He buys the stuff at the local drugstore, I’m told. I don’t ask too many questions, but I hear it helps to ward off colds and generally boosts your immune system. Combine that with sleep and you’ve got a good recipe for getting sick less often.

But I know what you’re thinking. That’s just crazy talk.

If you really want to cut down sick days, the City of Guelph has stumbled on a far more sensible way to do it. This week, they agreed to spend $150,000 on a software program that will help them figure out how to get their employees to show up for work.

It turns out our fair city has a bit of a sick days problem among staff on the municipal payroll. They’re apparently as illness-prone as those kids in daycare who lick door handles. And it’s getting worse.

City of Guelph employees took an average of 10.2 sick days last year, up from 9.7 days in 2008. Compare that to workers in the Canadian private sector, who take an average of only seven sick days a year.

There’s also a problem with something called “culpable absence,” or “a voluntary unwillingness to work,” according to a recent report by city staff. If that doesn’t anger you as a taxpayer, it should.

Between 2008 and 2011, the number of days taken off by city employees from sickness or injury grew to 18,945 from 14,755. Last year, short-term, long-term and workplace injury absences cost the city nearly $1.5 million — up from $920,000 in 2008. So what’s going on?

We all get ill. We all need to occasionally take sick days. But why is it that our municipal employees take off so many more days than the rest of us? Are workers in the private sector just healthier? Maybe they take better care of themselves? If you believe that, you probably also believe in unicorns.

This is no idle debate. Sick days matter an awful lot right now in Ontario, where the leader of our debt-wracked province has asked teachers to do their part to reduce our deficit by accepting a two-year wage freeze and an end to the practice of cashing out their unused sick days — a gift that’ll cost Ontario $118 million this year.

That practice of paying out teachers for unused sick days represents a $1.7-billion liability for Ontario, a hefty sum for a government facing a $16-billion deficit.

But the suggestion that sick days ought be cashed in only when you’re — ahem — sick, was met with the usual howling for Dalton McGuinty’s blood from teachers’ union types. As if sick days were a God-given entitlement, not a privilege.

There’s plenty of reason to be wary when municipalities bring in drastic moves to curb absenteeism. In 2010, Kitchener approved a 24-hour shift cycle for its fire department — a project that promised to cut down on exploding overtime costs among firefighters.

Guess what happened. Firefighters started taking even more time off, raising overtime costs to $694,000 — far beyond the $216,000 budgeted.

Don’t get me wrong. When the city says it wants to reduce rates of absenteeism by about 10 per cent, to get in line with other municipalities, I’m all for it.

But there has to be a simpler way to get public sector employees to show up to work, like the rest of us. We should care because we’re paying their salaries, and the costs of their absences. And it ain’t cheap.

I’m just saying — I know I guy who can get you all the vitamin C you can handle. Just pretend it’s candy. It tastes good. It helps fight colds. And it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than $150,000.

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

Look into their cold, beady eyes my friends. Do you see any speck of compassion, any concern for our well-being?

No you do not. Why? Because beavers do not have hearts. They do not care for our troubles. They do not care for us. Beavers care only for themselves and nothing else.

But I am mistaken. There is one thing beavers care for more than themselves. And that’s killing our trees. And they will stop at nothing to kill and maim and destroy as many of them as possible.

Think about it. They creep around at all hours of the night, doing God knows what, swimming completely nude in our rivers and generally acting like they own the place. It just goes against the natural order of things.

Norm Bazinet, an aquatic biologist, recently raised the alarm about these oversized rats who are slowly taking over our city, leaving a path of stumps and wood chips behind. He’s talking Armageddon, beaver-style.

“If the population gets high enough, and I have seen situations where the population is high enough, they will take out whole forests,” he said.

Whole forests. Imagine that — a creature so callous it wipes out entire forests with little concern for living things. It’s simply unbelievable. It’s chilling.

Bob Bell, the city councillor, says the problem has gotten so out of hand along the banks of the Eramosa and Speed rivers we need to start shipping the beavers out of here.

“I think we’ve had what could be called an infestation of beaver activity,” he said.

I say pack ’em up and ship ’em back to where they came from: Russia, probably. Let’s act fast before they overrun our entire civilization.

Strangely, plenty of people have rushed to the defence of these cold-blooded beavers in recent weeks, flooding newspapers’ editorial pages with heartfelt tributes. But I think if we’re honest with ourselves, we all know where those letters really came from.

