CYCLISTS ARE FREELOADERS

 GETTING A FREE RIDE ON GAS TAXES

I was trying to make a turn at University and College to deliver Mary to a hospital appointment but cyclists were buzzing all around me and sneaking through a red light and living up to their rep as road anarchists.
Just another day in the traffic chaos of downtown which grows worse every week, especially when there is construction on every block.
Plenty of time in the resulting traffic jam to recall an interesting article by a chap named Peter Shawn Taylor in the summer edition of Canadian Business. I have never heard of Taylor but he certainly knows how to think outside the box, a cliche phrase that I dislike but seems to fit here.
Taylor is in favour of road tolls, which I hate. They're just an awkward means to raise some money while employing a lot of dubious bureaucrats and expensive computer equipment.
A sub headline on his article caught my eye: "Tolls are a fair, free-market fix for gridlock - and a great way to make Prius drivers pay their share."
Another block of type illustrating the column read: "A Prius takes up just as much of the road - and causes just as much rush-hour congestion - as a gas burner, but pays a fraction of the gas tax.  How is that fair?"
Of course it isn't. Governments soak motorists through horrendous gas taxes which used to be collected just for roads and road maintainance but became such a golden gush that they use our road taxes for every service that they struggle to deliver.
 Building cars that use less fuel is a good way to go - although often when you consider the additional purchase costs they are not as much of a bargain as they seem - but they still use the same roads as the rest of us do, and we pay more for the privilege.

But Taylor, and good for him, prompted me to think as well of those freeloaders on our roads, the cyclists. I'm not talking about kids or pleasure riders but those who hurtle regularly down streets and sidewalks and x-walks  and through stop signs to work or on deliveries, often trying to copy Lance Armstrong in their gear and their expensive bikes.
Since cyclists insist on having safe space around them, and that is only reasonable, they use up almost as much space as a car but the problem comes with their speed which is generally slower except for the maniacs. Two or three cyclists riding along a city block effectively close one lane to a greater number of cars and trucks. One cyclist certainly has as much impact on rushhour traffic as one vehicle, but it's the motorist and the municipal taxpayer who have to pay for every inch of asphalt while the rogue cyclists thumb their noses at the Establishment..
So the question isn't just why we are using tax money to provide special bike lanes for them, it is why we are not expecting adult cyclists to pay a bit towards the roads that we build and maintain through expensive taxes on our homes and our fuels.
So we enter a red-tape world that I hate, but we're talking about annual bike licences for adults, which would be useful for revenue and to reduce theft. We're talking about real fines for blatantly breaking traffic laws and not having a licence. And we're talking about banning cyclists from major roads during the morning and evening rushhours which lately seem to run from 7 to 7.
The fashion in government is for user pay. The lefties in government aren't big fans of that. They want others to pay. The 10-speed socialists would hate the idea of any fees or new rules for bikes since they are the great shield for cyclists on the grounds that environmentalists vote for them.
But there is no disputing the basic fact that the socialists love to ignore. Private vehicles move all goods and most Torontonians to works and play. Drivers pay the most for the roads while subsidizing the TTC riders which don't pay the complete cost of their ride. And cyclists pay zip while cursing The Man for not fixing more potholes and not providing more bike lanes which effectively reduce the road space available for the cars that move most of the people.
It's not fare.

