GregMercer.ca Newspapering and other adventures

Times are changing: let the businesses back in

Guelph Mercury, 25/11/09

When Schippling’s Bicycle Service first opened for business, it fixed wagon wheels and other funny things that you can only see now on Anne of Green Gables re-runs.

It was 1908. Schippling’s was still a few years away from getting into the mode of transport that would become its namesake: bicycles. By 1913, the two-wheeled contraptions were the little shop’s main focus.

As its Kitchener neighbourhood grew up around it, the little business built up its reputation and its customer base. These were the days when businesses were often small and independent, and they dotted neighbourhoods across Ontario, including those in Guelph.

Back then, no one blinked at the thought of a blacksmith or a grocer operating next door to family homes. Then times changed. City planners began to see businesses as something that needed to be kept apart from residential areas.

In many cases, this made sense. There was a need to separate homes from heavy commercial activity, or loud or hazardous factories. But all kinds of other businesses also got caught up in these new zoning regulations. And the problem with that is it creates segregated islands of development, which favour cars and discourage walking.

In 1994, Kitchener decided the Duke Street neighbourhood Schippling’s had been in since the turn of the century should be zoned strictly residential. They gave the tiny bike shop an exemption, but decreed that no other business should ever be allowed in its place.

Now it’s 2009. The man who owned Schippling’s has died and his relatives are stuck with a building they say they can’t sell, thanks to these zoning restrictions. They say they’ll probably sell to a developer who will demolish the shop and build a townhouse.

To amend the bylaw, the relatives were looking at an $8,450 fee just to get the ball rolling, with no guarantee of success. Time seems to be limited for the quaint bike shop in the old neighbourhood.

All of this makes one wonder what’s so bad about a small business, like a bike shop, rubbing shoulders with houses?

Zoning bylaws govern nearly everything about how our city looks and why certain buildings can only go in certain places. They have incredible power in shaping our communities and the way we live. And, as citizens, we need to start demanding more flexibility.

In Guelph, zoning bylaws are the rules that tell you where you can put your pool, why you can’t live in a trailer, why your satellite dish must be on the back of your house, or how tall your hedge can be — 0.8 metres above the street.

These zoning bylaws also govern what kind of businesses can go in residential areas. These are the rules that would allow a bed and breakfast or a day care, but not a small bike shop like Schippling’s, to open alongside a row of homes in the south end.

Like anti-clothesline covenants and rules that dictate what colour you can paint your front door, the thinking behind bylaws like this is increasingly old-fashioned. This kind of approach led to neighbourhoods where you can go a mile without seeing anything other than beige garage doors and identical front porches.

Despite all the talk about making smaller Ontario’s cities more walkable, most of us still live in neighbourhoods where restrictive bylaws prevent us from actually walking to all the things we need, such as bike shops. That’s too bad. As our cities absorb more citizens and grow denser, it’s something we’d better get used to.

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

W.C. Wood’s obituary was already written

Guelph Mercury, 18/11/09

So long, W.C. Wood.

When the bad news hit that one of Guelph’s most recognizable manufacturing dynasties was saying goodbye to the town it has called home since 1941, it prompted glowing tributes to our city’s golden days of manufacturing. You know, back when we used to make stuff that went all around the world.

Here was a once-proud appliance maker, a household name for some 80 years, folding and vanishing under the apparent pressures of a recession. The company’s demise here would leave 250 employees without work and its equipment and materials sold off for scrap.

Also gone was the company’s plant in Ohio, which employed 150 people, and another in Torreon, Mexico. At its peak, the company had 1,100 employees in North America.

This was as bad as it gets for a home-grown company. But the biggest question we should be asking—was anyone inside it really surprised?

What happened to W.C Wood was the consequence of a reckless, greedy spending spree that began on Wall Street and would eventually spread to factory towns around North America.

The tombstone was pre-ordered when the owners of W.C. Wood sold the company off to a New York-based equity firm, Red Diamond Capital. With that move, W.C. Wood became just a file in a “portfolio” of companies.

