Let`s ban pettiness in our public discourse
Kingston Whig-Standard
02 Apr 2013, Page 5
The Kingston community owes a debt of gratitude to city councillors Jim Neill and Rob Hutchison. What, with the mayor costing us more than $90,000 a year and each of the 12 municipal councillors another $27,500, few would have had the, um, imagination…read more…
KINGSTON – The Kingston community owes a debt of gratitude to city councillors Jim Neill and Rob Hutchison. What, with the mayor costing us more than $90,000 a year and each of the 12 municipal councillors another $27,500, few would have had the, um, imagination to suggest spending another $300,000 to get a single decision made.
Of course, the proposed casino referendum wasn’t so much about getting a decision made as it was about getting their decision made. Unlike the aborted-before-conception school-on-the-M-Centre –grounds debate, Neil and Hutchison failed in the first instance to persuade council to play ostrich. They knew they wouldn’t get the requisite two-thirds support to revisit that decision, so why not gamble $300K on the city’s perpetually perturbed out-voting the too-busy-to-care in a winner-take-all?
This, by the way, is just more evidence of council members having embraced the small-city version of big-government mentality: “A few hundred thousand here, a few hundred thousand there, it soon adds up to real money.”
Fortunately, a slim majority of councillors opted to do the job they’re paid to do, but the referendum debate on the casino debate got me thinking: if we’re game to blow big bucks, why not blow them on effecting truly positive change in the Kingston community. How about a referendum on banning corrosive pettiness?
Imagine, if you would – if you can – awakening from a week-long triumph like the Scotties Tournament of Hearts without having to face the morning-after recriminations of a Whig-Standard letter writer demanding a full cost accounting of the fun on the sheets. Apparently no communal benefit to hosting the Scotties could be considered because “I haven’t received my cheque yet.”
Incidentally, to that letter-writer: so many of your more generously spirited neighbours paid $100 for the honour of volunteering at the event that, shoulder-to-shoulder, they encircled the K-Rock Centre ice surface during the closing ceremonies. Full accounting, indeed.
In addition to a prohibition on the use of questions by people who have no interest in answers, our ban on pettiness will have to include a subsidiary ban on one of the community’s wellheads of such, the neighbourhood association.
I’ve written in the past about the clever-dressed-up-as-stupid that oozes from the Williamsville and Kingscourt neighbourhood associations, but for truly high-end pettiness, check out the current Sydenham District Association’s newsletter “The Village Pump” ( http://sites.google.com/site/sydenhamdistrict/SDA/newsletter-the-pump ).
This issue consists of three embittered rants. Association chair Ken Ohtake leads off, desperately clinging to Queen’s ghetto population by way of conjuring up statistical justification for denouncing, in no uncertain terms, any suggestion that Sydenham district participate in rebalancing of municipal electoral boundaries.
Resident Peter Rubens takes up the baton, denouncing the rebuilding of King Street. “King Street is being made more traffic-friendly!” he beseeches his neighbours. Traffic friendly, I tell you. Soon, he says, windows will not be opened without traffic noise “drowning out music or conversation.” Residents will catch their breath as they “inhale ever-greater amounts of exhaust from heavy trucks, buses, and cars.” And on it goes.
The Pump’s third piece is a reprise of Councillor Bill Glover’s rant in the Whig-Standard last summer in which he accuses Mayor Mark Gerretsen – although Glover takes great pains to avoid directly acknowledging that Gerretsen is mayor – and those members of council with whom Glover doesn’t see eye-to-eye of being in the pockets of big developers.
Of course, it couldn’t simply be that some members of council disagree with him, or more remarkably, that Glover could be wrong. It has to be about deep, dark, ulterior motives (you’ll remember that Glover’s initial rant was followed by disclosure that he accepted campaign funding from a local developer, but not, as he was quick to point out, from the developer’s company).
Did I mention that the average family income in Sydenham district is $100,000 more than in Rideau Heights? For some reason, I can’t look at The Village Pump without that factoid coming to mind.
Without question, a ban on pettiness will also have to include a prohibition on publicly impugning the motives of others. Imagine the elimination from public discourse of “in the pockets of …” and its innumerable snide variants. Why, the silence that would erupt from municipal council chambers and a subset of municipal councillors would be deafening.
And come to think of it, rather than limiting free speech, there may be a more direct route to ridding ourselves of the worst of our corrosive behaviours. How about a referendum on recalling municipal councillors who can’t deal with an issue without dragging the community down to the level of pettiness? Pettiness, that is, and a willingness to blow $300k of our money to have their own way?
David Morris is a Kingston-based writer and strategist and former member of the Whig-Standard community editorial board. He blogs at http://davidmorrismykingston.word press.com/
The power and the M-centre
Kingston Whig-Standard
02 Aug 2012, Page 5
There’s a terrific line in the opening episode of Aaron Sorkin’s latest television series, The Newsroom. A veteran producer, brought in to restore relevance to the network’s flagship news program, lectures her anchorman on the need to “speak truth to stupid.” As…read more…
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There’s a terrific line in the opening episode of Aaron Sorkin’s latest television series, The Newsroom. A veteran producer, brought in to restore relevance to the network’s flagship news program, lectures her anchorman on the need to “speak truth to stupid.”
As evident by news coverage and letters to the Whig editor of late, the school closure debate – no slouch itself in the stupid department – has uncorked a fresh of wave of the stupid that’s been flowing like a tainted aquifer from the Memorial Centre for the last several years. Here’s why no measure of truth will stem it.
