GregMercer.ca Newspapering and other adventures

Google Street View waits for no man

Guelph Mercury, 03/03/10

It’s a real shame you can’t pick the clothes you wear when you get immortalized.

If you could, I might have chosen something a little more impressive than, say, a ratty yellow T-shirt two sizes two small and an old pair of dirty shorts. And I wouldn’t have been standing around on the sidewalk, barefoot, pulling at the hair on my head like some confused vagabond.

But Google Street View waits for no man to get properly dressed.

I discovered that last month, when other Guelphites giddily went scouring over the latest uploads from Google’s 360-degree mapping system. Nearly nine months after that nosy car went around photographing our fair city, the Internet behemoth finally released the images.

I wish they hadn’t. Because there I was, captured for eternity—pulling at my hair like a lunatic on the sidewalk outside my apartment, unaware that Google’s prying eyes had caught me on camera.

It had been a bad day. It was a warm May morning, and I had discovered the hard way that my apartment door locks automatically—with me on the wrong side of the door. Google’s car happened by just as I was reaching my most desperate moment, standing on the sidewalk barefoot, yelling at my apartment, looking like I was caught in a bad domestic dispute.

How did this happen? The Street View function was added to Google Maps in 2007. Since then, Street View camera cars, which offer panoramic, ground-level photographs of streets and highways, have visited cities and towns in 18 countries across North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. They’ve now mapped some 130 Canadian cities, including ours.

A lot of people have expended a lot of energy trying to get onto Google Street View. For some, it’s a badge of honour. They’ve plotted and planned, waiting for the exact moment the Street View car passes by. But forget those now-famous Norwegians who, in wetsuits and with pitchforks, chased the Google car in their scuba gear, and became Internet viral phenomenons. I managed to look like an idiot for Google without doing it on purpose. Take that.

Not everyone is laughing about Google’s cameras, though. Just ask Windsor, where the Google car captured an image the city would rather not promote—a murder scene. After complaints, Street View removed the images that showed the parking lot of a strip joint with yellow police tape and a pool of blood.

According to Google, images that invade people’s privacy can be blurred, though only a few complaints in Canada have generated those kind of edits, the company said.

Google says it’s aware of the public’s concerns about privacy. Street View’s software automatically blurs the faces of any person captured on camera, along with all vehicle licence plates. My face was blurred—but I still look like a dork.

At least I’m not alone. Google’s prying eye has caught plenty of unaware people in compromising positions. The dudes walking out of a strip club. The guys scaling a fence, trying to break into a home. The girls sunbathing topless in a park.

But in a way, that’s the beauty of Google Street View. It’s unpolished, un-Photoshopped images of your town. It’s not the kind of stuff that makes it in the brochures. Streets with hookers on the corners, crimes in commission, people driving dangerously and exposing themselves on sidewalks. That, or barefoot guys locked outside of their houses.

They may likely never make statues in my likeness. OK, they will never make statues in my likeness. But thanks to Google, at least, I will live on.

Greg Mercer is a Guelph-based freelance writer. His column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at greg_mercer@hotmail.com, and past columns can be read at gregmercer.ca

I’m on Haiti time

Sorry for the lack of columns, folks.  I’m in Haiti with the Waterloo Region Record until Feb. 25.

You can follow the stories down there at Dispatches from Haiti

Here’s the latest story:

PORT-AU-PRINCE – Outside the doors of the operating room where she was born by Caesarian section, mothers in labour wail from the overcrowded birthing ward. Their cries can be heard down the hallways and out the front gates, where a few hundred more sick and injured are waiting to get in.

By the dozen, the mothers are yelling, screaming, shouting in Creole. Dozens more wait in the next room with swollen bellies. Every day, more babies keep coming, infants born into one of the poorest countries on earth, a place stumbling toward the future when barely one in 50 has a steady job.

Around the corner in a surgical ward, Fabienne Joseph, 25, can barely whisper. Life starts with such a ruckus here, and ends with a whimper. She’s been at the Universitaire de la Paix hospital since her house collapsed, and after three operations to repair her crushed stomach, she still can’t leave her bed.

