We, the people of Orleans, are tired of being complained about. Using the euphemism “outside the greenbelt”, politicians, editorial writers, and “public intellectuals” alike, seem to believe that those who live in the eastern urban area of Ottawa are slothful suburbanites whose very existence encourages sprawl, wastes boatloads of other people’s money in infrastructure spending, demands unreasonable levels of services, and embodies boring, middle-class, wasteful lives spent in the perdition of ticky-tacky subdivisions.
Councillor and Urban Planning poet, Clive Doucet wants us to de-amalgamate from our betters in the “core” of Ottawa. After all, we take far too much of the scarce finances of the city and are never satisfied with our lot in life. Although City Council’s own fiscal study indicates that urban areas outside the greenbelt are only minimally away from balanced revenues and expenses (in the budgeting sense), it makes a far better argument to blame Orleans (or Kanata) by lumping it together with rural parts of region. The political orthodoxy is that everyone outside the greenbelt: this mythical social barrier to fiscal responsibility, is to blame for Ottawa’s budgetary woes.
Similarly, the Citizen Editorial Board consistently and repetitively pours scorn on our social incorrect lifestyles. The bias oozes everywhere there can be a geographical demarcation in lifestyle. In the 2009 Restaurant Guide, Orleans is relegated to a section entitled: “Outside the Greenbelt and Out of Town”. No wonder Orleans is almost never one of the “Five Best Places…” to do anything in. Journalists, in their infinite wisdom, don’t think there is much of merit to go to Orleans for. Except for our beach: Petrie Island, which should never have been built, according to the critics, because it is closed to swimming so often. Never mind that the main cause of that pollution is the antiquated sewage system within the greenbelt. Or that one of the main reasons for amalgamation in the first place was to have suburbanites financially help Ottawa fix its decaying infrastructure.
With peak oil raising the spectre of suburbia as a wasteland of abandoned tires and broken dreams, Orleans is seen all too often as a bad neighbour. And given the advent of Richard Florida’s creative class as the new “in-group” in town, the very ordinary residents of Orleans are cast as both passé and to be pitied. Is it not surprising then, that Orleans people have more university degrees and higher average incomes than many of our “cooler” neighbours in the core. Creative people aren’t supposed to live on a suburban street. Right?
They definitely cannot work here. The air was ripe with congratulations and celebration when the RCMP headquarters was moved to a JDS Uniphase building in Barrhaven a while ago. Pierre Poliviere and John Baird crowed with delight at the boon to the “local economy” this shift in workforce represented, not contemplating or caring that to pay Peter, they had robbed Paul. Everyone in eastern Ottawa knows what politicians from Western Ottawa seem to have conveniently forgotten. Orleans was the traditional, primary home of armed forces and RCMP families. Their presence was an integral part
of the fabric of our community. So what! Why not make them travel forty five minutes to get to work, or move? That makes sense.
Maybe this “official disconnect” exists because, we in Orleans are seen by the rest of Ottawa and its various governments to take more than we give. We must consume more than we deserve, mustn’t we? Notwithstanding the unfortunate truth that Orleans has the lowest industry and government base in the city, and is not expected to improve much under the watch of the City of Ottawa planning department. No, on the contrary, we should be contrite: hold our heads down in embarrassment, and simply not arouse further antagonism from the farmers’ market going, café sitting, bicycle riding, environmentally and socially correct minions of such inner city bastions of urbane-ness as the Glebe, Westboro, or Sandy Hill (among others) who can walk to work. Either that, or move to a chic condominium on Preston or Beechwood and reform our wicked ways.
We are outside the greenbelt. We must atone. Never mind that the barrier of greenspace between Orleans and Beacon Hill (the “in” edge of the greenbelt) to the west, is only three minutes by car, or ten minutes by bicycle path, the real measure of sprawl is the half hour it takes during rush hour to inch along regional road 174 to get to the infamous “split”, which many planning pundits still believe should not be fixed, because it only encourages us to live in those bad places beyond the greenbelt. For that reason, we, the people who use public transit more than almost anyone else in the whole city, must shoulder the responsibility of sprawl. And of course, multi-laned highways to Stittsville should be encouraged nay even demanded, but provincial funding to expand a local treacherous highway to Rockland, far closer to the core than its western counterpart, must be rejected by a “holier than thou” City Council on the alter of “sprawl”. The line must be drawn somewhere. So it is erected in stone at the eastern greenbelt.
Orleans then becomes a classic example of blaming the victim. They built the houses: the planning department, the developers, and their ilk. But we made the mistake of moving here. And if the neighbourhoods do not have liveable, walk-able features, it is the homeowners who must suffer the consequences. If a bloated ribbon of pavement along Innes Road divides and conquers neighbourhoods: encouraging us to drive and park, and drive and park, from one big box store to the next, all along its girth, it is not the politicians and planners who are to blame. It is all those Orleans commuters taking advantage of the situation.