Step back, if you will, to 2003 and Harvey Rosen’s first term as mayor, his mandate to deliver a new arena, and his forevermore-scarred task force volunteers who identified development on some or all of the M-Centre grounds as one means of funding the K-Rock Centre. It was a brainstorm that unleashed a firestorm … of stupid.
A god-backed crusade was launched to save the “beloved” memorial to our fallen heroes – a leaky, dilapidated arena, sitting next to a leaky, dilapidated pool, surrounded by mid-town’s communal doggie toilet, and, oh yes, a cairn – from desecration by Rosen and his rich cronies.
Giving stupid its due, it – and the futility in silencing it with the truth that the centre was never at risk – prodded Rosen’s two successive councils to commit to the recently completed $11 million in M-Centre revitalization (even the scaled-down memorial doggie toilet has a new fence).
But here’s the thing: the people at the wellhead of the stupid, encouraging its flow, channelling its direction, were – and are – anything but stupid.
In fact, they’re an impressive municipal council alumni – Jim Neill (returned to council in 2010), Steve Garrison (stepped down from council in 2010), Mary Fleming, Pat Hodge, and Brian Evoy – a group whose most elementary municipal experience taught them the universe of difference between a citizen committee’s musings and a council decision to divest of a public asset.
So why would smart people pretend to believe stupid? Simple: there’s always a constituency to be scraped together among the ill-informed and easily frightened.
And among that constituency, every M-dollar spent was spun as a victory of the everyman over the oppressor, good over evil. Before the first K-Rock footing was poured, the M-Centre had become not just a tribute to the staggering power of stupid, but a potent political power base.
To what end? Well, that takes us into the 2010 municipal elections and the upcoming 2014 campaign.
The M-Centre sits between the city districts of Kingscourt-Strathcona to the north and Williamsville (WV) to the south. Going into the 2010 municipal elections, Garrison was the incumbent in KS and Ed Smith in WV. (In the interest of disclosure: Smith and I became friends during the 2006 campaign when I opted to support his campaign in my home district rather than run on my own.)
Against the tsunami of stupid, Smith wasn’t about to shake off his “Rosen minion” label. During the official opening of the linear park, for instance, Fleming, on stage as a revitalization committee member, indulged in the grand gesture of turning her back on Smith as he delivered his official remarks, but it was Neill who, a few weeks later, became the alumni torchbearer.
Having once lobbied as a councillor to ban the military from city parks, Neill couldn’t have chosen a more ironic location to kick off his campaign than the M-Centre. Evidently confident that stupid sells, on the stump and in his printed material, he stuck to the fabrication that Smith had voted to sell the M-Centre. It was an effective ploy and he emerged victorious.
Having lost to Smith in 2006, Brian Evoy shifted over to KS to run in 2010 as Garrison’s anointed successor. Neophyte Sandy Berg had the temerity not only to contest the district, but to win it. (Berg and I have subsequently become friends, despite my encouraging her to run, then abandoning her – and Canada – for Australia.)
No sooner were the 2010 elections over than preparation began for the 2014 election cycle, and it is evidently three-pronged.
In Williamsville, Sue Bazely, a standard-bearer at Neill’s campaign kick-off, her partner John Grenville, Hodge and, of course, Neill are the only discernable faces of an email list they’ve dubbed the Williamsville Neighbourhood Association (WNA). Members of the alumni have also been the driving force behind formation of the Kingscourt Community Association (KCS).
Both supposed associations are bereft of elections, membership, and meeting minutes. This hasn’t stopped WNA from claiming it represents “businesses, services and (the 10,710) residents of Williamsville.” Such was the claim, for instance, when Grenville presented his personal views on school closures at a recent public meeting.
With one of their own as the incumbent, WNA has little real work to do but continue building the email list, while using the illusion of an association to refashion the district in its own image. KCS, on the other hand, has the added task of discrediting Berg.
Reliable sources say KCS meetings are the epicentre of a whisper campaign against Berg. Internal notes of a recent meeting label Berg as unhelpful and that she has “declined” to attend meetings. In fact, KCS meetings run up against Berg’s city hall meeting schedule. Those same notes record the group’s decision to continue meeting when it knows Berg can’t attend.
The third prong in the election-readiness effort is the Memorial Centre Advisory Committee. Control of the committee allows the alumni to control the city’s M-Centre agenda and therefore preserve its power base.
One has to ask: when the bustling, multimillion-dollar Invista Centre doesn’t have its own municipal advisory committee, why does the M-Centre, uniquely? If “Quebec” and/or “distinct society” comes to mind, you’re probably on the right track.
City hall sources describe the committee as an unmitigated train wreck, conducted by Garrison, Neill and Church Athletic League stalwart Ken Ohtake. The trio’s reputation for railroading through municipal procedure is the backdrop for Neill’s recent blow-up with city commissioner Lanie Hurdle – a blow-up that now has him at odds with the mayor and, potentially, the Ontario Municipal Act. Fortunately for Neill, fabricated martyrdom is even more powerful than fabricated stupid.
I invite you now to revisit two highly entertaining letters to the Whig editor, published on July 9.
In the first, alumna Hodge evokes memories of the first round of M-Centre stupid and promises it will pale in the face of the stupid to come – testimony, no doubt, to the value of those “association” email lists.