Joseph has withered away to skin and bones, and she’ll likely die in the next few days, say the Ontario doctors who’ve been here all week.

“She won’t make it,” said Dr. Tom Marshall, a physician with the St. Joseph’s aid mission, which includes volunteers from St. Mary’s Hospital. “Her body has nothing left.”

Joseph’s mother, Claudette Amilcar, sits by her bedside and watches the nurses change her daughter’s IV. She’s already lost one child in the earthquake, and she still thinks the doctors can save this one.

“I used to have six,” she said, of her children. “Now I have five. She just need help.”

In another country, maybe, Joseph might stand a chance. But not here. When she dies, her mother will probably fall on the floor and wail, as the Haitians do when they lose someone. Eventually, she’ll gather up the things she brought, including the mattress her daughter has laid on, and go home.

They’ll pull the sheet up over her head and carry her away, feet first — the Haitian sign of death in this hospital. Living patients always go head-first, something the Canadians learned the hard way.

Joseph’s body will be stored in a small metal refrigeration unit at the back of the hospital, next to the roaring generator. There are only two bodies there now.

A month ago, in the days after the earth shook and killed 230,000, there was no space. There were so many dead they piled them in the courtyard and in the parking lot, said Jeanty Kety, a guard at the hospital. It made her depressed, she said, but things are better now.

“If someone dies now, they will get a funeral. During the quake, they didn’t do this. They took them all and put them in a hole and covered them up,” said Fritz Dorceus, 26, a Creole translator who works with the Canadians.

At the hospital, the Haitians seem to think everyone can be saved. Last Saturday, an elderly man with severe stomach cancer was brought in. He had stopped eating, and didn’t respond to anyone.

The Canadians knew the man was doomed. But the Haitian doctor looking after him ordered that he be kept alive. With his family looking on, a new catheter and IV drip went in.

“The family thought that this was it. This was going to save his life,” said Anita Otterbein, a nurse at St. Mary’s and volunteer firefighter in New Hamburg. “Three days later, he died. The family was completely aghast.”

They fell to the floor and wailed until security guards removed them from the building. Two days later, Otterbein watched a mother do the same thing, and tried to console her. Her two-year-old daughter had come in with meningitis, and she also believed her girl, too weak to cry, would recover.

The hospital is so undersupplied that those patients in their final days can get little more than strong Tylenol to make them comfortable. Dying is hard here. New life can be even harder.

Birth is a painful, lonely experience here. The women are kept from family, given no drugs, and left naked on tables in an open room while a male janitor mops the floor around them. About a third of their babies won’t make it to age five.

A week ago, Jeanette Saintville, 35, gave birth to two premature babies, a boy and a girl. The girl didn’t survive. The boy is kept alive in an incubator, and his mother worries how she will care for him. She may not have to worry much longer, the doctors say privately.

The mother, who is HIV-positive, already has three other children, and they lost everything they had in the earthquake. Because of religious beliefs that forbid birth control, as many as one in five of the mothers coming into the ward has HIV.

“I don’t know what will happen,” Saintville said, through a translator. “I have to accept what God chooses.”

Up on the hospital’s second floor, a man with tuberculosis lies on a bed that has been pushed out into the open-air walkway. He’s been lying like that for three days, and can barely lift his eyes. His arm is so skinny now his wrist band almost falls past his elbow.

The man just stares out into the blue sky above the hospital. Somewhere down below, a mother in delivery is hollering, hard. Then she gets quiet, and a new voice gets loud.

Another baby has arrived.

Downtown dwellers get a voice

Guelph Mercury, 03-02/10

Look up, look way up.

See those lights blinking on in the second- and third-storey windows above Wyndham and Macdonell streets? Yeah, those ones. Turns out, people live up there. Who knew?