They were probably written by beavers themselves.

So I’m here to say it: listen up, beavers. The party’s over. For too long, you’ve been terrorizing defenceless humans with your wanton destruction of our trees. Some of those trees are in our parks, too, where we like to play Frisbee.

And that just hurts.

Throughout history, you’ve felled trees to build your own dams, canals and lodges, as if snubbing your noses at all the perfectly fine human buildings around you. What? You think you’re better than us, beavers?

And really, is there no end to your need for trees? Plenty of creatures in the animal kingdom make do with no trees at all, but oh no, not you beavers — you want all the trees you can chop down with your greedy little mouths.

I, for one, am not going to stand for it anymore. I’m putting you beavers on notice. Every single last one of you. I’m sticking up for the little guy. The humans.

Oscar Wilde, the legendary Irish fur trapper, had it right. The only good beaver is the one draped around your shoulders in a luxurious fur coat.

I say we start taking our town back, one beaver skin coat at a time. I say it’s high time someone finally said “Hey beavers, I’ve had it up to here with your attitude.”

While we’re at it, I say we take the beasts off our nickel coin, too, and replace them with something far more regal and symbolic of Canada. Like the skunk. When’s the last time you saw a skunk kill a tree?

- Guelph Mercury, March 31, 2012

If you’re looking for someone to explain it all, call Peter Mansbridge. But if he’s busy, here’s all you really need to know:

Robo-calls: A rash of phone calls made by a group of robots who really, really didn’t want you to vote Liberal in the last election. Somehow they overthrew their human masters and figured out how to make long-distance phone calls to anyone who wasn’t a Conservative party supporter in tight races. Just let this be a lesson next time you start thinking how cute R2D2 looks.

Pierre’s Poutine: A small, Macdonell Street poutine joint that secretly doubles as the front for robots trying to undermine democracy in Canada. Try the smoked-meat poutine. It’s lovely.

Elections Canada: “Hello, you’ve reached Elections Canada. There’s no one available to take your call right now. At the tone, please leave your message. We’ll add it to the thousands of other complaints we’ve received and done nothing with.”

Tiger Dunlop: A legendary Scottish booze hound who apparently helped John Galt establish Guelph while drunk on whisky. Historians say he was looking for street meat and trying to call his ex-girlfriend when he stumbled on the perfect location to start a new settlement. He must have been really pickled — because why else would anyone choose to live this close to Toronto?

Condos: It turns out they’re worse to wake up next to than that cougar from the human resources department. Residents who are trying to build a time machine to bring Guelph back to the 1950s are also fighting plans to build condo towers in the downtown core. What do they think this is, a growing city?

The Oscars: An annual party of tanned millionaires congratulating each other on another year of tricking regular schmucks like us to pay $26.50 for a movie about a war horse that can’t even talk and a bag of salty popcorn.

Billie Crystal: Apparently, still alive. See above.

The Maple Leafs: According to archeologists, there was once a successful franchise that played the ancient sport of iced-hockey and went by this name in the city of Toronto. But that was many moons ago. Before you were born, kid.

Ron Wilson: Coach of said Leafs. Please call for resume. Can send references upon request.

Syria: A repressive Arab state where a dictatorship is killing its own people. No, not Iraq. No, we can’t go in there and help them. They’ll have to save themselves. Why? Because it’s complicated. Just trust me. We shouldn’t get involved. Also, they don’t have any oil.

Afghanistan: Huh? That’s still around? I thought they rejoined Russia or something.

Austerity: A new fragrance worn by federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. Mmmm, smells like belt tightening.

SNC-Lavalin: Canada’s largest engineering firm and a model of ethical business practices. Also, they lost their wallet in Libya when it was still ruled by the Gadhafi regime and $35-million went missing. If you’ve seen it, please call them.

Apple: A California fruit company that this week joined the most exclusive club in big business when its market value topped $500 billion — a feat that only Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, General Electric and ExxonMobil had previously accomplished. Now that’s a lot of pies!

Mitt Romney: An American politician aiming to be runner-up in the next U.S. presidential election.

Ontario: Please send money. Pretty please?

Guelph’s municipal leaders recently announced they want to double the city’s so-called tree canopy, or the amount of land covered by trees when viewed from above, to up to 40 per cent of our total space.