In the second, as if honouring the very fallen heroes to whom the M-Centre is dedicated, alumnus Evoy spins warmish praise around Garrison, Neill, and even Ohtake’s Church Athletic League, while condemning Berg for his pretend belief that she wants to bulldoze the $11-million pool, splash pad, etc. to accommodate a school.
Hodge and Evoy’s letters are a mere harbinger of the stupid you’ll hear ad nauseum between now and the 2014 municipal elections. If that sounds far-fetched or overstated, check “Kingston Memorial Centre” on Wikipedia.
After the page languishing for a couple of years, “Kingston Electors” has posted in excess of 70 updates since mid-July, presenting a stunningly skewed and factually inaccurate rendition of the centre’s “recent history.” Kingston Electors is a political online forum with historical connections to Fleming and her partner Dave Jackson.
So, count on hearing a lot more stupid, and hearing it from people who are absolutely smart enough to know better. And that’s why there’s no speaking truth to it: it’s really anything but stupid, it just sounds that way.
David Morris is a blogger and political operative who most recently co-managed Ontario Attorney General and Kingston MPP John Gerretsen’s 2011 re-election campaign.
Apologies for my bit of fledgling fascism
My Dear Williamsville Neighbours:
I write to apologize to all 10,710 of you, less, of course, the handful who will be offended by my doing so.
I was suckered into one of those “town hall” meetings – and not for the first time.
The first was during the 2010 municipal elections. Jim Neill’s campaign orchestrated a so-called town hall, with supporter Sue Bazely playing a lead role. That the district’s incumbent councillor wasn’t invited soon tipped the crowd off to the real purpose of the session. And once we’d shut down the underhanded campaign rally and the slandering of people not in the room, those of us who turned out for a neighbourly chat had quite a pleasant one.
As it happens, Neill won the district and there have since been several meetings, some in conjunction with the city’s mid-town revitalization initiative. Like the first, these have been orchestrated by the same half-dozen – and I feel I’m being generous in my count: notably Neill, Bazely, Bazely’s partner John Grenville, and former municipal councillor Pat Hodge. Along the way, they’ve anointed themselves the Williamsville Neighbourhood Association (WNA).
Williamsville, as you may know, is the Princess to Concession neighbourhood of mid-town. Along with the south-side Sunnyside neighbourhood, it comprises the city’s Williamsville district.
WNA seems to focus mostly on saving the neighbourhood from all manner of desecration, but when one of its kitchen-table gang wants to lend weight to a personal opinion, as Grenville recently did at a public meeting on school closures, it’s presented as that of a district association.
There’s a beguiling notion that, in community, we all see eye-to-eye. In fact, in healthy ones, the opposite is true. Prior to this town hall, my last WNA outing was to ask what was being done to welcome opposing points of view. The offence taken to my question was all the answer I needed.
Walking into the most recent meeting, I was confronted by a front and centre proclamation that WNA represents businesses, services and residents of Williamsville. A corresponding mission statement promised that WNA acts in the best interest of Williamsville and works to preserve its character.
Given that this association is at best shadowy – there are no elections, named officers, votes, or recorded minutes, I felt compelled to ask:
On what basis does this group claim to represent almost 11,000 residents, not to mention businesses and services?
Who decides what’s in the best interest of Williamsville?
Who decides what character is worth preserving?
The reaction was hostile and unburdened by anything resembling answers. I discerned, however, that when people claim to represent me, it’s incumbent upon me to join in or accept how they do so.
Jim Neill was in attendance, of course, as was, oddly, Sydenham district councillor Bill Glover. I got no traction with my suggestion that I’m represented by an elected municipal councillor. In fact, Neill, the guy who promised to put district back into district councillor, responded that it’s easier for him to deal with an association rather than having to go door-to-door.
No kidding.
In hindsight, I should have packed-up my notion of all things democratic and run, but with so many of my erstwhile neighbours clearly wishing I would, or, better yet, drop dead, I surrendered to ego the next two hours of my life.
And that’s why I owe you this apology.
Before the evening was out, Bazely led us through a “good, bad, and ugly” slide show that I’m embarrassed to say involved your properties, dear neighbours. Never once challenging the supreme authority of the taxonomist – presumably Bazely – we dutifully nodded in cued measures of appreciation and disgust.
Councillor Neill excitedly announced the prospect of WNA conducting walking audits of Williamsville. Under the scheme, neighbours-turned-vigilantes will do a walk-by assessment of Williamsville properties, forwarding perceived deficiencies to the city’s property standards department.
Rounding out an evening of smug, know-it-allness was a highly selective report from Grenville. one of WNAs two self-appointed development watch watchdogs. Evidently, development officials who are duly elected and appointed through democratic processes, regulated under the robust Ontario Municipal Act, can’t be trusted nearly as much as people who simply know better.
I can only beg your forgiveness, dear neighbours, for my shameful silence and therefore tacit participation in this bit of fledgling fascism. I promise you, it won’t happen again.
P.S. To my Kingscourt neighbours:
You may want to know that Councillor Neill and the cadre of M-Centric ex-municipal councillors – Mary Fleming, Brian Evoy, Pat Hodge, Steve Garrison – are busily establishing a similar neighbourhood association in Kingscourt.
With an eye clearly on the 2014 municipal elections, association meetings are at the epicentre of a whisper campaign against incumbent councillor Sandy Berg. Internal notes of a recent meeting describe Berg as unhelpful and record the group’s decision to deliberately meet when her city hall commitments prevent her from attending.
No doubt this underhandedness will be portrayed as the will of all 4,155 of you.