At least Ottawa paved the road. But in the core of Orleans, the hydro wires are still not buried along St. Joseph Boulevard. Choices were made on how money was spent in Orleans, and those choices were not necessarily the right ones. They certainly do not help in the revitalization of central Orleans into a community which could draw people into a “downtown” that careful stewardship could have evoked. That kind of thinking is “too big” for “the sticks”. It must be saved for inside the greenbelt. Intensify or die, is the mantra of those who think the village of Orleans never existed, and that a community of more than 100,000 is nothing but a suburb. It must grow without a soul, or not at all.
Orleans is the epitome of mindless sprawl, you say. Really? We must live on huge lots (40 feet by 100 feet is considered a large piece of property in most of the neighbourhoods of Orleans), given the uproar about intensification targets, and how Orleans does not meet them. Why, then, is it acceptable for a typical residential lot along Wellington, or Alta Vista, or Riverside to often be up to twice as wide or deep? The answer, unfortunately, is because those neighbourhoods are within the greenbelt, and safe from scrutiny. Orleans is not, and is tarred and feathered with charges of unsustainability. The only difficulty in the logic involved is that there is not one city map available, nor statistics to support the drawing of that map, to determine what the population density in Ottawa communities actually is. Try to compare the number of people per square metre in an Orleans neighbourhood with one in Ottawa South, and you will give up in frustration. The city, in its wisdom, does not know the answer. It uses macro-statistics for whole vast swatches of Ottawa to justify decisions that would not bear the scrutiny of micro-economics. It sets the examination: where those who pass get access to rapid transit networks, and those who don’t, are suburbanites.
The “liveable community” is the mantra of planners and their official plans. How nice it is to be able to walk from your house to the local coffee shop or bar, and stop to pick up a few tomatoes at the market, a loaf of bread from the baker, and a book from the independent seller along the way. The people of Orleans can only dream of such a rich lifestyle. After all, in its infinite wisdom, the Ottawa planning department has decided that this kind of community belongs only within the greenbelt and be frustrated everywhere else.
In order to travel by bus from one part of Orleans to another: for example from Place d’Orleans to Innes Road, we are expected by transit planners to travel ten minutes west to and from Blair Road to make a connection between express routes. There is no efficient, fast, circular route around the community, and no plans to create one. In the unlikely event that light rail ever arrives in Orleans, it is designated to go along a corridor behind row after row of big box stores rather than link to the core of Orleans. What will that plan produce? Sprawl. City planners perversely held focus group sessions on this transit scheme in Orleans, but paid absolutely no attention to the critical opinions of community participants who attended them. It almost seemed as if the consultations were not designed to consult but rather to sell a vision that few in Orleans wanted.
Forcing Orleans to look outward to Ottawa to meet almost all of its needs rather than within itself for a sense of community is nothing new. For example, we have no central library, and the facilities that do exist are difficult to access unless you open the double car garage and take a car. Without one, it is actually faster to travel “on the 95” to the main public library downtown, than it is to take a series of buses to either of the two local branches. We have two pools in Orleans for more than 100,000 people, and unlike parks in the Glebe or Lower town, for example, the wading pools in local parks are few and far between.
Yes, we have new schools. All new communities have them. Fifty years ago, the new communities were different ones, closer to Parliament Hill. They are excused from
parochial attacks now because we all seem to have short memories and think that everything within the greenbelt was always the way it is. Yes, new schools have a capital cost which affects the tax rates of central Ottawa. But is it not ironic that the begrudging contribution of Ottawa taxpayers to Orleans is more than offset by the increased tax on operating costs we Orleans taxpayers incurred when the amalgamated school boards decided to arbitrarily adopt the higher Ottawa Board salaries than the lower Carleton Board ones? Or the fact that for several years of transition, our residential property taxes, as a whole, went up, while many in the core had theirs frozen. Why do you think that so many people who live in “suburbia” are livid with the myopic view of the centre? We had fiscally responsible governments who used a “pay as you go” system of development to build things. In fact, the citizens of the Gloucester half of Orleans actually voted to willingly pay an annual surtax to get a library, only to be rewarded with fewer hours of operation. Ottawa, on the other hand, gave Orleans its labour costs and debt. Having the big city come to us was just as costly, if not more so, than bringing us to the city ever was. Well-meaning but woefully uninformed people like Clive Doucet just don’t understand that fact.
A lack of respect in the City of Ottawa for Orleans and its people has been evident for a long time. It shows in the rolling of eyes when we tell people we are from Orleans. It is demonstrated in our newspaper when it shows outright ignorance of the community in some cases, and completely ignores it in others. And it definitely is prevalent in City Hall. We are viewed to have more than our share. We are seen as a drain on the taxpayer. If that is true, then let us go. We will be just fine. And perhaps, in going, we will create just the kind of sustainable, intensified, well rounded community that we deserve. Despite you.