Right now, we’re at 20 per cent, about on par with most Canadian cities.

Mayor Karen Farbridge said she’d like to see Guelph have more trees than any other city of our size. It’s a formidable goal, and should be embraced on principle. We all want to live in a city with more trees. If you don’t, you’re probably dead inside. Or from Toronto.

As the city grows and becomes a denser, more urban place — our population is nearly 122,000 now, Statistics Canada revealed this week — we’re going to need those trees even more.

But like everything, the devil is always in the details. If Guelph plans to grow its urban forest largely through city owned and maintained properties, we could wind up with a real mess on our hands years from now, foresters and urban experts warn.

Our neighbours in Kitchener can tell you that. They’re stuck with a $10-million bill for tree maintenance after 4,500 ash trees planted by the city years ago have to be cut down and replaced.

And the bill for taxpayers there is about to get even bigger, considering a further 60 per cent of the Norway maples that line most of Kitchener’s street are thought to be nearing the end of their lives, too.

The danger is an aggressive push to increase tree planting can draw money away from the important stuff like tree maintenance and forest management, warns Andrew Kenney, the vice-president of Tree Canada’s board of directors.

“If the focus shifts from overall forest stewardship and management to simply increasing canopy cover very aggressively there may be a tendency to shift towards tree planting and the rest of the urban forest might suffer,” Kenney said this week.

Later this spring, city staff will use the results of a $30,000 study that looked at Guelph’s tree canopy to draft the city’s urban forest management plan. Here’s hoping the folks at city hall realize a greener Guelph can’t be managed by municipal employees alone.

Some of the best reforestation projects out there are already being run by volunteers, students, businesses, private citizens and non-profit groups.

School boards across Ontario are passing shade policies that are bringing trees to playgrounds once baked by the sun. Groups such as the Grand River Conservation Authority have been planting thousands of trees around local watersheds for years. There are lots of other organizations, including Trees Ontario, Trees for Guelph and Tree Canada, that run programs to encourage tree planting and urban reforestation.

Plenty of privately owned strips of land — around malls, factories, businesses and new subdivisions — badly need some trees. The city could encourage that by demanding a minimum tree-canopy rule for all new development, and push homeowners to plant healthy trees, through tax breaks and other incentives.

And people can register their newly planted trees with the local Rotary club, so they can be added to the 40 per cent canopy goal.

None of these things need to cost the city much money. If this 40 per cent canopy goal is powered by trained volunteers and other non-profit groups, it can be a very good thing. If it just means a bigger bill for taxpayers down the road, it can become a problem we never asked for.

We’re all for more trees. Who isn’t? But let’s not lose sight of the forest for the trees.

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

Guelph Mercury, Feb. 11, 2012

“I don’t think women should be boxing. It doesn’t seem right to me,” she said.

This was after I’d just told her I had spent the week in Sydney, N. S., covering the Canadian amateur boxing championships for my newspaper, where men and women were fighting.

It was a good thing she kept her voice down. In the seat behind her was Mandy Bujold, Kitchener’s seven-time national flyweight champion. Two rows up was fellow flyweight fighter Amanda Galle, sporting a black eye so gruesome it looked like it was added by a Hollywood makeup artist.

Try telling those women they shouldn’t be boxing.

Canada has some of the best amateur female boxers in the world, giving our northern country a dominance on the international scene normally reserved for hockey or curling. And yet so many of us, like the lady on the plane, think there’s something inherently uncomfortable about it.

Women have been boxing since early 18th century, and have encountered opposition nearly every step of the way. So many people still feel it’s just plain wrong – even if we don’t know exactly why we feel that way.

Despite often positive portrayals in pop culture and the media, women’s boxing still struggles for mainstream respect. After spending most of the last century banned in many countries, then finally winning the long, stubborn fight to be included in the Olympics for the first time, the debate switched to whether women should be required to wear miniskirts in the ring.

It was the International Amateur Boxing Association that proposed the idea, arguing that the women making history by boxing at the Olympics for the first time needed something to help them “stand out” from the men.

The idea, I guess, is that if we’re going to allow women to box, they should at least do it while wearing something we consider feminine. I suppose high heels were too impractical.

To their credit, most female boxers – who don’t see any difference between their sport and the male version – have laughed at the miniskirt suggestion.