My sense of what it means to be a man is tied directly to my father
My sense of what it means to be a man is tied directly to my father
David Morris
Kingston Whig-Standard
16 Jun 2012
It felt odd in mid-May to turn the same age – to the day – that my father was when he dropped dead. It felt even odder the next day to realize that I will now grow evermore older that the “old man.”
I was 23 when he keeled over, unceremoniously and unquestionably dispatched. His parting parental lesson was life’s toughest: how to go through the motions without drowning in the gaping hole that’s appeared in the universe.
Youth is second only to sex on the list of things we don’t associate with our parents. Despite that, I had no trouble grasping, rationally, that 53 is too young an age at which to die. Surpassing his longevity, while continuing to wrestle with what I want to be when I grow up, drives the point home, freshly and viscerally.
In the lead-up to this Father’s Day, I’ve been pondering the curious, if not surrealistic, circumstance of my being my father’s age and my boys, at 25 and 23, being essentially the age I was when he died.
I’m too much of a fatalist to lose sleep dwelling on the odds of history repeating itself, but this faux time warp has me contemplating the relationship of fathers and sons and, more particularly, how we men inherit and bequeath our sense of what it is to be a male.
My father once suggested that, by the time a child reaches puberty, parents have imparted all that will be imparted. If this is true, and I suspect it is, at least partially, then he had taught me all he could long before he died. This would seem to be borne out by my siblings who have been known to comment, usually impatiently, “You’re just like Dad.”
I’m not sure it’s what they intend, but “just like Dad” calls to mind a remarkably self-reliant, consummate jack-of-all-trades.
Over time, without a mortgage, he and my mother stick-built the rambling, two-storey house in which I grew up near Chelsea, Quebec, filling it with five children as they went.
Per the times, he was the family’s sole bread-winner. We never thought of ourselves as poor, there was just never any money. And so, what he didn’t know how to do for himself, he figured out – always masterfully.
When the transmission went on the family car, for instance, he carefully dismantled it, covering the basement floor with rows of impeccably sequenced parts. As he anticipated, he found a stripped gear, which he was able to replace for a couple of dollars, and the reassembled transmission was put back into service.
He worked as a copy editor at The Ottawa Citizen throughout his abbreviated adult life, coming entirely into his element in his last two years as a researcher and writer for the paper’s consumer help column. As his obituary in that column noted, he could speak planetary gears with mechanics as comfortably as he could speak law with lawyers.
At a more profound level, “just like Dad” calls to mind one of the most unflinchingly principled men I’ve known. For a taste: when my oldest sister started elementary school in the early 1960’s in pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec, my father succeeded in having unqualified teachers removed from the classroom – nuns.
Directed at my brother and me, he told parables from his childhood. The most oft-repeated recounted the day he waited for my Uncle Howard to finish cutting the lawn before smugly asking my grandfather for a quarter for the movies. Sensing a flaw in his son’s character, my grandfather gave him the quarter, but not until he had pushed the hand-mower back across every last inch of the freshly-cut lawn.
The point of the story, as I’ve come to realize, wasn’t about money or work ethic, but about the value of a man’s character and integrity.
“You’ll be punished if you do something wrong,” he would admonish my brother and me, “but not nearly as much as if you lie about it.” Nothing more clearly signalled our jig being up than his dismissing us to “go outside, get your stories straight, and we’ll start again.”
I’ve been catching myself staring into the bathroom mirror these last few weeks, searching for signs of the face that I haven’t seen in 30 years.
Is the greying around the fringe the way I remember it? The receding hair line? The laugh lines in the corners of the eyes?
Without question, my sense of what it means to be a man is tied directly to my father and, by extension, to his father. To this juncture, so has my sense of what it means to be a father. But from here on, my boys and I are in uncharted waters.
Council should perform like it’s spending someone else’s money — ours (Kingston Whig-Standard, 9 May 2012, Page5)
Kingston Whig-Standard
9 May 2012
It’s a truism — if not a cliche — in organizational behaviour circles that groups undergo four sequential stages of development: forming, storming, norming and performing. If it weren’t apparent from the recent plethora of 7-6 votes, then the…read more…
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It’s a truism — if not a cliche — in organizational behaviour circles that groups undergo four sequential stages of development: forming, storming, norming and performing.
If it weren’t apparent from the recent plethora of 7-6 votes, then the acrimonious exchange between Mayor Mark Gerretsen and Councillor Rick Downes that opened the last city council meeting (shades of Rosen and Downes of yore) suggests council is deep into storming.
Time will tell if the burbling rancour establishes itself as the norm for the second half of this council term. At this juncture, that conclusion is as imminent as it would be regrettable. But even more regrettable is that this council has yet to demonstrate a whit of financial stewardship.
Consider this year’s cavalier hike in property taxes and the promise of the same for the next two.
Consider the explosive year-over-year growth of the city’s “sunshine” list — the number of city employees earning in excess of $100,000 — city payroll being one of the key factors in your ever-escalating property taxes.
Consider council’s recent pledge of $200,000 for the International Hockey Hall of Fame’s laughable “business plan,” and that it actually considered pledging $400,000.
Consider the $1 million — and counting — hunk of scrap metal in Confederation Park, on the same waterfront into which we discharge sewage because we can’t afford to rebuild “historic” infrastructure.
But if nothing else, consider council’s performance at last week’s meeting.
The first substantive item of business was a motion to accept the environmental assessment on the proposed third crossing of the Cataraqui River. There are a few things you should understand about the EA.