OP Miner’s sometimes metaphorical rant documenting the obscenity of some of the pay cycles in the current public aristocracy smacks of sincerity. Indeed, you will know obscenity when you see it, and certain job descriptions tickling six figures and up do fail the smell test. Though I have never met Mr. Miner, I think I can safely make the leap that he is not a public servant, or at least not yet. An anger seeps out with his comments, but it is really fear, isn’t it: fear that the whole system is unraveling while those in charge pander to their self interests first, and their employers’ second. Thus, and I believe it was de Tocqueville’s observation, democracy does contain the seeds of its own destruction.

The historical flow seems to point to an almost certain evolution that tyranny follows democracy, or dictatorship the republic, that the freedoms usually enjoyed become inevitably entangled in rights, laws, exemptions, entitlements and, as our lyrical friends might suggest, shite, which really means greed, doesn’t it? Now we are there. Banks are bankrupt, economies on the slippery slope, deficits are norm, budgets are bust, and yet demands persist as if the only logistical problem is the availability of ink to print more money.

And leadership is the issue. Parliaments were formed to control an aristocracy which would spend our gold pieces on their indulgences. When the parliaments, congresses, councils and boards debase to the level of spending first on themselves, they have become the antithesis of their own creation, and there is only one recourse to control them: throw the bums out.

Or be quiet. People, cynically or even typically, deserve the government they have. I said that.

In the locker room, anything goes. Salty language, strange smells and infantile behavior - some of hockey’s best games are played behind closed doors. Stepping onto the ice and playing hockey requires timing, a bit of strength, some lung power and an overall physical exertion that both exhilarates and exhausts, even when it looks like the Keystone Copsroutine I regularly turn it into.

It’s a highly athletic game, and only those who are or who aspire to be athletic can understand the high you get from playing hockey. Having said that, some of the secondary aspects of the game are nearly as enjoyable, particularly if you’re involved in any brand of hockey attached to either a rink or a community league hall (like my Wednesday-night gang).

For instance, if you enjoy salty and inventive ungrammatical language, a medley of disagreeable smells, undeserved verbal abuse, zinger one-upmanship and generally infantilized behaviour, I suspect you would enjoy one key aspect of what I’m referring to: the locker room. Our locker room is a place where men are men and women are usually too smart to venture (though I feel compelled to add we’ve had a woman or

two join us on occasion, and it can be quite literally a breath of fresh air to have a female presence in the room).

There’s something utterly unique about the hockey locker room. I’m not sure why. I’ve played other team sports and none of the locker rooms were like this one. For now, I will forgo getting into the various psychoanalytic “theories of the womb” having to do with the warm cocoon of the locker room, where everyone’s dripping wet and everything carries a vaguely fecund odour. But there is no doubt the hockey locker room is different than those of other sports. It carries an air of exhaustion baseball doesn’t force on you, an intimacy football loses through sheer roster numbers. The soccer locker room (if you’re lucky enough to have one) may be closest, with similar player numbers and roughly equivalent levels of fatigue. Still, soccer doesn’t feature the great joys of getting to the rink hours in advance to don the equipment in the same ritualized, almost obsessive way that hockey players have, decade after decade. Soccer players also usually wash their socks.