On Wednesday, a new group is gathering to celebrate those people turning on those upper-floor lights. For the first time, a group of residents have created a downtown neighbourhood association. The new group is holding its Downtown Block Party at the Alma Gallery at 7 p.m. If you live or work downtown, you should think about going.

Why? Because neighbourhood associations matter. They can help shape their communities. They can speak up for residents who aren’t getting heard on their own. They inject people into the equation. And without people, urban planning and development is just buildings and streets.

When we talk about our downtown absorbing another 7,000 residents in the next few decades under Ontario’s Places to Grow Act, we need to make sure residents’ concerns are being heard.

Guelph is going to change a lot by the mid-mark of this century. And downtown will be at the front of that change. It’ll bigger, taller, louder, busier. Hopefully, it’ll also be more vibrant, more diverse, more livable.

We don’t want to leave our downtown’s growth to city hall or business leaders alone. Downtown businesses have long had representation through the Downtown Guelph Business Association. It’s a fine organization, but its priority is not the people who live in the core.

There are plenty of examples of downtowns in Ontario where good intentions, government planning and entrepreneurial spirit haven’t been able to bring new life to a core.

Look no further than our neighbours to the west, Kitchener, Hespeler and Galt, all with once-bustling old downtowns that are now marked by vacant store fronts, empty second and third floors, abandoned buildings and vacant lots.

Talk to anyone over 60 years old from any of those communities, and they’ll tell you about a time when you’d find packed restaurants, main streets lit up with signs, and everything you needed on a few downtown blocks.

Guelph’s core does not have the bustle it used to. Street cars used to run here, and merchants lined the sidewalks with their produce and goods. This was once a place where every kind of shop wanted to be downtown, not out in a plaza 10 minutes away.

Lucky for us, it’s still a downtown where you can walk for a loaf of bread and send a letter, get your shoes fixed and buy a book. And you can do it safely. But despite the 1,500 people living in the downtown and some 4,000 others who work there – according to Shelley Krieger, the coffee shop owner who co-created the new group – we still have empty store fronts and vacant top floors of old buildings.

The new neighbourhood group says it’s concerned about noise levels from bars, short-term parking and community policing. Let’s hope they’re also worried about long-term stuff – such as what the core will look like 10, 20, or 30 years from now.

Because if we’re going to make room for thousands more at the heart of the city, there’s work to be done. They’ll need places to live, places to play and places to work.

So here’s hoping this new downtown neighbourhood association understands that Guelph will continue to change. That means they’ll need to welcome more neighbours and denser developments on their own streets. And when it comes to things that aren’t working, they’ll need to speak up.

Greg Mercer is a journalist who lives in Guelph. His column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at greg_mercer@hotmail.com and past columns can be read at gregmercer.ca

Bowling for Canada’s game

Guelph Mercury, 01/20/10

Guelph has given the world a lot of things. The Biltmore hat, Sleeman beer and John McCrae, the man who wrote In Flanders Fields.

But one of the coolest things this fair city may have ever done was to produce a young man by the name of Tommy Ryan.

Ryan may not be a household name, but the game he invented is, or at least it once was. The next time you pick up a hard urethane ball and send it rumbling down a wooden lane, toward five — not 10 — plastic pins, remember to thank him.

Ryan could’ve been a pitcher, so good was his stuff. The Baltimore Orioles saw this, and came calling. But baseball was not steady work in his era, and men of the likes of Babe Ruth, who would soon play for the Orioles, were not yet names that meant anything to men like Ryan.

Instead, at 18, he moved to Toronto and began working at more indoor pursuits. First, he helped run billiard parlours. Then he established the Toronto Bowling Club, a tenpin club above a jewelry store on Yonge Street. He brought in tropical plants and a string orchestra. It was a fancy joint.

Some of his customers started complaining — how Canadian is that? — that the American-style tenpin game was too heavy and too slow. So Ryan used a lathe to trim down his wooden pins, found a smaller, rubber ball, and created a lighter, faster game that captured the imagination of a whole country.