First, it cost you $2 million to produce and it consumed about three years of the time and resources of a whole whack of outside experts, public servants and community members alike.
Second, once accepted, it has a shelf life of 10 years. So, if we do something distinctly unKingstonian and limit the duration of our angst-ridden debate on the matter to something less than another full decade, the EA stands as current.
Third, council’s acceptance of the document is nothing more than a formal acknowledgment of the completion of the EA, without committing the city to proceed with construction of the bridge.
All of that said, it was extraordinary to see councillors Rob Hutchison, Jim Neill and Bill Glover vote against accepting the document — the formal equivalent of flushing our $2 million down the toilet.
Given that Hutchison and Glover sat on the council that committed to undertake the EA, it was even more extraordinary to see Glover deliver his thumbs-down vote with a theatrical smirk — an apparent indication of the respect our tax dollars deserve.
The second substantive agenda item was a proposed hike in parking fees at city-owned downtown lots.
Strikingly absent in council’s Skinneresque discussion of behaviour-modification techniques was consideration of the revenues generated by parking and how those revenues might offset next year’s cavalier increase in property taxes, the funding pledged to the Hockey Hall of Fame, our $1 million hunk of waterfront scrap metal, and/or the upgrading of historic infrastructure.
Evidently, our city is so flush with cash, revenue generation doesn’t warrant mention.
As an aside: council’s discussion of the parking matter became quite entertaining. At any given moment, the typical downtown parker was portrayed as everything from a latte-sipping, downtown elitist, driving his Lexus a block from home, to a poor, downtrodden mother of three, nursing the family’s aging Chevy in from the whoop-whoops to her grinding minimum-wage job in the cruel inner city, forced, of course, to drop off and retrieve her children from multiple daycares along the way.
Fortunately, the factual material city parking director Sheila Kidd evidently had on hand wasn’t allowed to spoil the fun.
The third substantive item of business was council’s ongoing interference in the school-closure discussion.
Not content to exercise fiscal irresponsibility within its own realm, council, led by those comfortable with flushing a $2-million EA down the tubes, voted to continue railroading school board trustees into acting with similar irresponsibility with our education dollars.
Sure, there aren’t enough students to warrant three high schools. Sure, it’d cost more than $20 million to get the buildings up to scratch. Sure, spreading education over depleted buildings does a terrific job of diluting education quality. But what does any of this matter when taxpayers’ pockets are bottomless?
Of course, the only fitting cherry on top of an evening of such unbridled largesse was council’s parting demand that the province reinstate an annual $345-million subsidy to the horse racing industry.
It beggars belief.
Forming, storming or norming, one can only hope this council soons starts performing like it’s spending someone else’s money — ours.
No honour in local politicians running to the media
If you missed Councillor Bill Glover’s petulant-tinged screed in last week’s Whig-Standard on the Jack Astor’s approval process, or, more likely, you gave up trying to hack your way through it, here’s the abridged version.
Over the course of his five years on the city’s planning committee, Glover attended a whack of private get-to-know-you sessions with prospective developers. At no time during any of these sessions did a developer give the slightest indication that, gee, they’d really like to have their development proposal approved. That is to say, so long as Glover was at the table, it was all “pass the tea” and “I insist: have another cookie.”
Very shortly after Glover’s council colleagues voted him off the planning committee island, these by-all-accounts routine, get-to-know-you sessions became, according to Glover, “secret meetings,” made worse for being held in the brain centre of Kingston’s very own evil empire. And then, if you can imagine, a developer lobbied – lobbied, I tell you – to have its project approved.
That, in a nutshell, covers The World According to Glover, Part One.
Part Two details Glover’s moral outrage at the omnipotent – or so he thought – authority of the volunteers on the city’s heritage advisory committee being usurped by our duly-elected municipal leaders.
It’s difficult to know what part of “advisory” the good councillor missed, but this is the committee that, evidently, thinks it’s advisable to keep a god-forsaken concrete bunker in the heart of the downtown vacant for another decade or two, rather than expose the community to the scarring consequence of a commercial sign.
Permit me a digression: this would also be the same Councillor Glover who helped stall the Lake Ontario Park Revitalization Project a few years back by leaping to the defence of the park’s “architecturally interesting” public washroom buildings.
Without question, “heritage” is a mighty sword when brandished by the would-be powerful.
Interestingly, the biggest issue raised by Glover’s missive isn’t its content, but Glover’s behaviour.
Inside council chambers and while in attendance at council meetings, councillors’ conduct is regulated by a procedural bylaw that, among other things, prohibits speaking disrespectfully of anyone, and attributing motive to anyone, particularly a fellow member of council.
Regrettably, outside of council chambers and/or a council meeting, councillors’ behaviour vis-a-vis municipal business is regulated by nothing more than his or her individual sense of professionalism, loyalty, esprit de corps, collegiality, leadership, dare I say it: states-personship.
Glover well knows the cornucopia of aspersions cast in his public tirade wouldn’t be tolerated for an instant inside council chambers, which is why, of course, he took them to an entirely different forum: the community’s daily newspaper.
This isn’t the first time Glover has resorted to the press when he hasn’t had his way. You’ll remember his famous “the fix is in” comment after his fellow councillors declined to re-appoint his preferred candidate to a municipal committee.
Glover isn’t alone, of course, in this tactic. It was only a matter of weeks’ ago that Councillor Jim Neil took to the press in equally petulant fashion after he, Glover and a member of the public were taken to task for what was reportedly rude behaviour at a planning committee meeting.
