Colborne’s South Side: Myth vs. Fact

Myth: The south side fell victim to neglect and disrepair. Building code standards for fire and safety were not upheld, and a general blight fell over the south side, detracting from the advances made in urban renewal by the municipal government for the surrounding area.

Fact: According to a recent news report, almost all of the bylaw and property standards citations issued against the owners concerned exterior conditions, and none for safety and fire code infractions.

The blight and disrepair of the south side was the result of a three pronged assault on the private commerce and commercial development of the downtown by the city government.

1. Taxes, regulations and bylaws artificially inflated the costs of maintenance, repair and created disincentives to capital investment.

2. Previous boondoggles in the core were already taking their toll in the downtown. The vast amount of funds and infrastructure for the former Icomm Center (now a government run gambling parlor), the closing of market street to Colborne at a key intersection, combined with millions in structural (roads, utilities etc.) and direct subsidies to development in the north end.

2. Once the paralysis of the south side was in place, the city planners were only getting started. Then they decided to Corral the south side landlords and business into an "improvement district" which would utilize the immense brain power of city council and its pool of loyal consultants, and the cash invested by the property owners. However, city planner's stupid ideas are less likely to draw private investment without funding guarantees; another bright idea was moved to the back burner.

3. So the various businesses and landlords forged ahead on their own. Much of the south side was adjusting to the commercial losses and transitioning to a residential district. Plans were put in place to convert many of the former shop fronts to street level rental housing for low income families and individuals (called "slums" when they are privately run, and "social housing" when they are government run). The activity of Colborne, as Jane Jacobs would put it, and the neighborhood would be monitored by the people who lived there (horrors!). Again, the city planners became incontinent at the thought of an uncoordinated, unplanned community right smack where their bureaucratic wisdom was needed the most, so existing bylaws were amended and altered to prohibit these changes, which further backfired for two reasons: First, some permissions for mixed use alterations were grandfathered in, and the changes that could be enforced only drove vacancy rates up higher. The incompetence of the government had turned the south side into an urban wasteland, so city council capitalized on the growing frustration and demands that they "do something", and quickly signed the Memorandum of Understanding to justify the seizure of this vast stretch of nominally private land once and for all. Now in city hands, it could be destroyed literally, as well as economically.

Drafting your Trees

If you live and own property in Brantford, and it has trees on it, city council is going to consider a proposal this June that would amount to conscripting your trees (namely the big ones) and pressing them into service maintaining the city's tree canopy. This is meeting some pretty fierce resistance, which is good. The bad part is that the opposition is severely hampered because it agrees with the basic principle of this Orwellian nightmare; that the state has a responsibility to regulate the climate and the air we breathe.

“Tree canopy” is one of those environmentalist phrases that is indispensable to central planners, not for its scientific or biological value (it has none), but because by definition it reserves a sphere of influence for public policymakers. The objective, personal values that trees provide to their owners, such as shade, aesthetic beauty etc. is a function of private property. But if lobbyists, consultants and other special interests can persuade us that the air we breathe will be poisoned and the global climate will make the planet uninhabitable, then of course governments must roll up their sleeves and spring into action to save us all, while keeping a balance between “private rights” and the “needs” of the environment. So far the scam seems to be working pretty good. Hey, we can keep our rights intact while appeasing the climate gods at the same time!

The planners know better.

Tree Bylaw Considered

 

In a rare and uncharacteristic show of concern for property rights, city council is reconsidering an expansion of the site alteration bylaws that could further prevent you from cutting down a tree on your own property.

Hopefully, by "private property", they don't simply mean the interests of large developers. We'll see. I love trees as much as the next guy, but frankly, those on public property and crown lands are in much greater danger of being cut down than anywhere else.

Buckling Up For Your Own Good (and theirs too)

According to the Brant News today, 16,000 people in Brantford were detained and searched without a warrant this month…impressive.

Of course, that’s not exactly the wording of the original article.

We certainly have short memory spans. As recently as 40 years ago, any kind of “seat belt law” was considered an obnoxious invasion of liberty. But under the guise of “safety”, we have become very accustomed to laws that allow bureaucrats to dictate and mandate the devices we use for health care purposes. The promises of significantly reduced highway fatalities and lower insurance rates quickly found its way into the memory hole as the studies showed mixed results for the former and no impact on the latter.

Worse still, the “safety lobby” got its real start in the early 80’s, a coalition of the auto giants and insurance companies who were faced with pending legislation to install air bags, a hassle and expense they resisted. Transportation regulators hinted that if the safety lobby could pressure the government to pass seat belt laws, the industry could thereby pass the costs of its regulations to the consumer and taxpayer instead in the form of fines and higher insurance rates. This partially backfired for the auto makers and insurers since air bags were eventually mandated anyway, and costly lawsuits for the malfunction of seat belts as well as air bags have resulted (the costs for both, of course, went to the consumer). But it was an unqualified success for the state and an excellent example of the gradual growth of government power.

It began with a compromise, seat belt laws would only impact drivers who were already “bad” (stopped for other infractions) in what was called “secondary enforcement”. But of course, lobbyists continued to chip away at those limitations, and typical of the growth patterns of the regulatory state, soon enough, check points were set up with the express intent of checking specifically for seat belt infractions (and any other violations spotted during the visual search), a free surveillance/cost cutting service for the insurance companies and a permanent source of new tax revenue.

