GregMercer.ca Newspapering and other adventures

Pot club stung by legal confusion

Guelph Mercury, 12/05/10

I’m confused.

Not dazed and confused. Just confused.

The source of my confusion is the decision by the Guelph Police Service to bust the Medical Cannabis Club of Guelph last week, which led to trafficking charges against four staff, including founder Rade Kovacevic.

Part of my confusion may be because the message from Canadian officials on marijuana use is as mixed as a 1988 cassette tape. (Note to readers: a long, long time ago, music came in a strange format called a cassette tape and teenagers would create eclectic mixes of their favourite songs, which, consequently, is illegal).

In the eyes of Health Canada, marijuana can be a therapeutic drug with real medical benefits for some users. You can obtain a physician’s prescription for it – more than 4,000 Canadians have – and the government even contracts a company in Saskatchewan to grow marijuana for it. Hundreds more have federal licenses to grow their own pot with seeds from that company.

In the eyes of many police forces, however, marijuana is still a street drug to be pursued for criminal charges, no different from crack-cocaine or heroin. And that contradiction seems to have fixed a target squarely on the Medical Cannabis Club of Guelph.

While some of the club’s members had Health Canada prescriptions for marijuana to treat ailments from multiple sclerosis to cancer to Hepatitis C, many did not. But to get a membership, everyone needed a form filled out by their physician, explaining their symptoms and their illness, according to the founder.

In the eyes of the law, selling pot to members without a Health Canada prescription is illegal. What I struggle to understand is why targeting those buyers, whose use was condoned by a physician, was a priority for police, when there’s a much larger, arguably more dangerous underground drug trade in this city.

The club has been selling marijuana to the ill in Guelph for more than three years. Why did police consent to it operating in the city for all that time, out in the open, if it viewed the club’s business as criminal?

But regardless of who’s buying the stuff, the cannabis club offered a safe, transparent alternative to the typical source of marijuana – the black market, with all its connections to organized crime. The club has a downtown office. It maintains hours of operations. It has a website. It has an owner, Kovacevic, who doesn’t hide what he does.

And maybe that’s the problem. Was Kovacevic too out in the open for police’s tastes? In February 2009, he and his partners started a second business, Guelph Compassion Centre and Research Institute, in a 2,000-square-foot industrial space where they were growing about 100 marijuana plants under high-pressure sodium lights.

Kovacevic gave interviews to the press, posed for photos, and talked about the club as if it were some kind of independent pharmacy. In January, the club moved to a larger, more open Baker Street address. Business was good.

In fact, it was so good the club was carrying $10,000 in cash and more than 20 kilograms of inventory when police swooped in. Maybe investigators felt that’s too big of an operation to tolerate anymore.

The club also hired an employee, Scott Gilbert, who had been on the police’s radar before. In 2007, he was investigated after he exposed a loophole in the Municipal Elections Act by casting five spoiled ballots at different polls. Oh, and he’s also a communist. Yes, it’s true! He ran as a candidate for the Communist Party of Canada in the 2006 federal election.

Maybe the Medical Cannabis Club of Guelph simply became too much of an irritant for police to ignore. Here was a club growing and selling marijuana, which may or may not be illegal, which may or may not provide a medical benefit to its users, right under their noses.

Perhaps police just said enough’s enough, let the courts figure this one out.

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

Let’s just not talk about it, OK?

Guelph Mercury, 28/04/10

Whew. That was close.

Our kids almost got more education about s-e-x. Yeah, I know. Can you imagine? But for now, at least, we can rest assured our kids won’t get any information about that dirty, sinful business. We can be certain they will remain perfectly innocent and ignorant.

I’m referring, of course, to the work on our behalf by ethnic and religious groups, like Catholic parent coalitions, to pressure Premier Dalton McGuinty off his plan to modernize Ontario’s sex education curriculum.

The new curriculum would have taught Grade 1 students the correct terms for genitalia. And that’s just gross. Everyone knows our bodies are shameful and weird, and we ought to not talk about them without using funny nicknames.

Also under the proposed changes, in Grade 3, students would have learned about homosexuality and, in Grade 6, they’d learn about masturbation. Talking about anal and oral sex were part of the Grade 7 lesson plan. Gross, gross, and more gross.

Thankfully, groups like Somali Parents for Education, the Institute for Canadian Values and Parents for Keeping our Kids in The Dark all made it clear they don’t like sex, and neither should their kids. So they wailed. And they screamed. And they got their way.

McGuinty did what any politician facing the slightest bit of opposition would do. He flip-flopped and promised never again to propose something slightly controversial only a year and half away from an election.

