, although in that kind of environment it might only be to decide whether to get green benches or brown in the Park. Sometimes it seems like some Cobourgers only care about stuff like that anyway, it is well and good that most of us focus on the big picture instead.

How can dissenters to State or local policy express themselves in today's world and be effective? With legal beagles making cases for "Freedom of Speech Rights" and trying to persuade the courts that words are not the only form of expression protected by the Charter of Rights one can rightly wonder just where will this argument end. On the other hand one can also say that because basic rights are not absolute but dynamic and change as Society changes the right to express oneself as guaranteed under the Charter will always be in a different form. Some may pitch tents to express themselves others will just hold up signs.

So in this context those of us who believe that expression is the most valuable part of active citizenship should be appalled and ready to fight back at any attempt to muzzle expression. We have watched as local Pols, who don't want to listen to their citizens, even if they profess to be avid listeners, institute measures designed to limit opinion and frustrate argument. In the latest round of public consultations, in Toronto, local Pols took great pleasure in telling everyone who would listen that they were wonderful democrats by allowing all who wanted to speak to them could. What they didn't say was that by limiting the length of the speech to ONE MINUTE and manipulating the speakers' list and having dictatorial Chairs decide what people could ask questions of the speakers the whole exercise was tainted from the start.

Now in this morning's perusal of the International Press one can see this quote from the "Southern Daily Evening Echo". Spoken in the context of the largest strike to take place in the UK since the turbulent times of the 70s this comment could be found. “People should have the right to make their voices heard, but they can do that by having a symbolic 15 minutes.” – Southampton City Council leader Councillor Royston Smith.  This person should be ashamed of himself for even thinking this as a leader of the people. But as he is of the Conservative ilk why should we not be surprised. Cons here have, in Canada,  assumed that as they won the last election and formed a majority government normal practices and norms of the past one and hundred and fifty years should not apply to them as they ride roughshod over opposition requests and appeals for compromise and reconciliation. Time allocation in debates, closing committees to the public to make majority imposed decisions, control of all of the levers of power have shown that the HarperCons are no democrats. Their vision of democracy appears to be one of quadrennial elections and then telling the voters that that is all they are going to get. "We won – you lost so get over it!" is the attitude this publication sees in front of us. Locally we are no better off. The latest example is the imposition of a "Seniors' tax" here in Cobourg, the loonie idea is that all who use Seniors' programme must pay a loonie to access it. This loonie has no basis in fact and as such may be illegal as fees imposed by authorities must be based in fact, in other words have a financial relationship to the activity being accessed. Despite these arguments the fact remains that this was imposed with no public discussion. Where was the "no taxation without representation" position from the public on this one.

All we can do is to make our displeasure at these tactics public and voice our opinions often. How many times do we have to hear and quote the Ghandi reference: "First they ignore us, then they ridicule us, then they fight us and they we win!" for us to believe it? Keep it up.

Where is the front line staff at our local paper? Recent developments suggest they've either been kidnapped by aliens or have staged an invisible wild-cat strike. Their usual presence in Friday's paper is entirely missing and without explanation. Here's why I'm worried.

Lately it's taken longer and longer for the online version of Northumberland Today to post their new stuff for the day, so I wasn't surprised to see nothing up by late Friday morning. But as the day wore on and I kept checking back, the page stayed the same, the Breaking News box still filled with Thursday's headlines. Odd. Very odd. Logically I know they don't work over the weekend but checked it today, and still nothing. The only items posted at all on Friday were three editorials from head office. Nothing else. Other QMI newspapers managed to post a Friday edition, why not ours? Is it possible nothing notable happened so they just put their pens down and watched tv instead? What is going on? Was there a printed paper distributed Friday, and was it just a duplicate of the day before?

This is very stressful. I was forced to read all three editorials and another letter to the editor from that woman who wants to ban wood smoke, just to satisfy my craving for local information. The fact none of it was local soured me for the whole day. I'm especially anxious for more dirt on the Brighton Applefest Committee debacle, it's been another entertaining chapter of life too close to Quinte. How long will we have to wait?