For 100 years the game Ryan created has endured. It’s been played in bowling alleys from St. John’s to Victoria. We developed leagues and players’ associations. At one time, daytime fivepin leagues were so popular many bowling alleys ran daycare centres and hired babysitters to take care of the kids while the moms played.

But the rumble and crash of Canada’s game is fading. Fewer and fewer Canadians are playing fivepin in any organized way. Membership in the national association that oversees league play was still hovering around 170,000 in the late 1970s. Today, it’s closer to 29,000.

And when we do bowl for fivepin, it’s often under the guise of something called cosmic bowling. For the uninitiated, that’s bowling under black lights, with glowing carpets, glowing laneways, glowing pins and thumping dance music. Kind of like being stuck with a bunch of teenagers in a bad, loud version of the movie Tron.

As with so many things in our country, the American version of bowling gets more publicity, more money, more entrepreneurs. While they’re talking about high-end boutique bowling clubs that are bringing new players and a new revival to the game in the U.S., we’re talking about closing alleys and a dying game.

Veterans of the sport figure the Canadian game will be extinct within a few generations.

When a bowling game was developed for Nintendo’s Wii console, it was for the tenpin variety, of course. A whole generation of kids who have never stepped into a local bowling alley might think this is the only way to play the game.

This is Canada’s game. Yes, we claim hockey, curling and lacrosse, too. But so do other countries. No where else in the world do people play fivepin.

This is our game, and a man from Guelph invented it.

Greg Mercer is a journalist who lives in Guelph. His column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at greg_mercer@hotmail.com.

Trampled under foot

Guelph Mercury, 13/01/10

We spend most of our time trampling over them, taking for granted that they’ll always be there, underfoot, when we need them.

And sure, they’re not much to look at. Flat, heavy slabs of concrete that are about as unsexy as it gets.

But sidewalks are as big a part of city life as public transit and parks. Too bad we don’t seem to notice them until they’re missing, or buried under snow.

Back in December, city council considered cutting sidewalk plowing in winter as part of budget trimming. They ultimately decided to keep the service, and vowed to trim $100,000 from somewhere else.

We should consider ourselves lucky. Plenty of cities expect property owners to do the work themselves.

In Kitchener, you have 24 hours after a snowfall to clear the sidewalk that fronts your property. If you don’t, your neighbor can snitch on you and you’ll get a visit from a city bylaw officer. If they issue a warning and the work still isn’t done the next day, they’ll do it for you – and slap a $300 to $500 bill on your property taxes.

But what a city plow could do in one sweep takes days of enforcement and paper work. Even those steep fines don’t seem to work. Once the snow flies, it becomes a full-time job trying to keep on top of lazy property owners who can’t be bothered to clear their sidewalks.

Last winter, Kitchener issued some 1,400 of these fines. That may be money in the city’s pocket, but it also shows that the everyone-do-their-part system simply isn’t working.

And if you’re in a wheelchair, or elderly and have a hard time getting around, it means you’d better make alternative plans if you want to use city streets in the winter. Because though a few inches of snow might mean a chance to leave a footprint for most of us, it might as well be a wall for someone with mobility issues.

This is stuff Guelph ought to remember next time it considers getting out of the business of plowing sidewalks. Leaving the work to residents means sidewalks that are plowed in piecemeal form, always at different times, and by people who have different ideas about how to do a good job.

And never mind the problem of vacant lots or buildings with absentee landlords. In that case, who is around to get the message to plow the sidewalk? Kitchener bylaw officials will tell you this is one of their biggest headaches.

Still don’t think sidewalks are a big deal? Consider this: a Kitchener woman may have died this week because of them. Or, more accurately, because of a lack of them.

Veronica Walsh, 51, was killed Sunday night when she was trying to cross Victoria Street North in Kitchener to get to her home. There are no sidewalks on this stretch of Victoria Street, which means any able-bodied person has to climb over snow banks, across parking lots and through ditches to walk along the street. That’s not an option for someone in a wheelchair.

