Archive for the ‘Personal Reflection’ Category
Christmas Reflections
To those who will join today with family and friends and celebrate Christmas, may I wish you a Merry Christmas.
My family Christmas tradition sees three generations of Laforet’s celebrating Christmas in Guildwood – where our Christmas dinner has been celebrated since 1968 and with the addition of spouses, children and family friends spans three generations and includes nearly two dozen people.
For me Christmas is a time to share with family and friends, catch up and reflect on the year that is quickly coming to an end. It’s also a time to make decisions about how you will spend the year to come.
This past year has been a unique and totally unexpected one for me that has seen many challenges and opportunities present themselves. My community involvement and activism have taken an angle I could not have predicted they would even when I decided last fall to actively work with Guildwood residents to oppose Toronto Hydro’s project.
While where it has led has been unexpected, the camaraderie and friendship that exists within Wind Concerns Ontario is second to none that I’ve witnessed elsewhere and I feel blessed to consider so many fine Ontarians standing up for their communities to be my friends.
Christmas 2009 will also mark the one year anniversary of the burning of the Studio Building at the Guild Inn – something that tragically destroyed a heritage building on a site with so much meaning to my community. It is my hope, by Christmas 2010 the old Bickford Inn will begin to look like it’s old maintained self again and we can move past the ‘lost decade’ the City of Toronto brought my community at the Guild Inn.
Next year I am sure will be interesting for it’s own reasons, but I look forward to the challenge and know I am in good company as we soldier on.
Comments OffIn North Carolina Representatives Listen To Constituents, Defend Nature Conservation – Ontario MPPs Should Take Notice
Over the course of my political involvement I’ve become less and less impressed with the Parliamentary system as I do believe far too often party discipline and the control the executive branch has over the legislative branch hurts local decision making and local democracy. No where is this clearer than in Ontario, where you have communities on the escarpment fighting aggregate projects that will undoubtedly hurt the environment and their communities, folks in Simcoe fighting a dump site that will poison fresh water and be built against the wishes of the local municipality, folks in York region and north east Scarborough opposing development that risks the Oak Ridges Moraine or the Rouge Park, or the thirty four grassroots groups in twenty one counties across Ontario I am proud to represent in opposing poorly planned and poorly regulated wind developments that have negative health impacts and pose a threat to nature conservation and the local environment.
All of these fights represent instances of communities versus the Provincial government, and on all of these issues the Premier and his government side with the developer, against the local community consensus, and against clear science that in each case demonstrates negative impacts to groundwater, habitat, human health or the environment. Areas with Liberal MPPs get fed this utter crap from their local representatives that they are essentially powerless to do anything because of party discipline and so their communities basically need to just suffer silently, and re-elect them because the other guy is far worse, so they say.
That is in essence the flaw with the Parliamentary system. One tyrant, in this case Premier McGuinty (please someone challenge me on the label tyrant, as I am more than prepared to defend it), makes a decision and tells members of his caucus, each of whom was duly elected, that their opinions are worthless, and although no one actually elected him Premier, he is boss man because they support him and if they dare challenge him by standing up for their constituents he will throw them out of caucus and end their political careers.
Sucks if you’re a citizen, great if you’re the Premier.
In Ontario, residents like me have fought hard and watched Liberal MPP after Liberal MPP turn out to be totally and utterly useless at doing anything of any value for their constituents due to the rigidness of party unity, and have had to take political action, and prepare for larger battles to come in hopes of getting government to listen, or in many cases defeating those MPPs who lack the guts or courage it takes to actually do their jobs.
As a political science geek, I have to tell you I see a lot of value in a congressional system as representatives actually do represent their constituents, and will fight like hell for them because that is how they keep their job. They don’t give speeches saying things like ‘but I can’t do anything for you, because the Premier has all the say and he won’t listen’. They introduce the bill and defend their constituents (at least the good ones do) and they get things done.
North Carolina is the example I am going to use because they did something quite courageous about a month ago that is worth sharing.