Most people were shocked at the way the new curriculum seemed to come out of nowhere, considering the government only consulted with the public for three years before they sprang this filthy stuff on us. Genitalia? Imagine.

Some of the curriculum’s most vocal critics, such as Canada Christian College president and evangelist Charles McVety, cried that the new curriculum was pandering to “a special-interest group” of homosexuals. McVety knew that the gays were out to corrupt our kids’ impressionable minds, and if they weren’t stopped, would next try to institute peekaboo leather chaps and mustaches as school uniforms.

Someone had to stop this madness, and McVety took a stand. Just like he did when he tried to repeal the Canadian law that legalized same-sex marriage. Or when he explained that a carbon cap and trade system to reduce climate change would “fund the one world government of the Anti-Christ.”

McVety was the same concerned citizen who railed against Ottawa’s decision to allow Egyptian mobile phone company Wind to operate here, saying that it was akin to appeasing terrorists. So, clearly, he’s a guy that knows what he’s talking about. Good thing he’s apparently calling the shots in Ontario’s school curriculum.

What this whole thing taught McGuinty is that parents want to be in control when it comes to talking about that, you know, all that gross stuff. Our kids won’t get pregnant, get any STDs or start sexual relationships until we say so. And we’ll say so on our terms.

So don’t worry. We’ll get around to having the s-e-x talks that our kids need. Eventually. Sort of . . . I mean, hey — what’s that on TV?

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

When is retirement not retirement?

Guelph Mercury, 04/21/10

A police officer doesn’t keep chasing bad guys after he leaves the service. The post man doesn’t keep delivering your mail once he hands in his mailbag. So why does no one blink when school teachers retire, and keep on working?

For years, the practice of retired teachers taking supply positions has been as normal as budget cuts and fundraisers at school boards in Ontario. But we’re not talking about taking a few supply days here and there – we’re talking about retired teachers accepting long-term supply contracts on top of pulling in their pensions.

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you want to pad your retirement income, that’s your business. The problem, though, is that a retired supply teacher costs school boards about twice as much as a new teacher, and takes away another job opportunity for Ontario’s oversupply of teaching graduates.

A report by the Globe and Mail this week put in concrete terms what has been common practice in schools for too long. The newspaper found the province’s 10 largest school boards would have saved $16.7 million last year if they had hired recently certified teachers instead of retired teachers for supply work.

That practice leaves new teachers struggling to get the job experience they need to land a coveted full-time gig. They’ve been saying for years it’s time their retired counterparts to act like they’re retired and put down the chalk, but it seems no one has been listening.

Because union pay scales are based on years of service, some retirees are paid twice as much for a day’s supply work than a new teacher. I understand that principals and schools want teachers with experience, but favouring retired teachers over recent grads with no regard for the cost – when so many boards are strapped for cash – looks like cronyism. Kids, meanwhile, are cheated out of the new energy brought to the classroom by young, recently certified teachers.

The rules that allow teachers to work up to 95 supply days in the first three years after they retire is a leftover from the old days of Ontario’s teacher shortages. Today, the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that there are so few openings for teachers that some grads wait years to get a job.

Until then, they have to make due with the scraps left behind by older teachers who are allegedly retired. Understandably, they’re frustrated.

The Ontario College of Teachers’ manager of human resources says the province is producing 7,500 more new teachers each year than there are retirements. No wonder young people with education degrees are packing up their suitcases and teaching English in places like Korea, knowing it’ll be years before more teaching jobs start opening up here.

To help reduce the supply, Ontario has told its universities to cut as many as 1,000 openings from their teaching programs in the next few years. That will help reduce the supply problem, in a province where there’s two graduates for every teaching job.

And now the government says it’s looking at fixing the rules around how many supply days a teacher can work once they retire. Good. But the bigger question is this – why did it take a series of embarrassing stories in the national press before the province and its teachers union vowed to do something?

In the meantime, school boards can start being proactive on the issue. They can start hiring more young teachers as supply instructors, and they can start doing it today.

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

Jesus, hot wings made me fat

Guelph Mercury, 14/04/10

Oh right, it’s spring.

I’d almost forgotten our roadways aren’t for getting around — they’re for digging holes, parking heavy equipment, and for keeping the Road Closed sign guys in business.

Yep. You can’t drive directly across town anymore without taking a 10-minute detour, which means spring must be here. But we already knew that. We’ve already peeled back the seven layers of clothing we’ve been wearing since October and tried to bring our pasty skin back to life.

And, you know, it’s not so bad that our skin looks a little bit like Gollum’s from the Lord of the Rings. What’s worse is that spare tire hanging around our waist that suggests bears weren’t the only ones hibernating over the winter.