BEAVERS ARE PESTS NOT TO BE WORSHIPPED

COME HIT A BEAVER WITH ME

I think I hold the unique status as the only living man to hit a beaver over the head with a whippletree.
As a kid reporter, I was warned never to write that something was unique or the first of its kind. The world is a big place and has seen a lot of firsts.
But I'm pretty sure there aren't many who will try to take this unique title away from me. After all, there may be too many damn beaver around (even in Toronto parks) but there aren't a lot of whippletrees  these days.
If that blow doesn't strike you as remarkable, I have also hit the same beaver (I think) with an orange 100' extension cord. Should have used the cord to strangle it but I didn't want to get chomped. After all, beaver attacks certainly aren't unique.
In case you're baffled about the first weapon, a whippletree is the swing bar in front of the horses to which the harness traces and tongue of the carriage or wagon are connected.  I have used one for years because I hang flower pots from the big iron rings at either end and use the big centre ring to hang the floral contraption on the boathouse or in a tree. My late brother-in-law, Gordon Long, was a great collector of antique agricultural implements and farm odds and ends, and snapped this one up at a sale because there aren't many whippletrees left. (I just love writing that word.)
I have often written about my running battle with beaver at Burnt Point north of Campbellford on the Trent River. It literally is fought with tooth and claw, those damn big buckteeth of the beaver on the one side, and and barbed wire, fencing, noxious spices, guns, extension cords and whippletrees on my side. My last blog/column was on Nov. 11, 2012, titled To Hell With Beavers. (Come to think of it, that would never happen because Satan would be afraid that all the beaver dams would put out the hellfire.)
The score is about 15 trees and countless bushes on the beaver side, and maybe a wounding on my side, but with my eyesight I doubt it.
Now I used to love beaver. I grew up an eternity ago reading the wonderful tales of Grey Owl and his Ojibwe comrades when he raised beaver babies and generally sang a siren song for conservationists.
It seemed a simpler time. The Mounties were national heroes who always got their man and could sing like Nelson Eddy, and senators didn't cheat on expenses (or so we thought.)
 Then I discovered that Grey Owl was a phoney, not an native but an Englishman who dreamed up a colourful history where not even the dates were real.
He wasn't the last to write great stories about animals which may have had more than a tinge of exaggeration. Farley Mowat certainly has done a wonderful job of that without pretending to be a native, just from Newfoundland.
About the time I discovered that the RCMP were just another bunch of cops in nice uniforms, I also had discovered a multitude of evidence about the great gulf between city and country when it came to nature.
I  discovered that farmers have a much tougher attitude towards beaver that flood their fields and cut down useful trees, and the deer who cut up their crops with their hoofs, and the assorted vermin that eat their vegetables, than city folk who have this romantic view of the animal world and even, for some stupid reason, think any animal is equal to a human.
More than thirty years ago, the local Burnt Point beaver clan sounded the opening gun in the campaign against me by chomping down a wonderful stand of three silver birches and just leaving them screwing up the waterfront. Each year there are more fatalities, despite every stratagem I can employ.
Since a pair of beaver have taken to living in my boathouse (but never together), I have taken to playing music 24-7  there on a radio with the idea that might drive them away, I figured the incessant promotion of Moses Znaimer and his family on the new classical FM station (it seems to have been new for a century) would annoy them as much as it does me (just the classics please, not the Boomer crap.)
 It would keep them away for a few weeks but then they would return. So I played rock 'n' roll, which doesn't have a lasting preventive effect either.
So I tried the CBC. My son Mark was doing the impossible and straightening up the boathouse when the big male swam in and sat in the wet slip listening, apparently, to the CBC news. Seems the news annoyed him after a few minutes as much as it usually does me so it left, probably in protest.

A month ago, I figured we had driven the beaver away for good. So I wasn't careful when I went into the boathouse gloom and started fiddling at the workbench. ( In the past, I have actually stepped on the big male thinking it was a discarded rug.)
This time, to my surprise, a beaver moved near my feet, I backed to the door (you always give animals an escape route) and bumped into the whippletree.
What the hell, I thought. So I hit it over the head with it. It was like hitting a boulder with a dandelion.
It swam off. It returned a few weeks later, a sneaky surprise. When it moved in the dark and then rushed towards me. I reached behind me, couldn't find the whippletree, but came up with the extension cord. So I walloped it with that, while letting out war whoops that Grey Owl would have appreciated around the camp fire.
The neighbours don't laugh at me anymore because they have lost too many trees, and then there is the problem for them of sawing up the branches and trunks so they can drive down the humble road.
I know of a trapper that the OPP used when the cops had a beaver problem behind their Orillia headquarters. I also know where the beaver lodge is located right across the Northumberland Narrows. Back in the 1930s when Grey Owl was spinning his tall tales, a farmer would just take a stick of dynamite out of the cache in the barn that he used for blowing up stumps and stick one in the lodge.
But we're more civilized today, especially in the cities where beaver are right up there on the national pedestal with that other wonderful Canadian icon, the flying manure spreaders known as the Canada goose.
All I say is to know them is not to love them. Maybe I should try rap music on the boathouse radio. Surely even the Canadian symbol can't stand that, not knowing that in this politically correct time, we aren't allowed to criticize ethnic culture, or destructive animals either.