In 1983 North Carolina was concerned at the rate of development on mountain ridges, and passed a bill banning further ridge development. 95% of this land is now protected by the state or federal government, kind of like how the Green Belt protects a whole whack of land around the GTA from development. When wind developers wanted to put turbines on mountain ridges, presumably due to the high winds one would expect to find at higher elevations, Assemblymen and Senators at the state legislature said no. They did so, because their constituents have been fighting to protect the mountain ridges from all development and have been aggressively working to conserve the natural beauty that is the mountains.
This July a law passed the North Carolina Senate 45-1 declaring that wind farms are the same as any other unwanted development in this conservation area, and that the only wind turbines that would be allowed would be those shorter than 100 feet, and the power generated could only be used to supply a single home. They’ve basically struck a balance of allowing an individual to build a home based turbine, while blocking the for profit wind factories that are harmful to the environment, disrupt conservation areas and are frankly unwelcome in those parts of the state by local residents.
45-1 means Democrats and Republicans voted for the bill in a bi-partisan effort to protect areas worthy of nature conservation for massive wind projects. They did it because it was what their constituents wanted, and because residents made it clear that nature conservation was more important to them in that particular area than industrial wind factories.
The difference? The people’s elected local representatives have the power. The Governor is directly elected separately from them and does not share a directly linked political fate. The Governor also can’t bribe folks with perks into keeping quiet like a Premier can. If you’re a representative, thats what you do, you represent. You defend your community and fight like hell for them, free of the fear of retribution or undemocratic tactics used so commonly in our party politics to silence dissent.
Back to Ontario, our legislature and Liberal MPPs voted to take away the voices of local residents, they voted to remove environmental protection, to remove local planning and to deny citizens the right to participate in the decision making. Scarborough’s waterfront MPPs were spineless in the face of this local issue, and chose to sit quietly while their party leader literally took shots at residents of their constituencies and the Deputy Premier joined in as well. They are cowards who sat quietly as residents fought to protect the environment from unnecessary degradation.
Today John Gerretsen, the Minister of Environment put his personal approval behind Toronto Hydro’s illegal application and granted them permission to install an anemometer, wasting over a million dollars of taxpayer money to study something the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Federal Government each have already studied and determined there was not sufficient wind to warrant a wind farm.
Through the abuse of the Premier and Deputy Premier and Scarborough’s embarrassing lack of representation, residents were told defending the shoreline, some of the last untouched shoreline on Lake Ontario, and certainly in an urban area, a Provincial heritage site dismissible and not worth even listening too.
In North Carolina, I’m sure state legislators would have stood up for nature conservation, and common sense, in Ontario we’re forced to fight on our own, and defeat those who will claim to want to represent a community, until elected to do so and then fail miserably at the task at hand, breaking the faith with those who sent them and hurting the community in the process. I hope these failures of representatives carry the weight of this damage on their conscience, but sadly, I know enough to know none of them do.
The extreme control of our democratic institutions and using the levers of powers to abuse citizens is what generally results in the defeat of governments in Canada, where the concept of a government MPP speaking up for you is bested left for a political science course, sadly for them, the citizens who operate in the real world don’t care what the Premier would do to you if you actually did their job, and their failure to do their job will result in citizens entrusting someone else to give it their best shot in the next election.
4 Comments »Welcome to the New and Improved Laforet.ca!
I want to start by thanking the very talented Dara Skolnick, a local graphic designer, web designer and photographer, for all of her hard work on this project. I’m sure returning readers will recognize the significant improvements she implemented as part of what began as a simple re-design.
There is now a search feature to the right of the menu options at the top of the page, which will make it easier for folks with a specific interest to find information I’ve written on that topic.
It is now easier to subscribe to the RSS feed or have laforet.ca send updates by email to you, instead of having to visit the site to find out what’s new.
There is a project page, with information and links to the various organizations I am involved in, am supportive of and am hopeful you are too.
A media gallery has been set up with videos of coverage I have done as an accredited citizen journalist of the NDP and PC leadership races and on the Toronto Hydro Wind Farm proposal.
‘In the news‘ provides links and excerpts of media interviews I have provided as part of my advocacy work, over the last year.
The ‘contact me‘ page has been updated to include a contact form, making it easier for folks to get in touch with me.
The new design from a functionality perspective is far superior to it’s predecessor, and I believe the design is more interesting that the previous as well.
Once again, I’d like to thank Dara Skolnick for her hard work in putting this all together.
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