Like Glover, Neill isn’t a member of the committee, and therefore, like Glover, has no direct ability to affect its decisions. Are you beginning to see the pattern?
In the local media, Neill described the committee chair’s focus on decorum – as dictated by the city’s procedural bylaw – as indicative of the committee’s “country-club mentality.” As with Glover’s, it’s a comment Neill knows he wouldn’t be permitted to make in council chambers, and it’s hard to imagine one more disrespectful of his supposed colleagues.
We elect municipal politicians to debate civic issues within the municipal government forum. That forum is defined through a variety of regulations ranging from the Municipal Act to Kingston’s own council procedural bylaw.
Local media isn’t to be faulted for publishing screeds and juicy quotes from local politicians. But when those same politicians take to the media to get away with behaviour they’re specifically prohibited from using in the forum to which they were elected, their behaviour should be seen for what it is: entirely dishonourable.
Queen’s student ghetto to be province’s first Central Brothel District
KINGSTON , April 1, 2012 – If three Kingston municipal councillors have their way, the chronically troublesome Queen’s student ghetto will soon be transformed into Ontario’s first central brothel district, or CBD.
Once again demonstrating their tireless commitment to out-of-jurisdiction issues, councillors Rob Hutchison, Bill Glover and Jim Neill have pounced on last week’s Court of Appeal ruling that appears to legalize brothels in Ontario.
At a hastily called news conference this morning, opened with a characteristically lengthy, but well-researched lecture on prostitution by Glover, the trio unveiled an ambitious plan to make Kingston the “first capital” of provincial brothels.
“We’re going to spring yet another surprise motion on council next Tuesday,” Hutchison said, “calling for a three-year, phased-in ban on students from the neighbourhood. We’re confident we’ll come away with a 7 – 6 decision.”
Neill added: “Yeah, and if during the move-out, students leave their doors open with the air conditioning running, we’ll…,” but he was quickly cut-off by his colleagues.
“The city’s sustainability department is already on board,” Hutchison noted. “Think of the carbon savings from low-wattage red bulbs rather than streetlights.”
KEDCO president Jeff Garrah was the first of an impressive array of supporters on hand to speak in favour of the proposal, and to present his organization’s plans for the students-to-brothels transition.
“Economic development is always about expensive logos and clever taglines,” Garrah explained. “As a tag, ’Kingston, Where Good Ideas Come to Die’ continues to resonate more clearly than our official ‘Where History and Innovation Thrive.’”
But by building on previous near-wins, while minimizing re-development costs, Garrah said, KEDCO has come up with a sure winner: “Kingston, Where Historians and Innovators Writhe.”
Just back from its quarterly country-club retreat, the city’s planning committee also voiced its support. “Our big challenge in dealing with development in that neighbourhood,” committee chair Kevin George said, “is that we apparently don’t know our bedrooms from our broom closets. This way, the Health Unit can sort it all out.”
George added that his committee would be meeting to further discuss the proposal, “over an afternoon 18.”
Although not on the agenda, two personal friends of Neill’s, introducing themselves respectively as the Williamsville and Kingscourt “neighbourhood associations,” insisted on speaking next.
“A brothel district is an entirely sustainable approach to ensuring high-density ‘in-fills’ in the core,” they suggested, “without the messiness of actual development. Finally, it’s something we… er, our associations can support.”
The pair closed their presentation with the surprise announcement of a proposed Sunday brothel at the Memorial Centre. “The old Hockey Hall of Fame building would be perfect,” they said. “Giant puck…well you get the idea.”
The Kingston Rental Properties Owners’ Association was next up. While its membership stands to gain in the long-term from clients rather than students getting, um, accommodated, it faces short-term income disruption during the transition.
The group also faces the expense and “heartbreak,” according to its spokesperson, of removing “the Kingston arch,” that traditional, ubiquitous slab of heritage plywood that allows livingrooms and diningrooms to be rented as two bedrooms, rather than just one.
Seeing an opportunity for a partnership, Save Our Schools (SOS) and local heritage groups addressed the rental property owners’ concern in their complementary “Oldest School of the Oldest Profession” proposal.
The group is calling on the city, St. Lawrence College, anyone…, anyone…, to “invest” $30M in transforming KCVI high school from its current pre-condemnation state, to a state-of-the-art school of prostitution.
“Performing the Kingston Arch” will be a cornerstone of the school’s repurposed curriculum, the partners promised, noting they were “highly encouraged” by a recent description of the building as “a rabbit warren.”
Representatives of the KGH board of directors were also on hand, announcing they’ve just granted the hospital’s CEO a $250,000 hike on her half-million dollar annual salary. When asked if this relates to the inherent health issues in the sex trade, a confused-sounding spokesperson replied, “Why no, it doesn’t relate to anything.”
Queen’s principal Dan Woolf proved to be the biggest surprise in the group of supporters. “Turning the student ghetto… er, village into a brothel district will allow Queen’s to return to its traditional fall schedule of alumni donations… er, activities,” he said.
“Not only can we bank on residents being at work in their bedrooms on Saturday evenings, but they’ll each have at least one of those out-of-town troublemakers with them. It’s a win-win that allows us to entirely redefine ‘homecoming.'”
The proposal isn’t without controversy.
A group of local teachers is insisting that the brothel district be named in honour of a retired colleague whose track record in supporting the industry, they said, is legendary.