When Red Diamond bought W.C. Wood in 2007, no brand name was sold more often in Canada’s freezer market. Its revenues were in excess of $200 million. Though the company was far from stable—its sales had already been slipping—its troubles only increased under new American ownership.

Last month, the company cut 148 workers in Guelph and further slashed spending. It still wasn’t enough. When push comes to shove, private equity firms, including Red Diamond, will do anything to protect their profits. Now workers are out on the streets of Guelph.   

Private-equity firms like Red Capital are in the business of buying often struggling companies they hope to sell later at a profit. They buy the businesses with a combination of their investors’ money and ultra-cheap loans that went off the charts in the middle of this decade.

The biggest problem with these private equity firms is that they strip the companies they buy of assets and flip them for a fast buck. That loads those companies up with dangerous amounts of debt, which sucks out the money demanded by investors. This arrangement puts those investors first, and pays little attention to employees at the bottom making the products. 

Before the financial meltdown hit, this booming business of private equity buyouts often went un-scrutinized and was poorly understood by the public. When Red Capital bought W.C. Wood, firms like it were raising record billions. Those were the good old days of 2007, when it seemed that any company could be “saved” by the miracle of private equity.

Then the bubble burst. Creditors around the world started questioning the easy money offered to private-equity firms, which made their reputations by feeding off risky types of debt.

Blaming the recession is only half the story. The workers at W.C. Wood know that.

“We had a good workforce out there, and we made a good product,” Mark Siefker, a 52-year-old senior product engineer at the United States plant, told an Ohio newspaper. “Something changed with the new owners when they bought it from the Wood family a year and a half ago.” 

W.C. Wood was caught up in a risky buying binge that promised quick, easy money for investors. The bubble had to burst. It did. This week, Guelph saw what happens when it does.

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

Say it ain’t so, Bob

Guelph Mercury, 11/11/09

Sing it Bob.

Or croak it, or whatever that sound coming from your throat is.

Don’t mind us. We’ll just be sitting here, squinting from the very back row of this old hockey rink, knees banging on the heads of the guys in front of us, trying to figure out what the heck the guy in the big white hat way at the other end was saying.

Whatever he’s saying, it must be important.

This was Bob Dylan, after all, and he was once a really big deal. Who else could cause us to slap down $60 each to crowd into Kitchener’s cavernous Aud, a Soviet-inspired place normally reserved for hockey playing teenagers? We were trying to buy a piece of a legend, and we were eager to be pleased.

The night started out promising enough. We pulled up in the jammed parking lot, watching all those 50-something groupies falling out of Dodge Caravans and lining up outside the arena like NHLers waiting for the H1N1 vaccine. This was going to be good.

Walking into the rink, we heard music start up, and I figured from the sound some country-rock band led by an Inuit throat singer with a bad cold was warming up the crowd.

But no. This wasn’t the opening act, but the act – Dylan – showing us in awful clarity that times do a-change yer vocal chords. You could practically hear the recession-weary crowd in this recession-weary town groan “we paid what for this?”

One local reviewer later wrote that his “voice fell somewhere between a throat-clearing croak and a raspy growl.” I’d say that’s being polite. I can’t confirm it, but it’s probable that every child within a quarter mile of the Aud went running for their lives that night.

Other than the parts where he sang, it was a good set. The harmonica doesn’t age, apparently. But Dylan’s lyrics were indecipherable and when the song was widely-known, he deliberately changed the delivery so much that the sings were unrecognizable.

If Dylan knew he was performing in front of an audience, he didn’t show it. At one point, his leg shook a bit, but it may have been a twitch. At another point, after a 10-minute jam, the band wrapped it up, exhausted. The boss in the big white hat just glared at them, and awkwardly they started up again, and kept it going for another three minutes until he was ready to finish.

He seemed to ad-lib his lyrics and pulled lines from dozens of songs to fill the space he needed. His only nod to the crowd was when he mumbled “thank you my friends,” while looking at his feet.

Dylan played for 95 minutes, and wrapped up with a whimper before 9:45 p.m. The whole thing was painful, especially for someone like this writer who holds the 68-year-old songwriter in such high esteem.

