It's An Old Story, Times Two

Water like glass, Bayfield Inlet, Georgian Bay, 17 September 2023

Today is my 66th birthday, so I'm offering up a re-run from more than a decade ago, when I co-chaired the multi-stakeholder process to develop national air quality standards.

Here you go:

I spent Monday and Tuesday of this past week performing in what felt at times like a Neil Simon comedy.

Scene 1:  The scene opens in a medium-sized hotel event room, set up with a large u-shaped table. Present are a varied and exotic cast of characters including a soft spoken Quebecois man who has a secret he'll be sharing soon with the room, and the pugnacious Director from Health Canada who co-chairs the committee and who, of course, smokes. 

There are many others - thirty in total - and they cover a range of interests from the emissions-loving oil industry to the emissions-hating Ontario Medical Association. This group of fundamentally opposed participants has been working for more than a year to identify and agree on air quality standards for Canada. This is their final meeting and by the following afternoon, they will have decided on their recommendations to the federal and provincial governments.

...

Scene 5:  The soft spoken Quebecois man, in charge of the network of air quality monitors across the country, has just finished a slide presentation that has either baffled, enraged or baffled and enraged everyone in the room. One of the co-chairs -- the one who doesn't smoke -- tries to restore order. It doesn't work...

...

Scene 10: After a long day of almost reaching consensus -- and then having that blown sky-high -- and then slowly wheeling back to consensus, everyone retires to the hotel lounge for a drink. In the final comic turn of the day, the Director from Health Canada and the representative from Imperial Oil inadvertently walk off with one another's bags.

....

Scene 32: The two co-chairs, the one who smokes and the one who's writing this account, are in the hallway outside the meeting room, comparing notes on the day. They feel it's been going well, and are waiting for hotel staff to bring them the bill they'll be splitting to buy champagne for the group at the end of the meeting. After the astronomical bill tests their resolve, the co-chairs take a deep breath and tell hotel staff that three o'clock would be a good time to bring the champagne into the room.

...

Scene 35: Just as the meeting reaches its most antagonistic point, waiters bring in the champagne at three on the dot. The co-chairs wonder if the arrival of the bubbly might help break the tension. It does not. 

.....

Scene 38:  Forty-five minutes after being brought in, the champagne is down the throats of the meeting participants, and everyone's either packing up to catch their plane, or excitedly chatting about the meeting's result.

And there are new ambient air quality standards (proposed) for Canada.

Roll credits.

And In Today's News

In case you haven't heard, Doug Ford has finally gotten around to reversing his government's corrupt decision to hand over parts of the Green Belt to developers.

A couple of readers have asked me what I think about this.

Well, in this as in all things about Doug Ford, my answer is just that the man is an idiot. 

Because he's an idiot, he was persuaded by developers that no one would find anything wrong with the deal. They told him people would believe that it was about housing. He might have even believed that himself.

The maligned actions of the Chief of Staff who took direction from developers are actually quite normal for Ford's government. Because they are idiots, they don't trust the bureaucracy.

Once the issue blew up, because he's an idiot, Ford couldn't see how he had done anything wrong, so he stood his ground and defended his minister. Even in the face of the Auditor General's report, he refused to reverse the government's decision, because he's an idiot. 

Finally, after weeks of getting beat up in the press, and suffering in the polls, Ford did what I was starting to wonder if he had the weakness of character to do, he announced he would rescind the government's decision.

Commentators in the press have rightly brought up the gas plant scandal (the 3 billion dollar Liberal gas plant scandal) as a situation perfectly analogous to Ford's Green Belt scandal (8 billion dollars, adjusted for inflation and idiocy).

Ford failed to see how easy it would be for people to make this comparison, and failed to see how politically dangerous messing with the Green Belt would be because (all together now) he's an idiot. 

And, while I am very glad the people of Ontario got to stop Ford in his bone-headed tracks this one time, there are many more dunderheaded schemes going full steam ahead, like the Ontario Line and whatever the hell is happening at Ontario Place.

Thanks for reading!

Karen