TOO BIG FOR THE ROADS

 TOO FAT, TOO LONG, TOO STUPID

Do you ever feel like an insect on one of the 400 superroads when you drive along a wall of obese tractor trailers?
Do you ever have to squeeze into your driveway past the lawn care guy who bought a long pickup and a  longer trailer so he can't park in front of his customer without hanging over driveways because the combo is wider than the lawn?
Do you ever fume in a traffic jam because another 18-wheeler has rolled over on a curve like a hippo bathing in a jungle river?
Do you ever wonder why the province allows tractor trailers so big that they can't make an ordinary turn on a downtown street?
If you have, you live in the Province of Ontario where the transportation experts boast about the low accident rate compared to the rest of Canada primarily because ordinary motorists are so intimidated by truckers that we try to keep as far away from them as possible.
I don't blame the drivers themselves. They have to drive the rigs that the boss gives them. And the boss, trying to reduce labour costs, tries to cram as much stuff as possible into the biggest trailer that he can find.
I blame the transportation ministry. I blame the police who allow the obvious infractions around them when truck rigs are bigger than the law allows.
The trucking industry has always hankered after the infamous truck trains of central Australia which are really more train than truck.
So the trucking industry has kept pushing the envelope on size so now we have big dump trucks rumbling along that have an enormous connection to a second trailer. They resemble tanks more than they do a truck for sand or gravel.

It's astounding how just about every business that moves on tires has always tried to cheat on size. Even the TTC. I was startled long ago at a commission meeting to find the commissioners were plotting how to get city council to change the law so the latest buses they had bought were legal. On yes, our transit guys bought buses that were longer and wider than regs allowed.
I raised this many years later at a Ontario Safety League meeting where I was a director and two men there who had spent many years in transit laughed knowledgeably about the incident and sort of hinted that it wasn't the only time that it had happened with the TTC.
A few years ago I was trying to get my Toyoto serviced in the eastend but found that I couldn't get close to the service door because of this enormous car carrier that sprawled from the showroom out into the street. I said to the driver that obviously the carrier was too big for that delivery, and probably broke the law too. He said he made regular delivers there and I was the only one in five years who had mentioned  the rig's size.
It wasn't just at the OSL board that I raised my concerns. (The OSL is a volunteer advisory body to the government that is nearly a century old.) I used to write editorials and features for the CAA magazine, which I think has gone downhill to being more a travel mag that one really devoted to the concerns of  motorists. I also often wrote about motoring issues as a Toronto Sun columnist.
I find it astounding that even as traffic has increased on every street in Toronto, so has the size of every form of truck.
Once upon a time, urban planners envisioned a Southern Ontario where freight trains carried most of the stuff between cities. Any big tractor trailers that moved between cities would offload in suburban depots and smaller vehicles would carry the material the rest of the way.
Sounded great on paper but the big trucking outfits figured why use two vehicles and two drivers if one of each could do the job. So to hell with the rest of us!  Then we got just-in-time delivery where factories didn't bother building storage space but were brought their parts and material by a steady stream of rolling warehouses that were made as large as possible.
The latest trick for companies delivering shingles or brick or block by long flatbeds is to hang the little tractor off the back. Which just adds to the hazard, And I would say so even if Mary had not driven down a side street a couple of years ago where a big flatbed was delivering shingles and was parked on an angle out from the curb. She clipped a corner, for $6,000 damage, The driver was on the lawn. He argued that since he hadn't been in the cab, he wouldn't given even his name. He certainly didn't apologize for taking up most of the road. The insurance company didn't even blink at my story. I guess it happens too often, and we all pay higher premiums as a result.
I think it's time to get back to basics, to ignore the good roads and trucking lobbies that contriibute campaign funds to all the right MPPs, and have a commission into vehicle size. If the private motorist does nothing, those tractor trailers will keep getting longer and bigger until more of us, like some of the people I know, feel that' it's safer to stay off the 400 series of truckways.