And then the swooning came. People were tripping over themselves to say nice things. If you didn’t swoon, you’re not a real fan. If you didn’t cry, you’re probably dead inside. That same reviewer who panned the voice also quoted a line up of people gushing over the performance.

Right. But we’ve got ears, and they were working just fine on Saturday night. And so was our sense of being ripped off.

We know Dylan was always a reluctant icon in the spotlight, but you couldn’t help the feeling that we were the ones getting exploited that night.

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.

We feel your pain, Montreal

Guelph Mercury, 04/11/09

Ah, another day in the Royal City. Take a trip down the dirt road that used to be our main street, around yet another detour, over the craters in the streets and past the mob of thugs shaking the bus full of city officials.

And some other city thinks they’ve got it worse than us? This week’s front-page headline in Maclean’s magazine screamed “Montreal is a corrupt, crumbling, mob-ridden disgrace.” Guelph will be on next week’s cover, I guess.

Sure, Canada’s second-biggest city may still have its poutine and joie de vivre. But we can commiserate with the embarrassment Montrealers are feeling theses days. Not so much on the corruption part – there’s thankfully no evidence of that. But when you talk about a city where road construction seems to serve someone other than the public, and where goons hurl threats and more to intimidate civic leaders, you might as well be talking about Guelph.

Montreal is battling allegations the mob controls the road building business in the city. There is talk of brown envelopes stuffed with cash showing up at city hall, and contracts that are inflated well beyond their true costs. Part of that explains why it costs on average 30 per cent more to build a stretch of road in Quebec than it does anywhere else in the country.

But I’d put money on the line it costs twice as long to rebuild a street in our fair city.

Remember when you could actually drive down Gordon or Wyndham streets? Or Speedvale. Or Paisley. I don’t. This has become a city where you can’t travel from point A to point B without running an obstacle course of dirt roads, heavy equipment, stacks of culverts, piles of gravel or plain old road closure signs. And never a worker in sight—they’re apparently all at home resting after the grueling 25-hour week they put in fixing our streets.

Incredibly, Guelph didn’t make the recent list of worst roads in Ontario. A local disc jockey quipped “that’s because we don’t have any roads anymore. They’re all under construction.”

And Montreal may have its mob problems but we’ve got goons of our own. They may not dress in suits and drive fancy cars, but they aim to intimidate just the same. They think they’re beyond reproach. Guelph has long had its share of activists and anarchists. But this fight over the Hanlon Creek Business Park has brought out the worst in some of them.

When did this become the kind of city where ‘activists’ think it’s fine to show up at someone’s private doorstep – en masse – and warn them and their family away from a city project? And if the police intervene, these activists run to the legal system and launch a civil lawsuit?

Or a city where people who claim to care about the environment think it’s fine to descend into goonism, getting violent at a sod-turning event? Whether you like it or not, if you show up at a protest and begin shouting “You will pay for this. Your life is on the line” at the people taking part, you’re nothing more than a thug.

I understand that people get angry and tempers flare. And I’m no Hanlon Creek Business Park booster. The project is not particularly innovative or progressive, and it’s costing us a pretty piece of land, but by trying to stop it through violence and intimidation, you’ve done more damage than good.

Once you’ve crossed that line, you’re just a goon.

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

Local seafood? No thanks, I’m from Ontario

Guelph Mercury, 28/10/09

In Ontario, we like to say the more local, the better. Unless it comes from the sea.

We want our beef to be raised within 100 miles or less. We want to know the cow’s mother, what she ate, and how she voted in the last election. We howl when someone tries to pass off American apples or Mexican lettuce as Ontario-grown at local farmers’ markets. And heaven forbid if our wines contain grapes grown in any place other than the Niagara Peninsula. Heck, we throw people in jail for lying to us about that.

But when it comes to locally grown fish, seafood gets a pass. Ontarians still seem to value more exotic fish over the backyard variety. Local rainbow trout? How quaint. But Chilean trout? Ooooh.

“There’s always been a bit of snob factor around farmed seafood,” Patrick McMurray, owner of the Starfish Oyster Bed & Grill in Toronto, told me at a recent industry expo he hosted to address this problem.