“I won’t be wearing a miniskirt,” Ireland’s three-time world champion Katie Taylor told the BBC. “I don’t even wear miniskirts on a night out, so I definitely won’t be wearing miniskirts in the ring.”

Despite the progress the sport has made, made of us still have some pretty Victorian attitudes about women fighting, even with gloves, protective head gear and a referee to keep anyone from getting seriously hurt.

I heard from more than one cab driver in Sydney during the boxing championships that pretty girls shouldn’t fight because it might mark or scar their faces. I didn’t ask how they expected such a rule should be enforced.

Attitudes like this, of course, exist the world over. In Afghanistan, it takes even more guts to be a woman and a boxer. Female boxers dreaming of fighting in the Olympics endure threats from the Taliban, who think the sight of a woman wearing boxing gloves is a sign of a degraded, immoral society.

It’s a safe bet most people who frown on women’s boxing have probably never seen a bout. At the amateur level, protective gear and keen referees make it more like fencing than fighting. There is no pummeling into unconsciousness, no knockouts that leave a fighter spread-eagle on the mat.

Many coaches even frown at the use of the word “fight,” preferring to call them “bouts.” Boxing, they say, is a sport. Fighting is what you do on a Saturday night after the bar.

Whether we like it or not, women’s boxing is set to make history in just a few short months at the 2012 Summer Olympics. Here’s hoping most of us can open our minds just enough to admire it.

I would probably never have grown that mullet in Grade 3, for starters. But enough about that. On this day, as another December prepares to fade from view, we’re looking forward, not back.

Without further delay, here at my predictions for 2012.

• You will wake up the morning after New Year’s Eve with a very bad headache, gaps in your memory and a lampshade for a hat. Strangely, your face will begin to appear on cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon under the title “missing person.”

• Sales of skinny jeans will plummet when teenagers everywhere learn you can achieve the same flattering look with a $5 can of blue spray paint.

• Iran will “unfriend” America on Facebook. America will respond by creeping on Iran’s new friends Libya and Syria and spreading hurtful rumours that Iran is a bad kisser.

• In response to Ontario’s crushing $16-billion debt and troubled credit rating, public sector employees will tighten their belts and cut their lunchtime massages down to one hour. They’ll get carried away and reduce their wage demands to increases of only 10 per cent per year, for life.

• Finance Minister Dwight Duncan’s warnings that hard times are ahead will cause everyone who works for the government to consider jobs in the private sector. After looking up the words layoff, recession and cost-cutting in the dictionary, they will come back to their senses.

• Teenagers who read this column will ask their parents, “What’s a dictionary?” And, “Is there an app for that?”

• Canadians will boycott all British imports after learning hockey and curling will not be sports featured in the Summer Olympics in London. Buckingham Palace will make amends by sending us a signed portrait of Princess Kate, and we’ll forget what we were so mad about.

• Europe’s credit crisis will continue to threaten Canadians’ jobs and incomes. It will be revealed that Canada’s economy isn’t pinned around productivity or job creation as some foolishly thought, but around the fortunes of Liechtenstein, a tiny country of 35,000 people where nine out of 10 citizens think Canada is a city somewhere in North Dakota.

• Princess Kate will demand to know why palace staff sent her signed portrait to an obscure city somewhere in North Dakota.

• Dead North Korean leader Kim Jong Il will resurface this July in a cameo role in Weekend at Bernie’s 3. Set in the capital of Pyongyang, the movie will focus on the country’s attempts to build an even larger nuclear arsenal while its people starve. Hilarity will ensue.

• Concerned that Canadians are increasingly worrying about their rising household debt levels, Visa will come up with an innovative solution — a new credit card aimed at infants called Baby’s First Visa.

• The Vancouver Canucks will make hockey history by finally winning the Stanley Cup. Canucks fans will celebrate by destroying their beloved city in riots that baffle the rest of the world. Or they won’t win, and riots will still ensue. It doesn’t really matter.

• Property taxes will rise. Hey, I never claimed predicting the future was rocket science.

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

So, doesn’t it just seem so terribly unfair when an assassin is hired to kill you, all for a measly $80,000?