There’s something in the way my lady looks at my gut as if to say, “That wasn’t there last fall, was it?” that makes me think maybe it’s time to get back in shape.

But, as I’ve tried to explain to her, our expanding waistlines aren’t our fault. Turns out, we’ve been under some pretty heavenly influence.

Researchers at Cornell University say portion sizes in paintings of the Last Supper have increased dramatically in the past 2,000 years. That’s right – the size of the loaves of bread, plates of pork, fish and lamb have increased by as much as 69 per cent over the centuries.

Some of the earliest depictions of the supper show Jesus and his crew eating depressing little meals that looked like they’d been prepared by Jenny Craig herself. But by the modern era, the dinner looks closer to Thanksgiving dinner at most Canadian homes. The scientists behind the study used computer programs to compare the portion sizes in 52 of the best-known paintings of the meal.

They studied the Last Supper because it is the “most famous supper in history,” says Brian Wansink of Cornell University’s food and brand lab in Ithaca, N.Y. Well, easy to say when Wansink wasn’t at my friend Steve’s house that time we drank too much beer and broke into his mother’s Easter ham a day early.

The researchers’ findings were published in the International Journal of Obesity — now there’s a periodical I’d like showing up on my doorstep. The same journal also recently published a study showing that mice who ate blood oranges gained less fat than mice that ate regular sweet oranges, which prompted mice everywhere to say “what the heck is a blood orange?”

But perhaps Jesus can’t be entirely blamed for my ballooning waist. I’d like to think all these road detours mean I’m doing a lot more sitting and waiting than I used to. And so, like most civilians, I also blame city hall.

Then again, maybe choosing my recipes from the website www.thisiswhyyou’refat.com was not such a good idea, either. OK, I take it back – the Cadbury Cream Eggs Benedict was delicious. Heavenly, almost.

But seriously, perhaps the best thing that could happen to my waist is the tragedy that is happening to my wallet and my favourite food. You now what I’m talking about — the price hikes that have been applied to chicken wings, which used to be a throwaway food. In some regions, the wholesale price of chicken wings has risen almost 40 per cent in the past two years, which is downright criminal.

Somewhere out there, the chicken-wing barons are greedily rubbing their hands. And I can’t say for certain, but I’m pretty sure they’re working on a way to get hot wings added to the menu of the Last Supper.

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

What’s in a dog’s name?

Guelph Mercury,  08/04/10

On the surface, dogs seem to have it all. They don’t have to work. No one blinks when they sniff each other’s rear ends. And they get to pee outside.

But unlike people, who can legally change their names, man’s best friend has to live with the name we give him, no matter how stupid it may be.

That means choosing a dog’s name has always been fraught with danger. Let children do it, and you’ll end up with Mr. PooPoo. Adults aren’t much better, considering one of the most popular female dog names remains Lady. I guess people take perverse pleasure in standing in the park and yelling, “Hey Lady” and “C’mere Lady!”

A tiny poodle named Killer is bound to be confused for life. Call your fierce guard dog Fluffy, and he’ll invite anyone into your house.

And so it is that I am about to welcome a shaggy stranger into my home. No, not Owen Wilson. That would just be weird. I’m talking about a dog. And this dog needs a name.

Personally, I’m partial to Uncle Leo, but apparently others don’t see the humour in naming your dog after Seinfeld characters. Others like the name Money, as in “We lost Money again,” and “Money has destroyed this house” and because you can stand on your doorstep and yell “Come here, Money!”

George W. Bush was partial to Barney, the Scottish Terrier that helped him craft foreign policy while he was in the White House. Then there’s Bo, Barack Obama’s Portugese water dog, the little pet that probably eats better than I do.

There’s the always dependable Pat, the Irish Terrier who mattered so much to our own Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King that he cancelled cabinet meetings just to sing to him.

For loyalty, you can’t beat Bobbie, the name of the Wonder Dog who walked 2,800 miles across the United States to Oregon after getting separated form his owners in 1923. Or Shep, the border collie that waited at a train station in Montana for six years after his master was loaded onto a train in a coffin.

My own experience with dogs hasn’t been quite that legendary. First there was Sheba – a sheep dog with a troubled past who herded the neighourhood kids around the yard. She was extremely effective, because any kid who strayed from the pack got nipped in the face.

Then there was poor old Sassie – the dog that would run for days on end until the game warden two counties over called and told us to come pick up our pet. Every year, she’d chase deer across the ice until the lake broke open in spring. Inevitably, she’d come home sopping wet, shivering violently like an underdressed university student standing in line outside a downtown bar.

Sassie spent her final months carrying around a goiter on her mouth the size of a tennis ball. As kids, we ran from her like she was the Elephant Man.