Sure, we’ve long caught fish in the Great Lakes. But the solution to getting more local fish on Ontario tables won’t come from more fishing boats on Lake Huron or Lake Erie. It will come from cages.

You might not know it, but Ontario has a farmed seafood industry. But rainbow trout, its prized pink-fleshed product—often mistaken for salmon—is still flying under the radar. Many consumers, assuming Ontario doesn’t produce much farmed fish for seafood counters, don’t bother checking or thinking about where the fish they buy comes from.

The Northern Ontario Aquaculture Association says it had sales in the range of $51 million in 2007. But it’s still a very small fish competing with some very big sharks for grocery store space. Chile’s farmed fish exports, by comparison, are over $3-billion. That includes over $480 million in trout alone, the fish that Ontario’s aquaculture industry is pinning its hopes on.

Ontario also grows talipia, Arctic char and bass—but you can bet most of those varieties at your local seafood counter don’t come from Canada’s largest province, either. And if consumers don’t ask, grocers won’t switch.

Natural Resources Minister Donna Cansfield thinks the ‘go local’ craze in food means a golden opportunity for Ontario aquaculture. She says she wants to make it easier for the province’s fish farmers to grow their operations. The first step, the industry says, is reducing some of the over two dozen separate pieces of regulation and legislation they say says makes it incredibly difficult and slow to add new cages.

But reducing bureaucracy won’t be the only challenge. The Ontario farmed fish industry knows it has image work to do if it succeeds with plans to expand. Some environmentalists don’t want to see the industry grow, spreading concerns over pollution, impact on wild species and exposure to disease. And many land owners, especially those around Manitoulin Island where most of province’s fish farms are located, want unbroken shoreline vistas, not miles of cages off their beaches.

But fish farmers have a good story to tell, too: When you raise fish in a cage, you help reduce overfishing. And farmed fish is the future, according to the United Nations, which says global seafood consumption is growing by almost nine per cent a year. Half of the seafood eaten around the world is farmed, and we can’t grow it fast enough.

We accept land-based farming as a fact of life in Ontario. But while pioneers first plowed fields hundreds of years ago, commercial fish farming has only been around for a few decades.

Consumers, it seems, still need time to think about it.

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

Do good couches go to heaven?

Guelph Mercury, 21/10/09

Nobody writes obituaries for old couches. But maybe they should.

Especially for this one. It looked like a chesterfield but drooped like a hammock. If you needed a nap, its asbestos-filled upholstery would lull you into a two-day pass-out that cats can only dream of. Best of all, it collected change more efficiently than a bum. And it knew a thing or two about those, too.

After what looked like 30 years of hoisting people’s posteriors, the old girl kind of gave up. In her final days, her insides hung out on the floor, collecting all kinds of dust and hairballs. Dusty hairballs and spawn of dusty hairballs that scientists have yet to discover.

But she was all mine—every beige inch of her granny-style flower pattern and uncooperative pillows spilling stuffing that looked like it was running for its life. She came from IKEA around the same time the Bee Gees were hitting it big, and after decades of loyal service to me and previous owners, I dragged her to the curb and propped up a ‘free’ sign.

The old couch sat baking in the sun on the sidewalk across from my window, and I pretended not to look. The last I saw of that frayed, worn-out beauty, teenaged punks were doing back flips off it. The nerve.

It suffered an afternoon full of abuse that day. Earlier, some sweaty, shirtless guys came upon it and plopped down, nursing their beers. They took the ‘free’ sign away and left an empty pack of smokes.

Strangely, some girls came by and took photos of it with their cellphones, probably destined for some dirty Internet couch fetish website I don’t even know about yet. Whatever they planned for it, I don’t want to hear about it. I just hope they treated her with dignity.

The couch disappeared without a trace overnight. I guess the new owner was too embarrassed to be seen picking it up in the daylight. When the sun came up the next day, I looked out the window to the spot where the couch had been, and felt a tinge of regret.

Funny how guys can develop unusual, probably unnatural attachments to old worn-out things. If it were up to us, we’d still find a use for the underwear we had in high school. But that sort of behavior causes problems for those who don’t understand that kind of thinking. Namely women.