But more than the equipment rituals, I think the locker room retains a mystique and even an unspoken attraction for men because of its simple

intimacy. It provides an easy way to manufacture conditions for intimacy under which men can operate without ever having to pretend or, God forbid, admit that they care about anyone. Friendships are formed, personalities are revealed, bonds are cemented. It’s a safe haven for men in a way that sitting in a Starbucks with a couple of pals sipping a chai latte and sharing a low-fat cranberry muffin probably never will be. As shocking as this may be to the distaff side, men are evolving but have not yet fully grasped the frankly rather bizarre bonding methods women typically favour (such as the premeditated use of not just questions, but answers). The locker room, therefore, offers a frictionless way for men to bond while also participating in the one thing that truly defines us as men: abusing one another verbally. Women, of course, can also dish it out when they have to, and I have no doubt women’s locker rooms feature their own brand of bonding and ritual. My daughters love hockey and they can cut someone (okay, me) down to size with a couple of words and a half-lidded glance. But my sense - or hope - is that women are above it all. Men, on the other hand, are plainly at their most manlike (notice I didn’t say manly) when they are able to freely harass, torment, provoke and insult one another.

Take one of the friends I play with every Wednesday. We’ll call him JR. He’s one of the best players on the ice and is well liked by all, but it isn’t until you hit the locker room that his true gifts are revealed. It’s in our little hockey hall that he shines, doling out the abuse he feels is warranted on a weekly basis. If someone whacks him on the shins, he will suffer in the locker room. If someone cherry picks, he’ll hear about it. If someone quits early because it’s too cold, the poor sap will absorb a few slurs at the earliest possible moment. Even in writing this, I am exposing myself to the worst JR has to offer. For what, you may ask. For writing about hockey instead of getting out there and playing the bleeping game, even though I play it like a bleeping bleepy.

Yet it’s moments such as these that bring dreamy smiles to the faces of hockey veterans. Locker-room ribbing is part of how men communicate the world over - a male Esperanto if you will - and though I make no claims about its psychological worth, I think it’s a big part of why hockey veterans and former pros miss the game so much. Sure, they wish they were still flying up and down the rink, but it’s all the other stuff they miss nearly as much.

Bobby Orr once said hanging out with the guys was something he missed after hanging up the blades, and one of the reasons Wayne Gretzky came> back to coach the hapless Phoenix Coyotes was that he missed the locker room. Even Pat Quinn, the 65-year-old coach fresh off the thrilling World Junior success, was quoted as saying he came back to the game because he “liked being around the rink and liked being around the players.”

You could parse that many different ways, but to me it’s simple: He liked being in the locker room. I don’t blame him.

By Curtis Gillespie

Curtis Gillespie’s most recent book is the novel Crown Shyness.

TJ’s comment that “taxpayers contain within themselves the seeds for their own funny farm” got me to thinking. That in itself (me thinking) is a bit of a foreign travaille. The more I thought about it and the more I started researching, the more pissed off I became.  In a day when nothing stays hidden away in the confines of a filing cabinet but rather naked facts are now perched on the top of everyone desk, gyrating around a stainless-steel pole, while the viewing public is ogling at them.

You don’t have to look far into the public domain to find out some things, simply,, piss you right off. I almost wish that I never knew what hid behind that public service g-string but curiosity invoke some of the strangest characteristics in people, myself included. I am curious by nature. That why I electrocuted myself when I was six, threw up after smoking a cigarette when I was eight, and still to this day, struggle not to stick the 9 volt battery to my tongue.

 I recently discovered the Ontario Government Public Disclosure website that, essentially, lists every employee paid by the Ontario taxpayer that earns over $100,000 annually. After a couple hours of data compilation where I mud wrestled these bundles of systemic abusers from the people that actually deserve the dough, a dirty feeling came over me; I felt violated.  The feeling then moved to sickness. Then the consequence and liability lights started to brighten and I became terribly concerned.  Then it was, holy crap !!!!! I gotta get the hell out of Dodge (sic).

This peep show that I had ventured into had a bus driver in the City of Ottawa making $129,000 in only one year.  I said to myself, “ Holy F%$k”, as a saw that a Vice-President of a major University; she with 12 letters after her name, was making less than this particular bus driver.  There then appeared Scads of police constables; not inspectors or the like, but plain ordinary constables earning well into six figures. Behind door number three, I saw a room full of elementary school teachers planning what to do with their summers off, all the while earning more than a $100K annually.