Then came Cassie, the dog who took to digging up deer carcasses and dragging them to the front door after they had aged properly. She was pretty to look at but just about as dumb as you’d like a dog to be – though smart enough to figure out if you went swimming with your electric collar long enough, it would eventually stop shocking you.

Maybe, just maybe, a good name should be a reward for good behaviour. In that case, maybe I’ll let the dog help choose its own name. That way if it turns out to be a monster, I swear I’m naming it Whiskers The Cat.

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

No place for farms in prison bonanza

Guelph Mercury, 31/03/10

In these achy days of post-recession hangovers, all anybody in Ottawa wants to talk about is slashing costs, delaying purchases and getting tough on spending.

Federal bureaucrats have been told to start trimming programs used by millions of Canadians. It’s time to make tough decisions, they say. It’s an era of restraint.

That is, unless you work for Corrections Canada. In that case, it’s bonanza time.

The department that runs Canada’s prisons is one of the few areas of government that isn’t experiencing belt-tightening as Ottawa tries to rein in our crippling $54-billion deficit.

Instead, the federal government has announced the department will soon be awash in taxpayers’ money, and will launch a massive hiring and expansion campaign. In the next three years, Corrections Canada plans to hire another 4,000 staff, and will watch its budget swell by 27 per cent, to $3.1 billion.

All this for a prison system that’s responsible for just 22,000 inmates, including 9,000 or so who are in halfway houses and living in the community on parole. According to this year’s budget, the federal government already spends about $112,000 per offender, with a staff-to-offender ratio of almost one to one.

And here’s the strange part. You would expect this expansion of Canada’s prison system to be a response to the crime wave crippling our country. But there is no crime wave. Far from it.

Canada’s crime rate has been dropping since 1991, and recently hit its lowest point in 25 years. Murders, break-ins, robberies and car thefts are all declining. So if Canada’s crime rate has been steadily declining for decades, why is our federal government acting as if it’s going in the other direction?

I’m especially confused, considering a year ago the same government said it didn’t have the $4 million it needed to keep operating six prison farms across the country. It announced it would be killing the program, just as it ramps up spending on super prisons.

By the end of this year, Corrections Canada will wind down its farm program that teaches 300 inmates skills from growing vegetables and making cuts of meat to raising livestock and harvesting eggs for food banks.

At these farms, prisoners get up before dawn, and spend their day producing food for the prison system and their community, doing something productive, something good. So what if few of them actually get jobs in agriculture after they’re released, as Corrections Canada has complained?

Lots of people have pleaded with the Conservatives to keep the prison farms open, including the National Farmers’ Union, saying agricultural skills are in high demand across the country.

The decision is “short-sighted,” they said, just as it was in 1972, when Ontario decided to phase out its own prison farms. That change in philosophy spelled the beginning of the end for Guelph’s Ontario Reformatory, which completely closed in 2001.

Our own provincial facility was once the biggest prison in the country. It produced milk, fresh meat, vegetables, canned fruit, jams, all which went to feed prisoners and other public institutions. The prisoners built extensive rock walls, man-made stream beds and ponds. They created a manicured 310-acre property that’s now enjoyed by fishermen, hikers and historians alike.

The work done at Guelph’s old prison farm taught valuable skills to thousands of inmates, produced food for many more – and saved taxpayers money. Back then, prison farms were seen as a progressive way to rehabilitate inmates.

Today, the Conservatives will tell you that kind of thinking is quaint and old-fashioned, with no place in this massive prison system expansion we’re all about to pay for.

And that’s a shame.

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

Words? Get it away! Get it away!

Guelph Mercury, 24/03/10

We did it!

Yes, dear readers, it is true. We finally found something to distract us from television.

No, it’s not sex. Come on, that requires work. Eating? No, we can do that at the same time.

I’m talking about the internet – that great, illuminated thing that brings us instant weather updates and naughty school teachers. The good news is, we’re using it more than ever before.

According to a recent poll from Ipsos Reid, Canadians are now spending more than 18 hours a week online, compared to about 17 hours watching television.

I just typed those two numbers into my online calculator, and it tells me that’s 35 hours a week staring at a screen, combined. In a year, that’s about 76 full days of round-the-clock staring at a screen, which isn’t completely crazy in a country where Mother Nature acts like she’s in menopause for a good chunk of the year. If you add going to the movies, video games and texting on handheld gadgets, there’s probably half our year gone just staring at screens.

And it will probably keep increasing. We’re now turning to the web for movies, sitcoms, sporting events, music videos — you know, the stuff television networks used to broadcast before we had Reality TV.