LET'S ALL BRAKE THE LAWS

I KNOW WHEN I"M BEAT

Let's copycat most cyclists and ignore stop signs. It will save us time by making for quicker trips and will help the environment and our cars.
Let's just roll our cars through stop signs if we see no one is coming. And if traffic is really bad, we could just switch to the sidewalks or cross with pedestrians at the lights.
I drove from the Humber to downtown at 7.45 a.m. and found that thanks to the police ticketing offenders, few parked car were blocking a lane of traffic, just one or two cyclists in each block.
My trip was swift. All the drivers around me were rushhour hardened so there was no dawdling and no stupid quick moves. Can't say the same for cyclists who whizzed by on both sides of the car at lights and swayed towards passing cars occasionally like a cow heading for the barn.
The cyclists were a pretty sight. No, I'm not talking about that Star picture showing a nude cyclist. As a veteran of bike hikes, that sight caused parts of my body to seek refuge inside.
No, I'm saying that cyclists are so much more distinctive and flamboyant than those drivers hunkered down morosely behind the wheel,
Some the other morning wore so much gear, I figured they had taken a wrong turn in a tour in France or Italy. There were even flowing pretty skirts fluttering in the breeze beneath purses, bags and baskets which jutted out at alarming angles as traffic squeezed by.
And no one was shouting curses at drivers. But then it was early and I guess they weren't warmed up yet.
I was driving down one of those endless side streets the other evening where the neighbourhoods have persuaded City Hall to put a stop sign at every intersection and to heck with the increase in air pollution. A pleasant older man was riding one of those old clunkers that I used to have before either gears were invented or I didn't have the money to buy them. It really didn't matter to him how slow the bike was because he kept up to me easily since he never stopped at six stop signs.
Ironically, the area south of Bloor just west of the Humber has been blessed in recent months by a cop of Asian heritage who hides in hedges and jumps out at any motorist who doesn't stop his wheels from turning even if there is no car in sight.
He caught two of my sons and many neighbours. I didn't know really what to think since it annoys me how many drivers in this area just cruise through stop signs. Not as many as the cyclists, but enough.
So why don't we save ourselves and the air and zealous cops a lot of grief and just abandon these silly bylaws that are already ignored by so many. Just let pedestrians run through traffic. Let cyclists belt along sidewalks and through stop signs. Allow motorists to only brake avoid collisions.
Let's have a relaxed attitude towards this scofflawism. What's that, you say? You think we would have a Wild West when it came to traffic. But we have that already. We could stop it from increasing by doubling or trippling the fines for accidents and all the other crushed-metal incidents that will happen when drivers start acting like cyclists.
Come down like the Hammer of Thor on any idiot who can't handle the easier laws and cracks up or rams someone. The rest of the time, just ignore the signs as if you were some innocent kid back on a tricycle before you grew up and were expected to obey all the rules. Silly thought!