The Ontario Provincial Police in Wellington County recently alerted citizens to a scam letter circulating around local e-mail inboxes. The letter begins, “Hello, how are you doing today? I was paid to assassinate you, but I felt it will be right for me to inform…”

The e-mail goes on to say that for a small sum of $10,000, this killer with a heart of gold won’t carry out their orders. It reads like it was written by a 12-year-old who’s read one too many Hardy Boys adventures. All that’s missing is a really cool plan to meet in a cave somewhere just at the stroke of midnight.

And yet, remarkably, some of us are scared enough to call the cops.

“As you can see there is no need of introducing myself to you because I don’t have any business with you, my duty as I am mailing you now is just to KILL you and I have to do it as I have already been paid for that,” reads a gem of a line in one of versions of the letter.

I especially like the emphasis on the word “kill.” If you need the police to protect from criminals this dumb, you should probably just lock your door and never leave your house.

The next time you get an e-mail from a professional killer, perhaps you should stop and think — what could you have possibly done to cause some unseen enemy to pay a hitman $80,000 to do you in?

Could it have been that time you didn’t return your shopping cart to the cart pen in the grocery store parking lot? Maybe someone wants you dead because you ordered the last maple glaze doughnut at Tim Hortons. Perhaps your flagrant abuse of coupons at Boston Pizza has caught the attention of the international restaurant owners cartel, and the only solution is for you to be silenced — permanently.

It could be any of those things. Or, less likely, it’s that … it’s a scam. I know, it’s crazy. But consider this:

1) If someone were really planning to kill you, they probably wouldn’t begin with some polite small talk by e-mail. They’d probably just, you know, kill you.

2) If this assassin was really in the business of killing people for money, he’d probably prefer an $80,000 paycheque over a $10,000 one. Whether you’re dead or alive probably doesn’t make much of a difference to him. Just sayin’.

3) Anyone who writes, “I have all your informations with me now, as am talking to you,” is probably a Grade 3 drop out and unable to find your house on a map. So you’re probably pretty safe.

4) A real professional killer probably wouldn’t contact you by e-mail. Just a guess.

I know, I know. The world is a scary place, full of scary people. And we should all be very afraid at all times. Danger lurks around every corner.

Just this week, an unusual e-mail landed in my own inbox, but it wasn’t from a scammer. It was from my employer, wanting to know if I would wear a fluorescent safety vest when out on assignment. You know, to keep me safe.

Only thing is, I work as a reporter for a daily newspaper in Kitchener, where the only real danger comes from paper cuts or ink stains. It’s kind of like asking a librarian if they want a hard hat or an accountant who needs to wear a flak jacket.

Yep. This is the world we live in now. So whatever you do, for God’s sake, stay safe. And watch out for those assassins.

Our fair city, it turns out, has a problem with noise. And city hall, like an angry father banging on the bedroom door, looks like it’s finally had it with all the racket.

Just this week, two residents told city councillors they need to crack down on the loud motorcycles and cars that roar up and down our streets with annoying after-market mufflers and amplifiers, causing all kinds of headaches.

This, not so surprisingly, hasn’t sat well with some motorcycle owners, who say driving a quiet bike is kind of like bringing pink lemonade to a bachelor party or talking about your feelings. Basically, it’s for wussies.

Police, for their part, reportedly told a Cardigan Street man they couldn’t do anything about his concerns because officers don’t have the training and, more specifically, men who drive loud motorcycles are scary.

Still, the noise crusaders forge on. Earlier this month, a city hall committee was updated on a review of the city’s 11-year-old noise bylaw — including a proposed amendment that would ban “unnecessary yelling 24 hours a day.” Currently, all our shouting needs to be done between the hours of 9 a.m. and 11 p.m. on weekends.

The amendment would leave it up to bylaw officers to decide if the yelling was necessary or not. It’s not clear if exceptions would be made for medical conditions, namely those people who suffer from the strange malady that makes their voices rise with each beer they have.

Whatever the city decides to do, it’s clear plenty of residents just want some peace and quiet. Even University of Guelph president Alastair Summerlee admitted things got out of hand during the recent Homecoming weekend, part of a noisy month in which citizens made 405 noise complaints.

One problem may be Guelph has some of the lowest noise bylaw fines in the province, according to a comparison prepared by city staff. The set fine for noise violations here is $130 — compared to a provincial average of $274.

Those poor, hard of hearing saps up in Barrie, long known as Ontario’s Shoutin’ City,  pay upwards of $410, meanwhile.