Over in the champagne room were the high rollers. It was full of Electricity. Here I looked in and saw a dude in the corner being entertained by two girls named Amber and Cheyenne (those were their real names). I checked the data…..wow….the head of a major Ontario Utility. He was pulling down a tidy $1,500,000 annually. He quietly took a twenty out of my left pocket and gave it to Amber. This dude didn’t keep it all to himself. I discovered a culture of greed right throughout his organization; over 6500 employees under him had also passed the 100K plateau and God only know how many are about to pass thru that threshold in the near future.    

In all, over 36,000 Ontarians were members of this exclusive club. Club membership dues tallied a staggering $4,500,000,000.  Yes kids, those are billions!!!! Then it hit me. A bunch of questions started percolating.  What is the benefit package costing us? What is the future pension liability? What are the other future liabilities of these benefit package? At first glance, I’m assuming that they’ll being pulling in 70% pensions when they’re done being employed.  As this generation retires and new hogs belly up to the trough, we have some substantial compounding taking place.  Are we in a position to fund this? I mean to say, “Are our kids in a position to fund this?” Along with the $100K club, they are also going to have to deal with the farm team. The folk in Ontarioland that didn’t quite make it to the doors of the $100K club but still have an all day pass on the “70% Gravy Train Express”. I assume that is the fat end of the pyramid but that scares the shite out me if the pointy end has 36,000 members. How big is this liability.

The delta, at this rate, is inevitable; All our tax dollars will eventually go to salaries….nothing else.

All this perversion to take you to where we are now.  Here in the City of Ottawa…..Here in the City of Orleans.   We already see a machine here,  where too much tax revenue goes to the labour pool. Nothing is ever left for programs. Nothing for buildings. Nothing for roads. Nothing for nothing. This economic model is headed for only one conclusion…collapse….and everybody knows it when they go to sleep at night. The OC Transpo strike is just one manifestation of an ulcer bleeding and revealing  the true capacity of this City’s leadership.

I stepped out on my front step at midnight last night. I thought I smelled Thuso blowing in. Not an uncommon aroma here in Orleans. I looked a little closer. The wind was blowing to the East.

Whoever wrote that taxpayers contain within themselves the seeds for their own funny farm sure saw the OC Transpo boys coming. Let me get this straight Ottawans: your bus drivers now have a higher salary than a mid-career JAZZ airline pilot, and are hot and bothered and ready to turn down a pay increase over some choice thing where they get to choose the colour of their band-aid on boo-boo Thursdays.

Somebody should be writing some laws to throw these collective no-bargaining bums on the street.

TJ Snodgrass, from far away

A footnote of history for political junkies is that I was thrown out of the Conservative caucus one day before the Harper government brought in its long-awaited green plan, which turned out to be the recycled Clean Air Act.

During the caucus meeting which saw my ship go down, as you will be reading in due course, one of the major concerns colleagues had is that I would slam the plan as inadequate, and beneath my expectations. The fact that the day before I had interviewed Elizabeth May, Green Party leader, for a webcast on this site just sealed my fate. Heave-ho, overboard I went.

Of course, the world was told that Garth had sold some Harper Administration secrets to aliens or, worse, Belinda Stronach. But, not so much. In actual fact it was my published expectations for a decent climate change strategy that apparently did me in. I learned later a lot of people on the government benches thought I was about to jump to the Greens, especially since I’d served as a director of the Sierra Legal Defence Fund for a few years, and published on environmental issues. Ironically, I had absolutely no intention of doing so. Honest!

Of greatest concern was my statement that I feared the Tory enviro plan would be a sellout to junk science and the oil sands. And, by gosh, I was right. It was, and it sucked. And you knew it. Public opinion surveys now rank the environment and climate change as the most pressing public policy concerns. Stephane Dion won the Liberal leadership in no small part because of his credibility on this issue. The Green Party has jumped in the polls. And now the Harper Administration has recognized it messed up, fired Rona Ambrose and brought in John Baird to, as they l-o-v-e to say in Ottawa, “handle the file”.

