GregMercer.ca Newspapering and other adventures

Free the Olympic torchbearers!

Guelph Mercury, 12/16/2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s bring the stores back to the Ward

Guelph Mercury, 09/12/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They banned handheld devices, but are we safer?

Guelph Mercury, 02/12/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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