Wayne D's Blog

The recent frenzy that resulted when people tried to sign up for the Canadian Do Not Call list and were greeted with an overloaded website and clogged 1-800 numbers made me wonder what all the fuss was about. I implemented my own telemarketing screening method years ago. I don't answer the phone. More correctly, I use an old tape based answering machine that lets me listen to callers as they leave a message. I works like a charm, telemarketers hang up on it, the people who I want to talk to leave messages and if I'm home I mute the TV, computer or whatever when the phone rings and pick up on the real people when they start to leave a message. No calls for new windows, long distance providers or phone service providers.

If you are one of the people I want to talk to please leave a message, if I'm home I will pick up and talk to you. If I don't and you really want to reach me send me an email, some people in my family aren't so good about passing along messages.

Sunday at midnight I put my bike in the trunk of the car and headed to downtown Toronto to experience Nuit Blanche the dusk to dawn art extravaganza that is entering it's third year in Toronto. After getting stuck in a traffic jam on Yonge Street I found a tiny parking space in a lot near Church and Carlton, reassembled my bike and peddled off into the night. Six and a half hours later I returned to the parking lot with a sore knee, an appreciation that I need a new bicycle seat but no regrets about staying up all night to explore the art of the city with the other Arterati of Toronto. Click the picture below to see the other photos I took throughout the night. They barely begin to document the experience of the night.

I was particularly struck with the Sound Forest created by Tova Kardonne and Christine Duncan at Queen's Park. After hearing them once I went back a second time and took a short piece of video which is terribly lit and has pretty muddy sound. The drums you hear in the background aren't part of the Sound Forest. The drummers had set up to do some drumming in the park as an unofficial member of the Nuit Blanche experience.

Why is Canadian politics so focused on personality and not about plans and policies? The Conservatives have spent most of their time trying to convince the electorate that Stephan Dion isn't a leader. They called the election but haven't bothered to release an election platform so far. The Liberals decided to focus their election platform on their Green Shift plan but now that the economy is on shaky ground they seem unprepared to talk about it. Kim Campbell was pilloried in 1993 when she said that an election campaign was not the time to discuss serious issues bu that does seem to be the way things go now. Voter turnout was just under 65% in 2006. Only two out of three eligible electors took the time to vote. Is voter apathy a symptom of people thinking that there isn't much to differentiate between the parties? Are we simply getting who and what we deserve in our style not substance society? Does it matter who is running the country or are we so hamstrung by our trade relationships and the vagaries of the world economy that we only have a semblance of control over our destiny?

So many questions, not many answers.

After the election was called on September 7th it was almost two weeks until I saw any sign of campaigning by our local Conservative candidate. Up unil that point I only saw signs from the NDP and Green party on my trips to and from home and work. I looked up out candidates name out of interest the might before I drove across town on the 19th and saw my first local Conservative candidates road sign. Now, a little more than a week later, a few signs have sprouted up. I really shouldn't be surprised the Conservatives aren't putting much effort into my riding, the past two elections they have trailed the Liberals by a huge margin.

I'm not very impressed with the campaigning so far. Between the Conservative attack ads and the Liberals being MIA on an explanation of what their Green Shift plan is all about I am disengaged and disinterested. The first time I heard a cognizant explanation of what the Green Shift was on a CBC comedy show on the same day I saw my first local Conservative election sign, or maybe it was a week later.

Maybe I'd be more engaged if the parties were talking about the proposed ACTA which will turn our ISP's intp copyright police and have the Canada Border service agents searching through our laptops and iPods for illegally copied materials. I think I'm surly because our Prime Minister decided to call an election when he thought he could win a majority, he's probably right but that doesn't mean I have to like it. There is no doubt the Liberals will win once again in my riding, I think I'll vote Green to make them feel better.

The picture at the top of this post shows the fence I erected yesterday for the community garden at my church. I was dropping my son off for the kids cooking club that one of the members has started when I saw the garden manager and stopped to chat with her. She told me about the terrible theft problems they were encountering. People would come to harvest their vegetables and find that someone had cleaned them out. This filled me with righteous indignation and I was determined to do something. It was off to Home Depot for a couple of rolls of plastic fencing. To save money I didn't buy fence posts which were terribly expensive as compared to the cost of the fencing, instead we used some tomato stakes that we scrounged from the garden.

We are also considering adding a video camera to monitor the parking lot and the garden access. If you are woman in the red jeep who thinks that a community garden means free vegetables we are watching for you. Stealing from our garden in different than stealing from the supermarket. If you are the other thieves who think that stealing vegetables other people have nurtured all summer or from the plots that we use for vegetables for the underprivileged members of our community you should be ashamed of yourselves.