DROWNING REMAINING CONFIDENCE IN HYDRO

HAZEL SAVED US FROM THE WORST

What a way to celebrate a wedding anniversary! Mary and I will never forget our 52nd. It was the water one.
I used to struggle to remember the symbol for an anniversary. I knew about the golden 50th, but not the rest. Long ago,  I found that paper was for the first, and walked across from old City Hall to Eaton's - that vanished gem of a department store- and spent more than half my weekly pay on two Gourmet Magazine cookbooks.  Since then we've acquired dozens of cookbooks but I still sample that first costly treasure. Unfortunately, not one cookbook helped me cook a lasagna on the barbecue, which was sort of the water anniversary celebration.
Mary and I never got to celebrate our 50th with the traditional party. I had just come out of hospital and just sitting upright was a struggle. Lurching across a sidewalk to the restaurant from a car for a humble family dinner almost finished me.
We didn't plan much for the 52nd. Number Three son was home from China, which was great, but Number Two son was in Rome with his family and Number One son was in California recuperating from his last visit.
 So we were going to a nice Japanese restaurant at the corner for tempura but then the downpour came and the electricity died and the Royal York and Bloor area spun into a sweaty cocoon that lasted for almost two days. And for hundreds, the ordeal stretched longer.
What did we do wrong, I demanded of Doug Holyday, the Tory candidate in Etobicoke-Lakeshore?
After all, I said, we pay more than our share of taxes. We don't riot in the streets. Yet neighbourhoods around us, like, for example,  the NOBs (north of Bloor), got electricity back almost a day before we did, and we aren't as mouthy as the Kingsway folk in criticizing government.
Holyday said the party was thinking of demanding compensation for streets like mine that sweltered for 46 hours. I said I think we should elect a Tory government to make Ontario Hydro swelter.
I have never been a fan of Toronto Hydro or Hydro One and their cheating smart meters. I hate the provincial electric boys for screwing us on delivery costs to try to recover some of the billions they wasted through their endless fat-cat years.
 I'm still smarting from a system that billed me more for a bunkie that had been used for a week than it did for providing electricity to the main cottage for five months. Obviously a mistake, but not for an outfit that specializes in pretending it has never made a mistake.
Perhaps my Sunnylea neighbours have also yelled as I have whenever the Hydro boys treat our money like, well, water.
 Perhaps the Hydro boys use all their ingenuity and equipment that should be used to deliver electricity even in a huge storm to mark the streets of all their critics on a big computerized map and say that now they have had a big rain, that's our excuse to turn their food into smelly garbage in their fridges and freezers and make them sweat in their beds and bang into things when they're hunting for flashlights.
I was out that Friday, Oct. 15, 1954, on the banks of the Humber River that killed 82 people. The rain was drenching but not as hard as the rain Monday that just poured down the brick walls of my house because the down pipes couldn't cope.
 I was shovelling rain from a patio on to the lawn because my basement fireplace was flooding. Except the rain just sat on top of the saturated grass.
I have been through a tropical storm in Fiji that shuttered the island for days and killed 10 people. And the rain wasn't as fierce. Nor was the sheets of rain and giant waves when I
 rode out a hurricane on the South China Sea. Doctor from Doctors Without Borders and I clung to the deck of a battered fishing boat and wondered how long we would last when we were tossed into the sea that deserves its treacherous rep.
Since Hurricane Hazel, I have sat on the conservation authority and know just how the watersheds feeding into Toronto have been tamed. The Humber can never again turn into the raging monster that killed more than 60 people on just one street, Raymore Dr., across from the Weston area where I lived.
The conservation authority has done solid work. I wish I could say that about the various varieties of Hydro. Just how in God's name can an outfit be so stupid that it can't ensure that vital cogs in its expensive delivery system won't flood?
And the communications afterwards was almost criminal in its stupidity and lack of information.
I could have loaded my Sienna van with the most expensive and delicate food and taken it to the cottage if we had known we would have had to wait into Wednesday afternoon.  Except we were told we would have power mid-day Tuesday. Then it was later, Then it was nothing.
On Wednesday, the officials say that only 1,600 people woke without power. Bullshit! Speaking as one of the 1,600, with the loyal support of wife and son, it was patchwork at best. It was like a chess game where you weren't sure there would be power when you landed on a new square. And too often there wasn't.
Only two of the five closest traffic lights to my house were working, and that was seen as progress. I went to a garden centre to buy crushed stone to make wells beside the patio for the new thunderstorm that was said to be coming. It was open but the grocery store beside it wasn' t. Islington was a limp artery.
 I wanted to collect a prescription from my Shoppers but it was closed, but the TD bank a block away wasn't. The stretch of Bloor on either side, with dozens of restaurants, shops and medical offices, was dark, with a grocery store trying to get rid of produce outside the gloomy premises.
Urban life as we know it didn't exist. And they pretend that only 1,600 were still affected  Wednesday morning. Bullshit, I say again, without fear of contradiction from the officials who really know how to BS. And when they say triumphantly that power was restored mid-afternoon, they forget that for hundreds on that second day, they stayed in the dark.
What bothers me, and makes me wonder how normal people could actually vote Liberal in these byelections, is that it's been obvious for years that the public doesn't think think Hydro is doing a great job. And throw in the Liberal party too. And assessment, and power plant cancellations, and staggering mismanagement in health funds.
 If you listened, even Dalton McGuinty could be critical of  the obese bureaucracies beneath him.
What happened Monday is that we had a freak weather calamity that dumped more water over us than the killer, Hazel. And it turned out that for the most part, thanks to the lessons of Hazel, we can handle the great torrents in our rivers and creeks but that's about it. Not in our sewers  or on our transit or, damn it, our power.
We are supposed to be impressed that workers removed 30 or 300 or a zillion Olympic-sized swimming pools of water from the drowned Manley transmission station. What would have impressed me more is if the same workers were boasting about how planning sensible infrastructure had prevented 300,000 gallons of water from getting into such key equipment in Etobicoke in the first place.
I suspect the Monday deluge not only submerged the tiny bit of confidence the public still had in Hydro One but also opened the flood gates to washing the damn Grits out of power. If that happens, I promise to forget a Monday night shovelling water.
But I'm not sure Mary will. Some celebration!