Now. I probably know John Baird better than you do. I don’t traipse around official Ottawa on his arm, the way Laureen Harper does, but I’ve spent enough time near the guy to make a few observations. First, I never heard the word “environment” come out of his mouth before the cabinet shuffle last week.

Second, he is the most vicious partisan in the government, who has become a caricature of himself. In the opposition lobby outside the House of Commons, there are cartoons of him with a giant, six-foot-wide mouth. MPs often laugh when he stands up, in anticipation of the instant outrage he’ll manufacture. The man simply is not taken seriously and the fault is his own.

Third, he is a professional politician who has never had a non-political job. When he was barely into his twenties, Baird went to work on Parliament Hill, on the political staff of Tory minister Perrin Beatty, staying on until the defeat of the Progressive Conservatives in 1993. He then briefly became a lobbyist to the federal government before winning a seat at Queen’s Park. He quickly became immersed in the right-wing ideology of the Mike Harris government, and joined cabinet in 1999 as minister of community and social services, where he implemented the hugely controversial workfare program that removed thousands of low-income people from social assistance.

In 2002, Baird was the first cabinet minister to jump on board Jim Flaherty’s leadership campaign. Each man had been elected in 1995, and each had become hard-core Harris supporters, sharing on obvious bond. Flaherty lost the campaign to Ernie Eves and Baird continued on, as government whip, then energy minister until the Conservative government was defeated in 2003.

Baird then co-chaired Flaherty’s second attempt at leadership in two years, which Mr. Flaherty lost to John Tory. At the same time, Baird was supporting Stephen Harper in his bid to become leader of the new Conservative Party, then co-chaired the federal party’s Ontario campaign in the same year. Both Baird and Flaherty then left provincial politics in 2005 to campaign for the House of Commons.

He was elected last January, became the President of the Treasury Board, and as such shepherded the Accountability Act through Parliament, managing along the way to admit the Conservatives had themselves breached the spirit of the legislation. Mr. Baird is where he is right now because Stephen Harper trusts him, not because he is an environmentalist. He’s a politician.

Now this is not a condemnation of John Baird and I actually find him a gas to be with. But I’m also a tad concerned I’m riding my motorcycle in January and that 2007 is forecast to be the hottest year ever. I’m worried that the declining price of oil will be used as an excuse by the energy sector not to invest in the technology we need to tame the tar sands. And I am pissed that a guy as smart as John would, on day one of his new job, be blaming the last government for greenhouse gases.

Get over it, big guy! We don’t care. We just want a plan with gonads that will establish targets that’ll be met. If it takes a professional pol like you to do it, fine. If not, maybe you should go dancing with Mrs. H.

By Garth Turner

Living here is like perpetually scanning a set of boring personals ads. Everybody wants the same cozy evenings by the fireside, the same long walks on the beach. But it’s all a facade. Organicism is a myth. Our bodies are never ourselves, our words and texts are never really our own. They aren’t “us,” but the forces that crush us, the norms to which we’ve been subjected.

As Burroughs knows, there’s no getting around it: “To speak is to lie–to live is to collaborate.” The only way out is the same way we came in. With postmodernism, as with drugs and pornography, the only way to get anywhere is to immerse yourself in it as much as possible, as mindlessly and as abjectly as possible, and then just sit back and enjoy it. One fix after another, one purchase after another, one orgasm after another; for there is no end to the accumulation: “the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never arrives” (Althusser). All we can do with words and images is appropriate them, distort them, turn them against themselves. All we can do is borrow them and waste them: spend what we haven’t earned, and what we don’t even possess. That’s my definition of postmodern culture, but it’s also Citibank’s definition of a healthy economy, Jacques Lacan’s definition of love, and J. G. Ballard’s definition of life in the postindustrial ruins. It’s a relief to realize that culture is after all empty, that its imposing edifices are just ruins or sound stage facades, that bodies are extremely plastic, that facial expressions are masks, that words in fact have nothing to express. For bodies and words are merely exchange-value: commodities or money. If postmodernism is indeed, as Fredric Jameson argues, “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” then it is perhaps most accurately regarded as a frenzy of delirious shopping–or better still, of shoplifting. We engage in orgies of endless consumption, forever postponing the moment when the bills come due. The party never ends: S & L scams for the rich, Visa and Master Card financing for the middle class, and even occasional riots and looting for the poor. (As I write these lines, unpaid credit card debts come to more than 33% of my yearly salary; but since I don’t expect ever to be able to pay these cards off, it feels as if I’m getting everything for free). It’s all a whirl of extendible lines of credit, substitution of goods, and metamorphoses of capital. The postmodern economy unfolds in an eternal present. We aren’t interested in duration or preservation; we devour and squander at a frantic pace, latching on to one thing only to throw it aside in favor of something else the very next moment. Everything is negotiable, everything is available for exchange. So let yourself go. Don’t be a good citizen. Don’t produce, expend. Be a parasite. Consume images and be consumed by them. Live off your Visa card, and scavenge in the debris.

