cktimes.ca Archives for Notes from a Garage


Notes from a Garage

With John Gardiner

Another great week for cktimes.ca

Tuesday, October 8, 2002

It's been another excellent week here at cktimes.ca. We are averaging an amazing number of hits per week (nearly 9,000) and I am extremely heartened that people seem to be reading along and enjoying what they read. I really must encourage you to read a good selection of our fine columnists. From Philip Shaw to Jon Gilbert, to Blake Mann and Scott Aarssen and on to Jim and Lisa Gilbert and Glen Turner, cktimes surely offers some of the finest reading material that can be found anywhere. This week, we add a real "heavyweight" in the local journalism field. John Weese, late of Chatham This Week, will be penning "Weese's Thesis" on a weekly basis and I'm extremely glad to have it in the Times. John and I were a fairly successful team back at the old Wallaceburg News in the late 1980's and we had some real fun in those days. I'm extremely pleased to be in the same publication as John. Check out his first offering this week – I think you'll be glad you did.

So, we're going totally non smoking in Chatham-Kent. I pretty well knew this would be the case back when it was proposed. Every other group in our society is guaranteed basic rights except smokers, who have no rights. And I guess there are many of you out there who would say that smokers don't deserve any rights in any case. Maybe you're right. I'm not real proud of being a smoker and I regret starting all those years ago – I also know it'll likely kill me despite all the best intentions of non smokers everywhere. But I will tell you that I regard my smoking as a coping mechanism – something I do to help me survive in an extremely stressful world. I've suggested before that if the planet would stop spinning faster and faster and life would slow down a bit and be a bit less hectic, perhaps it would be easier for the smokers (and drinkers and gamblers and drug addicts) to shake their habits and live healthy, long lives. I also feel that any of you who drink or buy lottery tickets or visit casinos but supported the push to total non smoking are being extremely hypocritical. Why is your vice okay, while mine isn't? Drinking and gambling ruin far more lives than smoking ever will and I don't need somebody's bogus statistics to prove it. I've lived life for fifty years and I know it's true. The passing of this smoking ban is draconian and extremely heavy-handed and was totally unnecessary. And I'll tell you something – I'm wondering which minority will be targeted next. Society will surely find some other scapegoat to blame for its problems once the evil smokers have been eliminated. That's the way it works.

How do you like that George W. Bush? I think the "W" stands for "Warmongering". Every morning and every night on the news I see Bush and the forces of "good" pushing us toward war with Iraq. Of course, it won't be much of a war. It'll be over almost before it starts – that's what they'd like us to believe. But I'll tell you what. If I was Saddam Hussein, and it was guaranteed that I was about to get blown to bits, I'd dump everything in my arsenal into Israel and try to get them into the action. Once Israel responds, that should pull the rest of the Arab world into the fray and soon we'll have an all out Armagedon happening over the Middle East. That would be good for the economy, eh George W.? I still think the American President will keep us at war until the next election rolls around, hoping this will keep him high in the popularity polls. I don't like the way this is going. It's a very scary situation, indeed.

Getting financial information out of Chatham-Kent isn't turning out to be all that easy. A few weeks ago, I made a call to city treasurer Stuart Wood to ask a few questions about our financial position. I wanted to know if there was any way to find out what amalgamation had cost us – what were we paying for services before amalgamation in our old municipalities and what are we paying now – on a per capita basis. I also wanted to know where we were at with the police budget. Stuart told me that he could get me the information, just like he used to when he was Wallaceburg's town treasurer and I was at the Wallaceburg News, but he said things don't work the same in Chatham-Kent as they did in Wallaceburg. He suggested I should call our elected representatives to get the information. So, I called Councillor Tom McGregor and did a budget story with him. During the interview, he told me that the police budget for this year is $16.7 million, or 10% of the total budget. I asked him what it was five years ago at the beginning of amalgamation. He said he didn't have the information, but he'd call me with it before my story went to press. I'm still waiting. Then, I did a story on Mitchell's Bay Marine Park with Councillor Bill Weaver. Again, I wanted some financial information and Councillor Weaver promised to get it to me. Again, I'm still waiting. I think the public needs information like this in order to make informed decisions on municipal matters. I hope both of these were just isolated incidents, but I'm afraid they may not be. It surely would be a lot easier to talk to the person with the information to begin with, but I guess that's not in the cards. Guess I'll keep trying – I'm like that.

Big thanks to Laird's Greenhouses for a great event in Dresden on Saturday with their first annual Pansyfest. Also, hope you all had the chance to visit Heritage Days over the weekend – what a hugely great event. Way to go to the whole Heritage Days Committee.

Time to go for another week. Hope you're reading along and are ready for the big Thanksgiving weekend. Take care...and remember..."Hew to the line; let the chips fall where they may."



John Gardiner is a 25-year-veteran of the community newspaper business, but he is also a prolific writer of moralistic short fiction he refers to as "emotional thoughtscapes" or "adult fables". Samples of his fiction can be found at:

He has also produced a noteworthy piece of humanist philosophy which can be found at: http://www.xs4all.nl/~aboiten/ad502.htm He welcomes comments on his work.