WHY WE SHOULD ELECT DOUG HOLYDAY

 LIBERALS SHOULD BE JAILED, NOT ELECTED

The news that Toronto's decent and hard-working deputy mayor is running provincially as a Conservative in my riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore is wonderful.
If a provincial party ever deserves to be defeated, if not sued, it is this Liberal government that has the Legislature overflowing with scandal, waste and stupidity.
The Liberal standard bearer is Peter Milczyn, who is pleasant but mundane and not a leader, more a party foot soldier than a general or even much of an officer. When I want info or help, I don't call Milczyn, who is my councillor, but Holyday, because I have appealed to Milczyn on several problems without success.
Holyday has been so diligent in looking after his voters, and even refugees from other ridings,  that he hasn't had to spend a cent to get re-elected for years,
He didn't finish high school but has a degree in common sense. He built a successful insurance business which he sold to concentrate on politics. (Milczyn doesn't practise as an architect.) Holyday didn't slow as he entered his 70s but plays hockey several times a week and in old-timer tournaments, and golfs at  prestigious St. George's. His lifetime of involvement in sports, often around his birthplace of the Lakeshore,  even includes being assistant lacrosse coach in a pro league where the coach was his buddy Morley Kells.
The riding is written off carelessly by the media as a Grit stronghold but Kells won in the area  provincially and municipally. Terry Grier of Ryerson University won it federally for the NDP, and his wife Ruth, a former health minister, represented the area municipally and provincially. The Liberals like to boast about their hold, even giving their failed leader, Michael Ignatieff, a map to it so he could represent it. The carpetbagger from Harvard was chased away in 2011 by Bernard Trottier who won for the Conservatives.
 It was said to be an upset but my politically-aware neighbours haven't been thrilled lately by Liberals being shuffled in and out on the way to patronage and appointments as billions explode.But back to this natural conservative who should romp to victory.
The proof of the political pudding is in the spending, both personally and municipally. There never has been a media story about councillors with the best attendance, most diligent voting record and the lowest expenses that hasn't had Holyday either as the best or close. He's legendary for his concern about waste and thoughtful approach where he will even suffer fools if he thinks they may just have a tiny idea.

Among his many accomplishments is the privatization of garbage collection, first in Etobicoke, then, because it was proved to be such a success, in the merged city west of Yonge St. Not only were the savings huge, the collection was better and no one could complain because the private workers were treated fairly. The NDP will have a tough time bashing his thoughtful leadership in labour negotiations.
I should warn readers of my conflict (if that is really necessary.) I have known and liked Holyday for several decades and we often lunch together. We have mutual friends. In fact, I am surrounded by friends and neighbours who thought Holyday should run for mayor next time. After all, he was the last mayor of Etobicoke before the suburb was swallowed by amalgamation.
When I was president of the Canadian National Exhibition, he was a vice-president. I had him chair important committees. We served on the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame together, and he still serves on the Etobicoke version.  I know from personal experience that anyone who cares about public spending and calm analysis of issues and taxation should rush to choose Holyday because the city and province would be best served if he and the other four Tory candidates win these byelections and then the Conservatives win the general election which must follow.
I just can't comprehend how anyone who has paid the slightest attention to provincial issues in recent years could vote Liberal.
 And I covered the Legislature starting as a kid back in 1958 and have reported on countless elections at all levels of government. In all those decades, I have never seen a more inept government. Its cynical waste of billions makes every single provincial government going back to Les Frost in the 1950s, even that NDP disaster under Bob Rae, look like fiscal giants.
The Liberals won half the vote in Etobicoke-Lakeshore last time. Now that the MPP has moved on, which I always expected, one would hope those voters would actually see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it's not an oncoming train of Grit waste and blarney.