So what’s this all mean for these ink spots on your page? Newspapers have been crying that ink space has been vanishing for decades. That readers want shorter, more concise, more summed-up content, so they can get back to their computers and televisions more quickly.

But what do they expect? I mean, seriously, reading? That’s for suckers. Or really old people. Personally, I’m bored of this column already. I want the day’s events summed up in 30 seconds or less with trumpet music blaring in the background. Besides, there’s this monkey online …

Oh yeah, and what about those other paper things you hear about on TV. What do they call them, books? Pfft. Entire blocks of uninterrupted text, without break-out graphs, embedded videos, illustrations, bullet points, hyper links or info graphics? How is anyone supposed to read that? With so much fascinating stuff like AmIHotOrNot.com and Create Farts.com online, who wants to read a whole book, anyway? Man, that would take hours, at least.

Thank God publishers are saving us the time. Indigo recently released Kobobooks.com, a website that lets you buy only the chapters you want from a book at 99 cents a pop. At last count, they had over 2 million books available for slicing and dicing. Imagine that – just buy the juicy bits, and forget all that character-building, plot and narrative hogwash. I’m sure there’s a website out there that can summarize those parts, anyway.

Other publishers are following the trend, too, including some that allow you to mash together your favourite chapters from any books into a bound text, as a music buyer would put together a playlist of MP3s. Sweet.

So what’s the lowly printed word to do, anyway? Find a nice burial plot on a hill and die so we can slap up a tombstone that reads ‘So long, we hardly knew ye’? Or maybe just a video loop, explaining what a book was.

Are we simply too distracted or too busy now to read anything without the help of something that hits us over the head and tells us what it’s about, saving us the time of actually reading it ourselves? I don’t know, didn’t Google have a link to a study on that recently? It’s around here somewhere …

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

Those students are worth the hassle

Guelph Mercury, 03/17/10

This spring, take time to hug a student.

I know, I know. They talk funny. They wear weird clothes. They drink too much and hog all the taxi cabs on Saturday nights.

But if you’re holding your breath for May and the annual exodus of students from town, you might want to take a moment to consider what your house would be worth if they weren’t here.

As we peer out from this economic downturn and think about our next great steps, let’s not forget the university that has offered us a buffer from the recessionary pain that has hit other North American towns.

While other cities have watched their housing prices dip dramatically, Guelph’s real estate market has avoided any major downward swings despite steep job losses across its manufacturing sector. Why? In large part, that’s because universities are a stable presence in unstable times.

The university doesn’t close up shop and move to Mexico for cheaper students. It doesn’t lock out everyone because of a bad quarter. It doesn’t need to appease investors and show that it can slash costs dramatically in the face of crashing revenues.

Universities have steady payrolls and an almost never-ending demand for their products. And while most universities have been affected somewhat by the recession, and have trimmed budgets and a few jobs, they remain on the whole insulated in a way that companies that depend on the market can’t be.

Just ask Rochester. Or Cleveland. Or Pittsburg. Or any other city that is banking on the future of its university after watching its old-line manufacturing base rust and corrode and drive residents away by the thousands.

The Eastman Kodak Company used to employ more than 60,000 people in Rochester in 1982. Today? The company, once a manufacturing giant, has slashed its workforce to 14,000. But Rochester is still grateful to Kodak, only not in a way you might expect.

By 2006, the University of Rochester quietly surpassed Kodak to become the biggest employer in the city. It owes a big part of that growth George Eastman, the inventor of rolled film and founder of Kodak. Before he shot himself in the heart in 1932, he gave the small university some $50 million.

That endowment helped turn the university into “a superstar of economic growth,” according Patricia Malgieri, Rochester’s deputy mayor. While Eastman’s own company bled jobs because of swings in the market, the university he helped build grew steadily.

It’s the same story in Cleveland, a once-bustling manufacturing town that now puts its hopes in its universities and research.

In 1910, there were more people living in Cleveland than there are today. By 1950, its population had swollen to more than 914,000 residents. Today, there’s less than half that many, as people fled a city where heavy manufacturing jobs were vanishing. As many as one in 10 homes are vacant.

For decades, the city’s location at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River on the shores of Lake Erie had made it an ideal place to build things. They worked in steel, chemicals and other goods and shipped them by rail and through the Ohio and Erie Canal.

But today you won’t find anyone talking excitedly about manufacturing in Cleveland. Instead, they talk about Case Western Reserve University, and the research in biotechnology and fuel cells that is finally drawing new money and smart people to Cleveland.

Universities can’t single-handedly revive an economy. But they can offer stability that companies never can. So next time you think about shaking your first at a student, try saying thanks instead.

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

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.