Walsh was using the only route available to a person in a wheelchair – straight across the road in the middle of the block – when she was hit.

Victoria Street is among some 55 kilometres of regional roads in Kitchener that should have sidewalks but don’t. Regional councilors considered a plan to fix the problem last year, but decided to save money instead.

So the next time you’re strolling down a plowed city sidewalk in the middle of January, consider yourself lucky.

Or, if you find yourself griping about how the city plow hasn’t been by in days, how about trying something else—like getting out there with your own shovel, and giving a helping hand.

Greg Mercer is a Guelph-based freelance writer. His column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at greg_mercer@hotmail.com, and past columns can be read at gregmercer.ca

The bearded wonder strikes again

Guelph Mercury, 06/01/10

Abraham Lincoln had one. ZZ top had ’em. Heck, Jesus practically invented them.

So, the thinking goes, having one would put a man in good company, right? I’m talking, of course, about beards. Those fuzzy jaw warmers that grow right out of your face like some kind of prickly Chia Pet. And for free!

Why are we talking beards? Maybe it’s just too cold outside. Or maybe it’s this impulse from that buried caveman gene that at one time or another tugs at all men.

Last month, after growing tired of getting lashed by another frigid wind tearing at my scarf, I began to wonder: why should only lumberjacks and the Amish have all the fun?

Whatever it was, after much serious thought, I had decided to grow a beard. Something to do with a certain lady in my life suggesting it would look charming. Or was it chumpish? I can’t remember now.

Anyway, this was to be no easy task.

The last time I tried to grow one, I was still in my early 20s, and it was a less than impressive effort. It looked like I had spread school glue on my face and tripped onto a barber shop floor.

But I had wizened and aged much since then, and was certain I was carrying the potential to grow a fierce, thick Grizzly-Adams beard.

I needed to do some research. I read how “the male beard communicates an heroic image of the independent, sturdy, and resourceful pioneer, ready, willing and able to do manly things,” according to the non-biased and always dependable website, beards.org.

I was ready to do many manly things.

The website’s creator went on to explain how aborted beards are still cooler than never trying to grow one at all: “Even if they later choose not to remain bearded, it is still a success story because they had the dedication—and even courage—to go through the beard growing experience at least once.”

Yes. It takes courage. And Rogaine. Lots and lots of Rogaine.

So I sprouted a beard. Not quite a Grizzly Adams, but not quite a peach fuzz patch, either. And it was a remarkable thing to behold. I swear on quiet nights, you could hear the thing growing.

Suddenly, people seemed to pay more attention to what I had to say. I’d walk into a coffee shop, and everyone would quiet down, as if to say “Quiet now, the bearded man is about to speak.”

I also discovered beards do the strangest things to women. Some recoil when presented with a new beard, like you smeared kitty litter across your face. Bad men have beards. Then again, bad men have beards. And, so my sources tell me, some women like bad men.

But the line between handsome man and homeless man is a thin line, fraught with many stray whiskers. You must remain in control of the beard, or it will begin to control you.

That was the dark side of going bearded, the side beards.org doesn’t want you to know about. The website didn’t mention that dinners stayed with you for days, like you were carrying Velcro around on your face. I began shampooing and conditioning the entire mess, but to no avail.

I also discovered another sad truth about beards: a woman might like the look of a bearded man, but would rather not kiss someone whose whiskers go up her nose.

Nuff said. After a month of shaveless mornings, the beard disappeared in an hour of slashing, hacking and cutting. For a few minutes, I didn’t recognize the bare-faced imposter staring back at me in the bathroom mirror.

I had walked on the wooly side, and that was enough.

2010: You read it here first

Guelph Mercury, 30/12/09

These are confusing times.

But relax, dear readers. If poorly-paid newspaper columnists are good at anything, it’s telling you exactly what will happen before it happens.
So get out your notepads. Without further delay, here are the Mercer Retort’s predictions for 2010.