Meanwhile, anticipating the massive displacement of Kingston’s student population, Strathcona Park residents are demanding the city fast-track plans for affordable housing in a little-used neighbourhood parkette.
“It’s not that we have anything against students,” a spokesperson said, “it’s just not the right place for them.”
– 30 –
Sunshine List: Salary report only confirms that we’re at a dangerous time socially
Sunshine List: Salary report only confirms that we’re at a dangerous time socially
28 Mar 2012
(Full Article)
Days after my comment on the obscenity of Kingston General Hospital CEO Leslee Thompson’s $501,000 annual pay package, and days before the McGuinty government’s so-called austerity budget, the province last Friday released the 2011 “sunshine” list, a by-name-accounting of public-sector employees whose annual earnings exceed $100,000.
The hope, obviously, was that the sunshine numbers would be buried in this week’s budget coverage. At worst, they’d justify a long-overdue tightening of the public purse. But the sunshine figures tell a critical story that we ignore at our peril.
In 2010, KGH reported 137 sunshiners, costing us $18.8 million for the year (for brevity, I’ve combined reported salary and taxable benefit figures). To this, we’d add 15 Hotel Dieu sunshiners at $2 million, and another 36 at Providence Care at $5.4 million. In total: 188 local hospital employees costing us $26.2 million.
In 2011, KGH’s list has grown to 148 at a cost of $19.8 million. Add in 18 from Hotel Dieu at $2.6M million, and 44 from Providence Care at $7 million. Our new tally: 210 sunshiners costing us $29.4 million.
This tally excludes the myriad sunshine lists of other local health-care agencies, such as the Health Unit, and any portion of the $51.1 million the 429 Ministry of Health sunshiners (province-wide) cost us last year. The ministry list was up from 396 people, costing $47.6 million in 2010.
Let’s forget health care – but not that Kingston is but one small city.
In 2010, principal Dan Woolf pulled in $384,000 atop Queen’s mammoth roster of 892 sunshiners, costing us $123.2 million. At St. Lawrence College, president Chris Whitaker, at $309,700 fronted a list of 105, costing $12.1 million. Limestone school board director Brenda Hunter, at $231,400, anchored another list of 72, costing $8.3 million. And at the separate board, 54 more cost us $6.4 million.
The 2010 local education tally: 1,123 civil servants costing $150 million.
One year later, the Queen’s list is up to 930 at a cost $131.9 million. St. Lawrence College, an impressive anomaly, has dropped to 100, costing $11.5 million. The Limestone board, taking up the slack, is at 75, costing $8.8 million, and the separate board is at 67, costing $7.8 million.
The 2011 local education tally: 1,172 civil servants at a cost of $160 million – a 4.4-per-cent increase in membership at a 6.7-per-cent increase in cost.
Again, this tally excludes any portion of the education ministry’s sunshine list, growing from 346 employees at $40 million in 2010, to 385 employees at $44.7 million in 2011. Also excluded, the Ministry of Training, Colleges & Universities’ list of 95 sunshiners, costing $10.9 million, up from 77 at a cost of $8.9 million in 2010.
Little wonder then, that our local health care and education sectors have set up charitable foundations to raise voluntary taxes (i.e. donations). Gee, there just isn’t enough money in the system to care for patients and students.
But here’s the whopper:
It 2010, City of Kingston CAO Gerard Hunt, at $185,900, led a sunshine list of 46 employees costing $5.4 million. In 2011, at $199,600, he now leads 112 staffers costing $12.8 million. Kingston Fire & Rescue appears to be the hotbed of new membership.
At police headquarters, Chief Stephen Tanner has gone from $202,100 to $208,600 while overseeing a comparatively modest increase from 32 sunshiners costing $3.7 million in 2010, to 34, at a cost of $4 million, in 2011.
Thanks to a loophole in the law and an evident aversion to sunlight, Utilities Kingston keeps its list in the dark.
So, the critical story behind all these numbers?
I need you to know one more: the average income in Kingston, in Ontario, and in Canada is in the low- to mid-$40,000s.
In the meantime, Ontario’s public-sector $100,000-plus club grew from a reported 70,000 in 2010 to 79,000 in 2001, costing us $10 billion, and demonstrating that systemic greed doesn’t magically disappear below the reportable threshold.
In Kingston last week, Ralph Nader was laughably understated in his prediction that Occupy will rise again.
Well, of course it will, Ralph.
And at some point, those prime-of-lifers consigned to mom and dad’s basement are going to realize their quality of life isn’t being gutted by big greedy corporations, but by their sovereign’s inability to reign in an insatiably gluttonous, out-of-touch court.
And at some point, Occupiers, or whatever they call themselves, will realize that the public-sector labour leaders standing, cross-fingered, by their sides, staunchly defending their right to pitch a tent, are busily trading their futures for an ever-more ludicrous list of “entitlements.”
And at some point, they’ll realize that big greedy labour’s version of trickle-down economics is no more moral or credible than big greedy business’s.
Sure, we’re at a tough time financially. But the critical story in the sunshine numbers is that we’re at a dangerous time socially. And if that sounds over-stated, take heed of Europe and the early rumblings in Quebec, and for heaven’s sake, reread A Tale of Two Cities.
David Morris is a Kingston-based writer and strategist and former member of the Whig-Standard community editorial board.