Oh, the things I’ve kept long past their best-before dates. The same week I threw out that couch, I said goodbye to a dozen coffee mugs, each one of them a free handout or a hand-me-down, and not one of them with its original handle intact. They had worked just fine for me. But then again, I’d probably drink out of old tin cans, if I could.

I also tossed a faded green kitchen table and set of chairs that were so wobbly you’d swear you were at sea when you sat on them. I said sayonara to a crock pot that may or may not have been used by Abraham Lincoln. I bid adieu to a coffee table so unsteady that newspapers risked crashing it to the ground.

And where does all this stuff go? Who knows. Is there a heaven for beat-up kitchenware and broken-down furniture, where everyone is a bachelor and a saggy couch can once again be a man’s throne? I can only hope.

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

Recall this! We’re surrounded by junk

Guelph Mercury, 14/10/09

Try explaining to your 85-year-old grandmother why she had two CD players die in one weekend, but her 35-year-old radio keeps humming along.

Or how she can make an entire Thanksgiving meal with the same cookware and appliances she’s been using since the 1950s—all of it remarkably still working, mostly made by companies that long ago disappeared—but she can’t buy a new coffee maker that will last a year. Or why relatives can still call her on the same rotary phone she had installed 40 years ago, but I can’t get a cellphone to outlast four seasons.

This is our modern world, Granny. Full of cheap, plentiful goods that seem designed with the lifespan of a fruit fly. Getting five years out of anything new today is cause for a celebration.

And the response from the people who sold you the thing is often a shrug. Why deal with the hassle of getting it repaired, when you can just buy a new one? You’ll spend just as much. So out with the old, in with the new—and see you again in six months.

At some point, we became a nation of cheap imports and daily product recalls. A visit to the federal government’s recall website (www.healthycanadians.ca) shows just how ho-hum product failure is for us. In the past month, we’ve been told to stop using: garlic presses that cut people, scuba gear that leaks, hammocks that collapse, mini glue guns that overheat, barbecue lighters that catch on fire, coffee makers that melt and bath soaps that contain harmful bacteria. On and on the list goes.

In America, recalls are so overwhelmingly common that their government’s website (www.recalls.gov) is searchable by country of origin. And not all of this crumbling stuff is made in crowded factories in Asia. Look for products recalled from Canada, and you’ll find dozens of items, including propane fireplaces that shatter glass and electronic paper towel dispensers that catch on fire. All of it made right here in the Great White North.

One of the best makers of bad stuff, at least when you count recalls, is still China. We’re their second-largest trading partner, bringing in some $35-billion in Chinese-made goods to Canada every year. So no surprise, either, that both of grandmother’s burned-out CD players were made there. You can’t become the world’s largest exporter by making things that never need to be replaced.

But recalls are only the worst of the worst. There’s no measure of the piles of poorly made stuff that simply break, wear out early or just stop working. It all quietly ends up in our landfills by the tonne, so we can go out and buy more cheap and plentiful junk.

One wonders, though—if more things were made to last like they once seemed to be, maybe we wouldn’t need as many landfills. But that’s nonsense, they say. Canadians have a right to the cheapest goods available. Right?

Back to grandmother. Her television looks like a piece of wooden furniture from Mad Men, weighs about 200 pounds, and has a black knob you need to pull out and twist to see a picture. But it works just fine, she says. And then out she pulls an oven thermometer made by an Ohio company shortly after the Second World War. It also looks like it belongs in museum, but it still works, too.

Everyone has something like it—a well-made appliance or tool or gadget that refuses to die. Made of real materials, such as wood or glass or metal. We know these rare things will probably outlast us.

And then it occurs to you: why can’t more stuff be like this? I wish I knew, Granny.

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

Disney World’s over. Now, let’s grow up.

Guelph Mercury, 07/10/09

It sure sucks to be young. What with all the health and freedom from mortgages, and all that.

But what about all these studies showing young people are bearing the brunt of this recession, which we’re told is now officially over? Unless it’s not.

That’s bad news for us whippersnappers, no? On the surface, it seems so.