1) The young woman who tackled Olympic torchbearer Cortney Hansen as she ran through downtown Guelph will get a job working for Fire Prevention Canada. She will be let go after tackling the local fire marshal as he stepped outside to light a cigarette.

2) Canadians will once again stop buying pork in the wake of the latest superbug, H1N6 – also known as Squirrel Flu – even though it is impossible to get sick from eating pork. Sadly, the virus will not be fatal to squirrels. Strangely, it will still cost $3 to buy a hot dog on the street.

3) The Toronto Blue Jays will emerge from spring training dramatically restructured and ready to win. They will be quicker, younger and more talented – and they will still finish in fourth place in the American League East division.

4) To make ends meet, Tiger Woods will take a job at the Victoria West Golf Course arranging tee times. Strangely, female memberships at the club will quadruple. Fire hydrants everywhere will cower.

5) Bob Dylan will release an album of Easter-themed songs, sung mostly in Mongolian. The album will be recorded in just one afternoon, despite the fact Dylan was suffering from a bad throat infection. Die-hard Dylan fans will hail the work as his best yet.

6) Norfolk Street will continue to be shut down due to construction until late spring. In May, the project foreman will realize he left his watch buried under the new road, and work crews will tear up the asphalt, shutting the street down until winter. It was a nice watch, so, you know.

7) The stock market will continue its remarkable rebound, making Bay Street brokers incredibly wealthy. They will celebrate by eating gold bullion from the hollowed-out skulls of the unemployed.

Stephen Harper will appear on stage playing the piano with a reformed Lovin’ Spoonful. He’ll play a passionate rendition of Do You Believe in Magic, marked by a solo so powerful the recession will disappear as the song reaches its climax.

9) Someone, somewhere will protest a development in Guelph.

10) Someone, somewhere will protest the protest of the development in Guelph. Many letters to the editor will ensue.

11) After emerging from near-collapse, General Motors will turn a new page by developing a cutting-edge vehicle that uses no fossil fuels, emits no greenhouse gases and actually makes its driver healthier. What will they call it? The sneaker.

12) Canada will haul in seven medals in curling at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and Americans will finally recognize our curling superiority and respond by saying ‘Curling? Is that a sport?’

13) The loonie will finally reach parity with the U.S. dollar. Canadians will celebrate by sending a truckload of beaver skins south of the border. Americans will respond by asking “Why did we get a truckload of beaver skins from Maine?’

14) Guelph city council will spend $10,000 on a pilot project designed to get college students to stop peeing against downtown buildings after a night at the bars. Shockingly, the project won’t work.

15) Guelph city council will slash spending on public projects not related to pissoirs and increase salaries for staff.  And property taxes in the City of Guelph will rise. Well, duh.

Greg Mercer is a Guelph-based freelance writer. His column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at greg_mercer@hotmail.com, and past columns can be read at gregmercer.ca

Free the Olympic torchbearers!

Guelph Mercury, 12/16/2009

Somewhere deep inside a frozen mountain near Whistler, B.C., lays a list hidden in a dark cave guarded by heavily-armed figure skaters and other lugers.

It’s not just any list. In fact, it’s The List. And the paranoid people running Canada’s Olympic celebration don’t want you to see it.

The List is a matter of the highest level of national security. And if it fell into the wrong hands, I don’t even dream about what might happen. The List, of course, contains the 12,000 names of people who have been chosen to carry the Olympic torch as it zig-zags its way across our frozen country.

Each one of these people will carry the torch 300 metres and light the oversized cigarette lighter held by the next person waiting in line. And they will do it wearing a fancy snowsuit that must be worn exactly to spec.

About half of these torchbearers are regular Canadians who got there by writing essays and winning other contests. A good chunk are appointed by corporate sponsors, namely Coca-Cola and the Royal Bank of Canada. The Vancouver Organizing Committee, or VANOC, controls the rest – they’ll be handed out to partners, sponsors and suppliers to dole out as treats for their employees.

Recently, I was assigned to fetch the complete list and run it in the local paper. We wanted to celebrate these lucky few who will carry the torch through the local community. Easy task, no?