IT'S THE COLOUR OF THE WORDS

I DON'T CARE ABOUT APPEARANCE

I loved those excuses after the CBC got caught discriminating against a white as a program host. It was all a mistake to say "any race except Caucasian" in the job ad. What absolute BS! All you have to do is turn on a TV and there is plenty of evidence that was precisely what the CBC wanted.
And other TV networks and stations for that matter. The pendulum has swung too far, from blatant discrimination to militant acceptance.
I really don't give a damn what the colour of skin is of the announcer or host. I don't care about the nationality or if they are minorities just off the plane. I just want to understand what is being said. If it comes with a nice Island lilt, fine, or a Brit accent, so be it. Unfortunately, too often that's not true. Simple announcements become a Rorschach scramble of syllables.
If you think I'm a crank about English which verges on the broken, I have put my money where the mouths of the incomprehensible should be. Back in 1979, I was the official sponsor of 43 "boat people" that I found in the refugee camps of Malaysia and Hong Kong. I had the legal responsible of looking after them financially for a year. With the help of Sun readers, I insisted that they could not work until they had passed courses in English as a second language.
I think of that every time I encounter someone who has been in Canada for decades and still can't speak English. Or I encounter some person with stilted English in India on a help line who can't deal with colloquial usage  Or the begging phone call, despite my being registered with the useless "do not call" list,  from some person just trying to earn a living but just can't speak English very well.
There is too much evidence that with the politically correct CBC and dumb private broadcast execs,   the colour of skin is more important than the ability to speak the English language with some resemblance to the way it is spoken even in ethnic Toronto.
After all, the electronic employers seem to think, just look at the huge market of Canadians that were born somewhere else. And when we hire minorities, we might increase our business even as we get in good with all the lefties who want us to go overboard on immigration issues.
I remember arguing during the meeting of a university advisory committee that I wasn't sure just how far a university should go in making it easier for minorities to pass journalism or radio and television English courses even after they were given an edge in admittance.
A high-ranking CBC official made it plain that she thought it was important that minorities on the electronic media also sounded like minorities. Her example was Ian Hanomansing. Hanomansing is a handsome competent Canadian newsman reared in the Maritimes but definitely looking Trinidadian. She said he would not be suitable for her on CBC radio because he didn't sound minority but white.
I was the only one of the group to find that strange. And so I was on the losing side of the perennial debate in North American high schools and universities where affirmative action gives minorities an advantage in admittance and then helps with their marks.
As some of the commentaries demonstrated after the CBC was caught with its prejudice showing, it's not just skin colour that is important to Mother Corp. I know as someone who did dozens of TV shows and radio commentaries, that women, New Democrats and gLiberals are preferred to compassionate white Conservatives who worked at a tabloid.
It was not unusual during pre-interviews with  producers to find them losing interest unless I was really provocative. After all, I was too white and right and I was from that damn Sun .
The great Doug Fisher, dean of the Ottawa press gallery, finally insisted that he wouldn't appear on CBC TV unless he was identified as a Sun columnist. Since Fisher was such a giant in political journalism, the CBC and CTV were happy to use him even if he was white and older and not a francophone.
Now if only the CBC was caught putting all its wishes, and not just "not Caucasian," in job ads and in policies for program execs. Then all the pretence would drop and everyone would know for a fact that the CBC desires to be the biggest mouthpiece in the country for lefties and activists.