This summer, unemployment among students aged 15 to 24 was 20 per cent, the highest for this age group since 1977, according to Canada’s Vital Signs 2009. Those of us who were able to get our careers started after college were the first to be shown the door once the economy went sour. In June, there were more than twice as many youths receiving employment insurance than there were a year earlier.

And yet, as youth unemployment doubled the national rate, employment among those 55 years or older actually rose, by five per cent. That doesn’t seem very fair. But hold on.

What if being this recession’s whipping boy is actually good for this generation? What if we needed to be shaken up? Because until now we’ve acted like a bunch of spoiled kids raised by parents whose child-rearing lessons went something like this: You want to be an astronaut, go be an astronaut. You’re more special than anyone else. You can be whatever you want to be. Go get ‘em, tiger.

No one ever told us you can’t get everything you want, when you want it. That’s why we spend like drunken sailors and treat saving for the future like it’s about as cool as getting the gout. That’s why we’re up to our necks in debt and living like we’re richer than we are. For the longest time, we were getting away with it.

So this harsh wake up might be just what we needed. A recent report in USA Today suggests this generation is recovering from the shock of the recession by embracing the simpler lifestyle. They’re becoming more entrepreneurial, and more realistic in their goals.

Depending upon how long the downturn lasts, the experts think this whole experience could shape our values and attitudes for the rest of our lives, in the same way the Depression shaped the attitudes of our grandparents. One psychologist called it “the end of Disney World,” and I’d say that’s a good thing.

We needed to be reminded there’s value in living simply and on a budget. That there’s nothing wrong with buying smaller house than you hoped you might have. That’s there’s value in waiting for the good life, and that there’s value in getting there on your own. In other words, it’s good, although certainly painful, to have your bubble burst once in a while.

You have to wonder, too, if some employers might be saying good riddance to all those Gen-Yers, or Millenials, or whatever other clever label they’ve come up with for people my age. Why? We have an enormous sense of self-entitlement, an impatience with delayed gratification and an expectation that the world is our oyster. We sound like royal pains.

After being coddled for most of our lives, is it any surprise we still have a fair amount of self-pity for what’s happened to us? According to the USA Today poll, some 60 per cent of those 18 to 29 feel “my generation has been dealt an unfair blow because of this recession.” Pass the tissues, will you? Because above all things, life is supposed to always be unwaveringly fair. Right? Right?

So maybe, if that USA Today report is right, this recession has been a good thing for young people. Maybe we are getting a new set of priorities as we watch our parents take out a second or third mortgage to afford that new car every five years, that big kitchen makeover and that new deck out by the pool.

Maybe more and more of us really are saying: If that’s the measure of a good life, they can keep it.

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.

City needs to grow, wisely

Guelph Mercury, 10/02/09

Rural land needs to be protected. Even city folk understand that.

And why wouldn’t we. No one wants to live in a province where the cities go on for ever. No one wants our farms and forests to constantly give way to more subdivisions and strip malls. (Brampton or Mississauga, anyone?)

But controlling how our cities grow is about more than just throwing up a “developers go home” sign at the edge of town. We have to accept that neighbourhoods inside our cities are going to change, too. For some of us, that might be the biggest challenge of all.

This week, the Region of Waterloo announced plans to place huge swaths of land outside Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge off-limits to developers. The municipality says the countryside restrictions will protect groundwater, preserve farmland and restrain urban sprawl. It also means new growth is going to be focused eastward, which should matter to people who live in Guelph.

Why does Waterloo Region need a greenbelt? Because its municipal leaders have allowed urban sprawl to go on unfettered for decades. And they’re not alone. Saying no to that kind of easy growth has long been a tough dilemma for many municipalities. More home owners within city limits means more tax revenue to do the big public projects that every community wants to do.

Guelph, meanwhile, has its own problems with sprawl and its own ideas about protecting the rural land around it. It’s even asked the province about expanding Ontario’s Greenbelt here.

But not everyone loves greenbelts. No doubt some rural landowners, particularly farmers, would balk at the suggestion they could never sell their land to a developer planning to build subdivision. And no wonder: for many of them, selling property that rings a growing city is their retirement fund.