But alas, The List is top secret. In a policy apparently designed by Canada’s intelligence agency CSIS, the Olympic folks have decided they will not release the list of torchbearers until 48 hours before they run.

It’s a matter of privacy, we’re told. Of course. Because if running a flaming torch down a crowded city street with police escorts and cameras rolling isn’t a private matter anymore, what has this world come to?

Funny thing is, the people on that secret list are happy to celebrate their rare chance to be a part of the torch run. If you find one of these lucky few, they’re pleased as punch to talk to you about it.

And the corporate sponsors who organized their own torchbearer contests get this. They’ve put their own torchbearers’ names on their website for everyone to see.

So what exactly is VANOC so worried about? Terrorists? With fire extinguishers?

They’ve even sent all torchbearers incredibly specific instruction on how to properly wear the official Olympic flame jumpsuit.

The commandments went as follows: 1) Ye official Olympic tuque shall not be worn jauntily askew. 2) Thine Olympic jacket shall be worn in a frontwards fashion, sleeves down. 3) Ye Olympic pants shall be worn only pulled firmly up around the buttocks. Plumber’s butt shall be swiftly punished.

Even when it came to choosing who would get to carry the torch, VANOC went a little overboard. Just ask Kitchener’s Brittany Livingston, a 13-year-old who poses such a danger to society that she declines newspaper interviews while doing her homework. She had to undergo a background check by the RCMP to make the list.

What threat could a 13-year-old girl possibly have to Canada’s Olympic celebration, especially when every torchbearer is trailed by two VANOC agents ready to pounce if you veer off the route?

But I guess we’re all missing the point. If you thought the running of the torch was supposed to be a national celebration, something fun even, you were wrong.

This is the Olympic flame, and this is serious business.

Let’s bring the stores back to the Ward

Guelph Mercury, 09/12/09

If you squint just right, you can almost see this place the way Tom Bradburn remembers it.

You’d believe the street that runs past his tiny vintage car shop at a fork in the road in Guelph’s old Ward neighbourhood used to be one happening stretch of asphalt.

From a triangle parking lot rimmed by Ontario and Arthur streets, he can point out the old burger joint, the Snow White laundromat, the bakery, butcher shop, grocery store and fish and chips spot. They’re all gone now.

Above the laundromat, the girls did the kind of dancing that only paying customers could see. Inside his own shop, long before he owned it, the men did the type of closed-door gambling that brought the police.

This was a neighbourhood with a real pulse, the kind of place where everything you needed could be had with two feet and a heartbeat. Tom, who has lived and worked here since he was five years old, remembers it well.

At some point in the passing decades, the Ward changed. Now neighbourhood grocers are boarded up. Corner stores are walled in and turned into rental units. Others are simply empty, waiting for a hopeful owner.

Just walk through this snug neighbourhood of brick homes and shuttered shops and you’ll get a glimpse of how vibrant the place used to be. But what happened to the Ward is more complicated than plant closures, changing bylaws, re-routed highways and demographic shifts. We changed, too.

Most consumers now bypass the Ward or treat it as a throughway to a larger grocery store or mall somewhere else. Those who live there hop in their cars when it’s time to buy something they need.

As Bradburn sees it from his cramped wood-paneled office, “more people are interested in going to a mall now, or a 7-11. It’s quick and convenient. In and out.”

At Sammy’s Variety, one of the few remaining convenience stores left here, co-owner Samantha Chang says she’s barely hanging on. She and a friend took over the landmark business on Elizabeth Street about a year and a half ago, and they’re still waiting on a day when they can actually pay themselves something for the time they put in keeping the place open.

To save money, they cut out lottery tickets and keep some shelves bare. And they try to do the things the big guys don’t do, like offer Italian-language newspapers for the old-timers and penny candy for the kids. They know their customers by name.

Meanwhile, the Wal-Mart on the northern edge of town is expanding. The parking lot is full. Chang says she simply can’t compete with the inventory and prices of stores like Wal-Mart and other chains. So the customers talk with their wallets, and choose to go elsewhere.