- Steven Shaviro (Doom Patrols)

As the great wheel of our democracy rolls forward, I think it’s important to take a moment and remember a forgotten hero. A man who so loved his country, he was willing to put on a suit purchased by a personal shopper, stand on a Minneapolis stage in front of a national audience and fake being happy about his impending shotgun wedding. Then, because he is a true patriot, he voluntarily ceased to exist for the next eight weeks. Of course I’m talking about Levi Johnston. Well, Levi, if you’re reading this, know that you’ve served your country well and you’re free now. Go! Run! Live your life! Or, you could acquiesce to marriage (look up acquiesce, you’ll get a kick out of it), in exchange for a plum job fighting crime in the frozen wilderness. Who knows, maybe there’s a TV show in your life and you’ll be famous again. I’m thinking we could call it, Tundra Heat, or, Permafrost Flatfoot, or, Glacier Gumshoe, or, Dude, I Forgot the Condoms. Oh, I so smell an Emmy.

- Chuck Lorre

Another federal election is over in Canada and the folks of Orleans decided to ignore the local issues and candidates and vote for or against the national party leaders. I understand that a lot of my neighbours couldn’t get around the fact of having Mr. Dion in the position of Prime Minister. I can see their perspective and I would have to say I shared that viewpoint. However, what I didn’t do is drop my principals and vote for a local candidate that does not have the interests of Orleans on the front burner. He has been noticeably absent since the election. I really hope he is off working on a new agenda for our community and is about to jump out from behind a curtain and yell….”HERE’S MY PLAN !!!!!” But alas…no…he’ll probably show up at the Festival of Lights parade and lurch around waving at the unsuspecting victims of his uncommitted reign, all the while repeating, “I am your servant…I am here to serve you…..I am humbled”.Well….since you are here and you are my servant….get me a drink because I think I’ll need it. A neat 15 year old Scotch would work!!! Oh what the hell, make it a double…we’re going to have a few years together.

It’s time Orleans really started to care about who we elect at all levels of government. Make them do something! Make them deliver something!! Make them accountable to all of us!! Look around the City of Ottawa and doesn’t take long to figure out that Orleans has always drawn the short straw when development opportunities and infrastructure was being assigned. Our future has always been sold up the river and in return we got their sewage.

As a general concept, I suspect that the folks we call neighbours and friends are not in favour of being taken for granted. We pay the same taxes as Kanata and Barhaven yet we see little in the way of comparable benefits. We get a little sidewalk replacement on Tenth Line while they get an entire road widened to four lanes….it’s typical of the distribution.

Let’s take a different approach to this….a new concept perhaps…..let’s say…..Have our elected officials represent the people of Orleans to the Government instead of what we have now where they represent the Government to the people of Orleans. When this is achieved, make them accountable and if they don’t deliver, kick their sorry ass out. Maybe then and only then will they actually get off their butt and do their job as it was intended to be done.

If that isn’t what you want and you’re happy with the status quo, let someone else decide your future, run your life and wallow in apathy…..turn out the lights when you leave.

The election in Ottawa-Orléans will be fought from the Tory bunker with Herr Harper dictating commands to his Petain-like candidate Royal Galipeau. Ooo, I can’t wait.!

Word has it that upon seeing that his main competitor occupied the same strip mall but at a higher perch, Nostferatu skulked around hrumphing and grumbling up and down the mall side walk as though trying to will the competitor’s office away. In the meantime, his evil minions were busy surrounding the competitor’s campaign office with Nostferatu signs.

Please, someone tell me the difference between a lie and strategic maneuver in the Harper campaign?

I think that Elizabeth May will not only tear a strip off of Harper’s hide during the English debate, but people will be looking forward to it.