Bylaws changes can only do so much — living in a city comes with some noise, and there will always be sounds that are incredibly hard to control.

But there have long been a special few noise-makers among us who stand out from the din of urban life. In their honour, here’s a few suggestions on how to the city can keep those obnoxious citizens on the quiet side of our noise bylaws.

1) Teach knuckleheads to use American Sign Language after the bars close. After a few months, they’ll be able to say things like “Excuse me sir, but I object to your description of my mother’s romantic history” and “I’d like to suggest to that you depart the area at once and perform an act which is anatomically impossible” — all without shouting a single word!

2) Make form-fitting, leopard-print spandex suits required wearing for anyone who wants to install after-market mufflers or pipes on their motorcycle. My suspicion is noise complaints would drop off dramatically.

3) Mandatory girlfriends for everyone who still thinks that modifying the exhaust system on their Honda Civic is a really, really cool thing to do. Also, tell their parents to finally kick them out of the house so they can learn to spend their money on things that matter.

5) Banning anyone who drives a Ford Mustang from the 1980s from also owning the Dance Mix ’95 album. Why do those two things always seem to go together? Who really knows — it’s just one of those mysteries of life.

6) Blacking out TV broadcasts of games involving any professional sports franchise from Toronto. At the very least, it would cut down on the swearing.

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Guelph Mercury. Oct. 29

Guelph residents wrote impassioned letters and made pleas to city council this week voicing their opposition to a proposed condo building at 180 Gordon St., near the Speed River. One man summed it all up by saying the whole project is “downright disrespectful to… a very sensitive piece of land,” namely, a small park next door.

You see, it’s not that they’re opposed to a condo development in their neighbourhood — why, that’s preposterous, they love condos! — it’s that they feel condos beside a park honouring the memory of a woman killed by her partner is inappropriate.

Here’s the basics: A Toronto company wants to build a four-storey, 11-unit brick condo building in a vacant lot at the end of Water Street. It’s a big building, sure, but the Empire State Building this is not.

It’s also an infill project, which puts new housing on unused brownfield sites within the city rather than bulldozing more farmland at the edge of town. Most of us can agree that’s generally a good thing.

The problem is, the condos would be next door to Marianne’s Park, named after Marianne Goulden, a women’s shelter worker who was stabbed to death by her boyfriend in 1992. It was a horrific crime and renaming the park after Goulden was a poignant tribute.

But what I don’t understand is this: How is an overgrown vacant lot, which stands there now, a better way to honour the memory of victims of domestic violence?

The residents say they’re upset over zoning changes requested by the developer. Currently, the property is zoned for a gas station — but I struggle to think that would be a more suitable neighbour for Marianne’s Park.

It goes without saying people have a right to oppose developments in their city, and they have a right to speak up when they feel those projects are pushing too far beyond the boundaries of their neighbourhood’s character.

But pretending this is all about honouring abused women and children — rather than good, old fashioned NIMBY-ism — seems just a little bit disingenuous in the case of some critics of this proposal. Instead, in the case of some, it looks more like throwing whatever opposition you can at a project, and hoping something sticks.

One letter writer even suggested Marianne’s Park would be “violated by being overlooked by residences.” Really? More so than the thousands of cars, city buses and trucks that roar past the park mere feet away on Gordon Street every single day?

The park, after all, is a very public space in the middle of a busy, growing city. That it could forever remain without anything being built around it is a little far-fetched.

But people trying to fight a condo development across the street will say anything, it seems.

The project’s opponents are acting as if the condos would be built smack on top of Marianne’s Park, rather than leaving it untouched as proposed. And they act as if an upscale condo owner would be a more neglectful neighbour than an empty gravel lot currently used by idling taxies and police cruisers.

Reality, however, doesn’t seem to matter much in these kind of fights. It’s the same kind of mentality that inspired someone to write “Go home yuppie scum” on a billboard promoting new townhouses recently built in a vacant lot across from Goldie Mill.

Infill projects like these are only going to become more common as thousands more people move into this city and we need to pack more folks into less space. As sure as the sun rises, these kind of fights will become more common, too.

But this has to be one of the most creative arguments we’ve heard yet.

At least a few of the letter writers to council were honest enough to admit what this is really about — they fear the condos could be bought and rented out to, horror of horrors, students, who would surely bring mayhem and much suffering to the entire neighbourhood.

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