But when these kind of stores close, we lose more than just a business.

From the highest floor of City Hall, you can see the rooftops of the Ward. It’s inside this building where they’re talking a lot these days about intensification. They want denser, more walkable neighbourhoods. They’re talking about creating space for another 7,000 downtown residents. We don’t know yet where all these people will live. But maybe, with the right planning and a bit of luck, they can help bring new life to an old neighourhood. Maybe they’ll help create a new Ward where people start forgeting their car and walking again, out the door and down the block and into the corner store.

Imagine that—a neighbourhood that has everything you need, all on your street. Kind of like the one Tom Bradburn remembers.

Greg Mercer is a Guelph-based freelance writer. His column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at greg_mercer@hotmail.com, and past columns can be read at gregmercer.ca

They banned handheld devices, but are we safer?

Guelph Mercury, 02/12/09

Why is everybody suddenly driving with their heads down, staring at their crotches?

No reason, officer. But I can tell you this much. We are not hiding the fact we are still texting. No sir.

Ontario’s new handheld device law for drivers is well-intentioned. It’s for our safety, and who can argue with that? The government says driver distraction is a factor in about one in five accidents on our province’s roads, and there is no reason not to believe them. Too bad there’s no similar statistics for stupidity.

Starting in February, if we’re caught on our phones or iPods while driving, we risk a $500 fine. It’s similar to bans introduced in Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, Nova Scotia, British Columbia, and those planned in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Every province seems to be getting on board. But are these bans actually doing what they’re supposed to do?

Plenty of people aren’t convinced a ban on handheld cellphones and music players while allowing hands-free versions is making our roads any safer. Studies, including major reviews by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in the United States, have shown drivers are four times more likely to cause an accident if they’re talking on the phone—regardless of whether they’re holding the phone or not.

The problem is when we have a conversation on a telephone, people often become engrossed in it, and lose focus on their driving. The law doesn’t take this into account.

“Once a conversation begins, we don’t see a difference between hand-held and hands-free,” Adrian Lund, president of the insurance institute that did one of the studies, was reported as saying.

In the U.S., the insurance industry is so convinced that handless sets aren’t any safer that they’re offering discounts only to drivers who sign up for call-blocking services that disable their phone while they’re driving.

Ontario’s hand-held ban may even backfire, with drivers going to greater lengths trying to hide the fact they’re talking or texting. And for police, it’s just another thing they need to enforce, and a difficult one at that. Aside from riding in ladder trucks up and down the highway, how reasonably can they be expected to peer into our cars as we drive, ensuring we’re doing nothing but that?

All we can say for sure about this handheld ban is it has been a boom for makers of handless gadgets, like the Bluetooth. No one was more thrilled about the new law than these businesses. They ought to send a truckload of their products to Queen’s Park for Christmas with a huge thank you card.

If it’s distractions we’re legislating, what about the flashy billboards that line our expressways? What about drinking hot coffee while driving? Or switching stations on the radio? Or re-programming your global positioning system? All of these legitimate distractions remain perfectly legal under the law.

We can’t reasonably ban all wireless communication on the road. For plenty of businesses, it’s a big part of the job and it affects their productivity. It’s unreasonable to ask companies not to talk to their drivers on the road, and vice-versa.

The problem is, as plenty have said before, you can’t legislate common sense.

And this ban doesn’t change the fact drivers can still be charged under dangerous or careless driving laws that we already had. They carry real consequences—fines of up to $1,000, six demerit points, a driver’s licence suspension and possible jail time. This was and still is the best penalty for distracted drivers who truly endanger others’ lives.

But that doesn’t seem to matter. We’ve got a new law, and we all pretend to follow it. But is it making our roads any safer? Maybe. But maybe it isn’t.

Greg Mercer is a Guelph-based freelance writer. His column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at greg_mercer@hotmail.com, and past columns can be read at gregmercer.ca