If a developer knows they can never convert farmland into an urban use, guess what happens to that property’s value. Those living within Ontario’s 1.8 million-acre Greenbelt around the Greater Golden Horseshoe can tell you. That’s why some argue, quite convincingly, that greenbelt farmers should be compensated for bearing the brunt of these environmental restrictions.

And greenbelts alone will never solve our growth problems, anyway.

There are other ways to guide Guelph’s development upward, not outward. City councils have the power to approve development that fits with our denser, more compact future. They have the ability to offer tax breaks for developers who build intensification projects within or close to the core, and grants to those who turn brownfields and old factories into new uses like housing or commercial space.

They can approve projects that require some creativity and style from developers. They can approve more neighbourhoods without two-car garages, detached homes and yards.

The problem with this kind of progressive urban planning is that it also takes the support of an informed public. And Guelph’s anti-development crowd has shown some among them can be anything but sometimes.

When a developer tries to build townhomes upon unused former industrial space near downtown, they cry “gentrification” and “go home yuppies” and talk about elitism. They wail as if all development is bad, as if an urban infill project is no different than a shopping mall on the city’s edge.

Blinders-on thinking like that might be popular in the closed circles of activists, but it’s in the real world it’s short-sighted and out of touch.

That’s too bad. Because the people will not stop coming. The city will not stop growing. All we can do is try to guide how it grows.

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.

Forgive my suspicions on this new deal

Guelph Mercury, 09/23/09

Happy days are here again. Yeehaw.

Government money is once again falling from the sky for one of Guelph’s favourite corporate welfare cases, Linamar Corporation. This week, the city’s largest employer celebrated another gift from taxpayers, a $54.8 million “repayable,” interest-free loan handed over by none other than Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Linamar says the money will help it develop new engines, transmissions and powertrains that will improve vehicles’ fuel economy. And we’re all partners in this new venture. What’s not to like about that?

Uh, plenty. Forgive me for being a little bit suspicious of the return taxpayers can expect from this big bag of federal cash, but this arrangement seems vaguely familiar.

Isn’t this the same company that in 2006 accepted $44.5 million in public funds to encourage Linamar’s homegrown expansion here? Back then, they talked of a new era in Linamar’s sure-thing expansion — adding another 3,000 jobs to their payroll and developing cutting-edge technology for the auto parts sector.

At the time, Linamar even signed a deal with the province saying it would create all those new jobs by January 2010. If it didn’t, it would pay back the money. Then came the recession, and Linamar changed its tune: See, we wanted to do what we said, but the market…

And the province seems fine with that explanation. After all, it agreed to the contract that gave Linamar plenty of wiggle room to get out of any conditions surrounding jobs, plant closures and anything else that would limit the company’s ability to cut operations in Ontario.

And now, here we go again. For all its high talk this week of finding new buyers and developing new products, this is still a company that has laid off some 800 workers in Guelph alone, and about 40 per cent of its total workforce worldwide.

Yes, there has been a downturn, and many of Linamar’s customers in the automotive sector were badly hurt. Of course, Linamar’s business was going to take a hit. But what this recession really proved is that downturns mean all bets are off when it comes to government aid to corporations.

And so, here we are, three years after the 2006 deal, embarking on another publicly-funded partnership with Linamar. What guarantee do we have that this is money well spent? We have none. Because Linamar’s employment and expansion decisions have everything to do with the swings in the market, and nothing to do with the boasts of government.

Even Linda Hazenfratz, Linamar’s CEO, admits it could be “three, five or more years” before the $54.8-million ‘investment’ made Monday creates a single new job.

Including $8.97 million Linamar got in 2007 from Ottawa to develop automotive gear designs, this is the third major public donation the Guelph-based company has received in little over three years.

What do we have to show for all our investment? That doesn’t really matter – because these arrangements aren’t about serving the people who pay the bill, anyway.

In both the provincial and the federal deals, the government gets what it wants – the appearance of putting its money where its mouth is, shelling out to help an important employer in an ailing sector. Linamar gets what it wants, too – a gift, a multi-million-dollar reward for doing something it needed to do anyway.

But what do we get for all our money? The thrill of yet another gamble with public funds? Right now, that’s about the only thing you can bet 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.