Val, Cecilia, Ted, I hope you're all ok, wherever you are. If it was aliens, try to get a picture. Same for the techie folk behind the scenes who push all the buttons. Come back, we need you to keep us all up to date on the thrilling, cutting edge events and developments in our little town. Our lives without you would be simply unbearable.

This half of the BR team pays scant attention to the nuts and bolts of the internet. I just use it, for hours on end, and leave the complicated techie stuff to the Boss to figure out. But I was a tad worried when my son, who uses Bell Internet like me, said that his family had gone over their downloading limit and been socked with a huge extra charge as a result. With two teen-age type females in the household that's not hard to do, but he was livid since they had no way of knowing they'd breached their limit. Turns out Bell has a feature, well buried in their site, that a user can set up to alert them when they're getting close to the line. But who knew? I didn't, and I'll bet most of us Bell users don't know about it either. Hell, I didn't even realize there was a limit.

This was an event that needed clarification, so I turned to Mr. Burd for help. He gave me a quick education on these limits, and the fight just resolved that was threatening small, local providers like Cobourg's Eagle. The local providers won this one, but the war continues, with a final decision due this fall on the rights of providers to keep usage levels so low that they're guaranteed extra fees when their customers exceed them. The big providers would like to get the little guys out of the market too, so our local providers are still under the gun.

Added to that threat is the federal government's Omnibus Crime Bill which will give them and their agencies the freedom to surreptitiously spy on anyone seen to be not on board with their policies. For many of us, that prospect is daunting, to say the least, although one suspects files already exist on dissenting Canadians. Always have been, why should it be different now when they have these new tools at their disposal? For a covert government spy, the internet is just a dream come true, and it's no wonder they want to snoop around in our private files. It's an insidious attack on our right to privacy, abominable and indecent.

Having just discovered an organization that's trying to fight all this, I wanted to share their website address and urge people reading this to go to it, get educated, and answer their short survey. I've signed up for future alerts so my education can continue, and I'll be ready for what comes next. It's called Open Media, it's a non-profit outfit, and worthy of our support. After all, it is OUR internet, it doesn't belong to Bell, or Rogers, or Cogeco, and it must not become another tool of repression by our angry, spiteful federal government.

Here it is, and please take the time to check it before Big Brother comes calling.

www.OpenMedia.ca

Yesterday my daughter set me off on a crusade when she told me she'd heard on CTV News that cursive writing is on the way out, and some provinces have already dropped the subject from their curriculums. Aghast at the very idea, I did some searching and found a sensible article on that topic on a website run by the Discovery People.

The article claims that there are two reasons for dropping cursive writing; that schools simply don't have the time what with all the new subjects they're teaching these days; and that handwriting is obsolete anyway, nobody does it anymore and we just don't need that skill. Printing is good enough for those rare occasions when we need to write something down. One source claimed we only used handwriting once a year or so. Balderdash I say!

On the supportive side of the discussion the article says that research has proven that learning to write is a crucial component of learning for children. Take it away and kids won't learn the connection between thinking and writing and won't be as capable of expressing themselves. They will lose out on the development of fine motor skills and muscle control that cursive writing gives them.

Now I suppose this is another indication that I've reached the curmudgeon stage, but I disagree with any notion to quit teaching cursive writing to our kids. Not just strongly, but vehemently. I put pen to paper several times every single day, jotting down notes for posts, making up grocery lists, even to-do lists if I'm really busy. I write letters too, and fill out cheques, and sign cards, and write out recipes, and little notes to my partner with his instructions for the day. Using a computer for that type of thing is just plain silly, and printing like a seven year old takes too much time.

Aside from the practical reasons to teach cursive writing, there's that most vital, most necessary ability to think for oneself that we must, absolutely must protect. If learning to write helps us to learn to think, that could make it just about the most important subject schools teach. And I am pleased to say that the writer of the article agreed. Here's the website: 

www.howstuffworks.com

Search for cursive writing and it will be there. Written by Julia Layton, it's titled "Is Cursive Writing Obsolete?"

This man, Nigel Frage, is the leader of the UK Independence Party, a super national party in the UK but elected to serve in Brussels at the EU Commission. Sometimes it takes unusual people to say the obvious.