The public sector’s shame (Kingston Whig-Standard, 19 Mar 2012, Page5)
Kingston Whig-Standard
19 Mar 2012
Having named the evil that is public sector management salaries while in Kingston last week, it’s a shame that dancing on the head of a pin was the best follow-through NDP Leader Andrea Horwath could deliver…read more
Having named the evil that is public sector management salaries while in Kingston last week, it’s a shame that dancing on the head of a pin was the best follow-through NDP leader Andrea Horwath could deliver.
Outside Kingston General Hospital, Horwath enumerated chief executive officer (CEO) Leslee Thompson’s annual pay envelope: $410,000 in base salary, a 20 percent bonus, and a $750 monthly car allowance. All tolled: $501,000 a year.
In addition to the top-notch health and benefits package a hospital CEO would enjoy, Thompson’s “entitlement” includes our apology of $410,000 were she to give us cause to sack her.
Knowing that the few of us have the background to truly appreciate such income, allow me a few perspectives that might bring Thompson’s pay closer to planet earth.
With a bit of rounding, $501,000 works out to $41,750 per month, or $9,600 per week. Assuming Thompson averages a 60-hour work week, that’s $160 per hour. So, for instance, if she whips down to the cafeteria for a coffee to go, it costs us $32 to $40. If you exclude her car allowance, of course, her pay drops to a paltry $492,000, hardly enough to expect her to cover her own way to and from work.
Here’s another perspective, which excludes Thompson’s car allowance.
Thompson earns almost three times more than her boss, the Minister of Health, who’s responsible for every hospital in the province, as well as the rest of our healthcare system. Incidentally, she also earns about three times what our Member of Provincial Parliament earns, the Attorney General, for keeping the lights on in our courts and legal system.
Thompson earns almost two and one half times what her boss’s boss earns, the Premier of Ontario. Be as cynical as you please, but I hope I don’t have to point out the orders of magnitude difference in their job responsibilities.
But let’s not stop there.
Thompson earns almost three times more than our Member of Parliament. And were our MP to become a federal cabinet minister, she would still best him by more than double. And if he were to become Prime Minister of the country, she’d still better his total package by $176,000. And just for the hell of it: her base package is $10,000 more than U.S. President Barack Obama’s.
But here’s the perspective that I think really counts.
One-sixth of Kingston’s households subsist below Canada’s de facto poverty line. Even those at the very top of this impoverished range, whose pockets are nonetheless picked to pay Thompson, earn in a year less than half of what she’s paid in a month. And they have pay their own way to their multiple part-time jobs.
As for Thompson’s car allowance: an increase to $750 a month would be transformational in the lives of a whole whack of Kingstonians subsisting on Ontario Disability Support (ODSP) and other social assistance stipends.
Lest I appear to be targeting Thompson, there are 137 public sector employees at KGH who, in 2010, the latest available reporting year, earned in excess of $100,000. Five, in fact, earned more than $300,000; eleven, more than $200,000; and the rest in the $100,000 to $192,000 range.
All fat-cat bureaucratics?
Thirty-three of them have the word “nurse” in their job title.
And lest I appear to be targeting KGH, we have three major hospitals on the go, all with impressive arrays of public sector $100k-clubbers. And lest I appear to be targeting healthcare, our local director of education pulls in over $240,000 a year.
And so it goes throughout the public sector. In fact, an April 2011 financial report pegged the average annual salary in Canada at $43,000, while noting that there were 70,000 public sector employees in Ontario earning more than $100,000.
And this is where Horwath proved her mettle at pin-dancing.
Her reported “problem” with Thompson’s remuneration is that she’s receiving it “while at the same time health-care workers are worried about their jobs.” Worried, mind you. So long as the McGuinty government pledges to continue throwing dollars we don’t have at her well-paid brother/sisterhood, then, Horwath’s problem disappears.
My problem with Thompson’s remuneration package is that it’s obscene, it’s immoral, and it’s a symptom of the corruption that has taken hold at both ends of the public sector.
From the so-called management side, it’s the corruption that flatters itself with its oft-repeated, ludicrous assertion that the “talent” required to administer a hospital is more rare, and therefore more costly, than that required to run the province, the country, the free world.
From the public sector unions’ side, as Horwath so aptly highlighted, it’s the corruption that says: we don’t care who plunders the taxpaying peasantry, so long as we get our share.
Kingston Theorem: Only the unelected qualified to hold office
I think I finally figured out Kingston’s version of democracy. Here’s my encapsulation, with reference to the most current of the news that just keeps repeating itself:
1. Elect representatives to steward public resources concentrated in the local school system.
2. Immediately upon these elected school representatives demonstrating anything akin to stewardship, conclude that they are untrustworthy, incompetent, and without a whit of functioning judgement and/or integrity.
3. Concurrent with Step 1 above, elect representatives to steward public resources concentrated in the local municipality.
4. Immediately upon these elected municipal representatives demonstrating anything akin to stewardship, conclude that they are untrustworthy, incompetent, and without a whit of functioning judgement and/or integrity.
5. Concurrent with Step 2 above, and despite Step 4, demand that the untrustworthy, incompetent, and without a whit of functioning judgement and/or integrity stewards of the municipality forcefully interject themselves as second-guessers of the untrustworthy, incompetent, and without a whit of functioning judgement and/or integrity stewards of the school system.
This leads to my Kingston Theorem: only the unelected are qualified to hold the office for which they weren’t elected.
And isn’t it wonderful that we have so many highly-qualified, vocal individuals who are willing to stand up and not be elected.
David Morris - My Kingston 