Purposeful Ramblings Through My Mind

Re: Ministry of Education’s School Nutrition Policy

Trust the Government of Ontario to take an essentially sound idea and mess up the implementation until it’s barely recognizable.

Teachers aren’t allowed to give candy as prizes anymore. I can get behind that. But we’re also not allowed to serve freezies after the annual Terry Fox Run or Play Day next June, unless of course they’re 100% juice. This strikes me first as far too restrictive, and second as wrong-headed; as any nutritionist will tell you, juice has too much sugar and too little fibre to be good for you anyway. Similarly, diet sodas are no improvement over regular because the sweetener is one not recognized by the body; they’re at least as bad for you as regular Coke, but the diet caffeine-free ones are permissible.

Pizza places have to comply with the regulations to sell pizza at elementary schools. That means whole wheat crusts, low-fat cheese, and most importantly, full-disclosure ingredient labels. That last effectively puts all small businesses out of the running for the school market, because they can’t afford to put their ingredient list on every box. Way to support local business!

Many teachers have arrived at their first in-service of the school year to discover that the regulations designed for children are also applied to situations where no children are present. I’m rather surprised that a crowd of angry, under-caffeinated teachers didn’t show up at Queen’s Park when they realized that the Board of Education was no longer allowed to serve coffee and tea with caffeine in them at events designed for groups of teachers. How exactly does serving coffee at an in-service with no children at it set a bad example for children?

Could we go back to teaching our children about a reasonable balance between healthy and non-healthy foods? This policy is so restrictive it’s punitive, and that in the long run will do more harm than good.

In the testimonial from the Mayo Clinic she went to in Arizona, her
condition is not a life-threatening cancerous brain tumour; it's a
vision-threatening benign cyst on her pituitary gland. She was not
going to be dead to wait six months, if in fact she'd even had to wait
six months - she didn't wait to find out.

Furthermore, she's not suing the government to get her money back;
she's suing the government to dismantle the health care system we
have, and she's funded by a registered charity called the Canadian
Constitution Foundation. Registered charity - that means our tax
dollars are paying for it via tax deductible contributions.

Holmes is misrepresenting herself, and our system, to Americans.
She's a fraud. I wonder if her circuit of talk shows and that
commercial have paid off the new mortgage yet?

Our newspaper occasionally reprints opinion articles from other newspapers around the globe or in Canada, to give another perspective on events in the news. Today's is from Saudi Arabia, about the lack of medals they've experienced in the game, and calling for more investment in their sports infrastructure to improve their chances at future games.

I'm debating writing a letter to the editor to point out that, while investing in their athletes might pay off for Saudi Arabia, until they allow women to compete, they're still going to be lower on the medals than other nations simply because they're cut out of so many possible competitions.

Sport is about excellence triumphing over any other consideration. Saudi Arabia lets gender discrimination triumph over excellence. As such, they're missing part of the point of the Games.

First, here's what I'm replying to.

( My response )

Background: Some years ago, under the aegis of a government that doesn't deserve to be remembered by name, Hamilton underwent a forced amalgamation with several surrounding suburban municipalities. Since then, the suburbs have seen their taxes go up, for several reasons. First is that the suburbs could afford lower taxes when they were separate - they didn't have social services to pay and their infrastructure was mostly much newer, so upkeep was less. Second was that housing prices were lower across the board, and property taxes are linked to a home's value (even if people didn't touch the value of their home.) Third, in Flamborough at least, there was a subsidy coming in from Flamborough Downs, a racetrack with slot machines.

Well, when the city underwent amalgamation, taxes went up due to rising property values and some evening-out of the tax system. Mind you, we in the old city also underwent tax increases which have exceeded inflation every single year, and the city is still broke. But Flamborough residents kept the subsidy they were getting for Flamborough Downs - the money was not pooled into the city coffers to affect everyone's taxes.

Until now. City Council has voted to end the subsidy and pool that money. That means a 9% increase in property taxes for Flamborough - and a 3.1% increase for the lower city where I live.

( Letter to the editor )

This one is about the proposal to make the public transit system in Hamilton free for users, and about a taxi driver complaining that this will kill his business.

( Read more... )

In answer to this article, I wrote the following letter to the editor:

Mr. Urquart, in his column, seems to think that the way we elect our representatives is a minor thing, and the real job is to get on with the real work of government. He believes the voters of the province understood the proposed change to the system and rejected it.

The polls do not bear this out. They showed, throughout the campaign, that people really didn’t have a clear idea of what MMP would mean. Politicians didn’t talk about it, or did so in the vaguest of non-partisan terms. The referendum happened in a vacuum, so that voters made up their minds based on incomplete evidence and the opinions of newspaper columnists like himself.

I have a particular bone to pick with Mr. Urquart’s statement that the reformers believe proportionality should trump accountability, tradition, simplicity and stability.

Anyone who believes that MMP would lead to less accountability for representatives hasn’t studied the countries in which it has been running smoothly for decades, like Germany. There, it’s a truism that list seats go primarily to opposition members while riding seats are the purview of the governing party. Translation: if the opposition members elected from lists want to form a government, they have to get a riding seat the next time out. List members and riding members both fight for riding nominations and the votes of individual constituents. That means at least two representatives courting each vote. That doesn’t strike me as a lack of accountability – in fact, it strikes me as better accountability, because you get to see two candidates in action before voting for either of them, it eliminates the incumbent edge, and it maintains the local character of elections.

I don’t see tradition as a good reason to keep things as they are. I’m a firm believer in, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but citing tradition as an argument against MMP is a way of saying, “we know it’s broke, but we’ve always done it this way so we’re not changing.” If the traditional way doesn’t work, it needs to be adjusted. Simplicity is in the same category. Simplicity at the expense of functionality is a bargain with the devil. Let’s go with the simplest system that works. First-past-the-post doesn’t fulfil that requirement.

Which brings us to stability. Stability is a straw man argument, because there’s no good reason why a minority government can’t be stable. Again, the matter of Germany: they get away with reasonable intervals between elections because their politicians work at forming coalitions. But even if you assume that a minority government is by definition less stable, you’re forced to ask the question: what price do we pay for our stable majority governments? And the answer is: the disenfranchisement of the 58% of voters who didn’t vote for the winning party, and the disenfranchisement of all those who didn’t vote because they didn’t see how it would do any good.

I want electoral reform because proportionality does indeed trump non-functional tradition, simplicity, and the value of majority governments as a stabilizing force. I believe it would lead to more accountability, and to more people taking an interest in politics and demanding that accountability. And I’m angry that the politicians in charge of the referendum did not create the kind of climate of public debate where these issues could be properly debated to allow for an informed choice. Once again, our system circumvented real democracy.