"Illegal Smokes"

Submitted today to the Brantford Expositor___

Every once in a while, an editorial such as Christina Blizzard’s rants about the “dangers” of black market cigarettes (“Revenue and lives up in smoke”, April 10). The motives are usually easy to discern, if not the logic. It’s not about native sovereignty; it’s about nicotine addiction among young children, she claims. Somehow, it is believed that teenage smoking can be reduced by drafting convenience store clerks as unpaid babysitters, an extension of moms “watchful eye”. The problem, of course is that the age verification stickers on the cash registers, and the tax inflated prices of regulated tobacco does not discourage teen smoking, but merely shifts it underground and beyond the view of caregivers.

No doubt, having the government relieve caregivers of their parental authority and responsibility is the bottom line for some, but this alone does not explain a crusade aimed not at tobacco, but specifically against cheaper, unlicensed cigarettes.

There is, of course the “lost tax revenue”; public service propaganda designed to recruit the average taxpayer as a stakeholder in defense of the tobacco cartel, despite the fact that the state can always compensate for “lost taxes” by looting someone else. So who are the real beneficiaries of this hand wringing over the “illegal trade” in smokes, and whose interests are really at stake? Why, it’s the tobacco cartel itself, and its efforts to use the state to restrain the informal, underground trade in cigarettes. It’s a turf war, all in the name of “the children”, of course.

Indeed, Illegal tobacco is big business. But legal tobacco, protected by regulations and licensing, is an even bigger business with the tax funded resources to suppress its competitors. Supported by a coalition of retail, state sponsored charities and corporate interests, big tobacco mounts an impressive “public health” campaign that attempts to teach us all about how a drop in their market share is not just bad for your health, but a threat to western civilization itself.

As the formal, regulated tobacco cartel collapses under its own weight, native “smoke shacks”, as they are called, are part of the process of reindustrialization, of reduced overhead and less burdened supply chains and networks. It is the free market, seeping through the cracks of the corporate state.

Ending the Land Claims Mess in 3 Steps

Of course, it won't be satisfying to those with a vested interest in altering the balance of government power and the redistribution of wealth and real estate, but it strikes at the heart of the matter and is the only way of "resolving" the issue to the least detriment of all innocent parties concerned.

1. Abolish the racist Indian Act.

2. Dissolve the Department of Indian and Northern affairs and end the reserve system.

3. Currently, approximately 11% of the land mass in Ontario (example) is privately owned; the remaining 89% either houses government bureaucracy or federally administered "crown lands" (the bulk of the land being the latter). Open all such land to private homesteading, and amend the Bill Of Rights to acknowledge full property rights for all Native *individuals*, including the right of homesteading and voluntary (not managed by the state) mutual aid associations.

Done. Cost to the taxpayer: $0

More Adu about Nothing

Monday morning, the legal teams return to court to seek a ruling on whether there will be an injunction on native "protests" at development sites in Brantford. Of course, we have had essentially an interim injunction for some time now, largely unenforced, to address these protests. And in March last year, we had this strange impasse:

Justice Harrison Arrell issued an interim order telling natives to stop protesting, and Brantford to not enforce its anti-protesting bylaws for two months.

Which I always thought was more than a little superfluous. If natives stopped protesting, no such enforcement would be necessary or even meaningful. So why not just reword the interim order as "stop protesting", period? The above is more like telling a perpetrator, "if you don't break the law, we won't charge you with a crime". Huh?

The Gift that Keeps Taking

Brantford’s most cherished myth. The “rebirth” of the core brought by the University complex seems to have taken on the status of a legend. It’s one of those things you have to convince yourself of, through a desperate ritual. The ritual has to do with confusing causes with effects. You pour money into a big whole, so a crowd of people come and scoop it up. So you dig deeper and throw more money in it. More people dive in, and soon after, you think the party you’ve thrown now has it’s own momentum. The problem is, people are being forced to dig this whole deeper and repeatedly, with the proviso that in exchange for this, the recipients promise to devour it quickly and in as large quantities. An investor who does with his own money is called a fool. A politician who does this with your money is called a “wise city planner”.

Anyone who believes that government stimulus spending is the engine of economic growth will laud the expansion of the tax funded University complex, and naturally the more tax money and real estate siphoned from residents to hand over to it’s new privileged class represents “progress”, no matter how many downtown shops close, and no matter how many low income families line up at the queue for public housing and drop off the EI rolls. The University complex just needs “one more” grant here, just “one more” expropriated building there. The revitalization is a 'raging success', but it stands to be derailed by any interruption in the conveyor belt that delivers the resources of this city into the hands of the University system . There’s that Orwellian refrain that the revitalization, the “rebirth” needs to be completed.

There’s another possibility. It never happened.

Earth Hour at Timmies

Tim Hortons has posted notices that it will participate in Earth Hour by reducing it's energy consumption during that hour. So by all means, don't expect toasted bagels, and do expect to nuke your lukewarm coffee when you get home. I'm sure the cash registers will be running on full though, with backup power if needed.

Debunking Brantford's "Hoover Myth"

You know, that myth that Hoover sat by and did nothing to prevent the great depression. Very wrong.

Well of course, we have our own municipal version of the Hoover Myth, and it goes something like this. Despite the (heroic at best and misguided at worst) efforts of successive city councils, the private sector allowed the south side to deteriorate, and government must come to the rescue.

Like me, you might not have seen this Expositor article, written a couple of years ago. Of course, true to the mainstream media and it's worship of power, it focuses on the "frustration" of good natured politicians trying to revive a sagging downtown, but unwittingly demonstrates a little more:

Contrary to popular impression, Steve Kun and others sought to transition from a commercial to a residential use of their properties:

In 1997, following a report entitled Downtown: A Time for Action, prepared by by the mayor's task force on downtown revitalization, zoning regulations for the downtown were changed in an interim control bylaw to allow commercial property owners to change their street level storefront space to residential.

The rationale was that the inability of the private sector to attract commercial investment had reached the point that any kind of development would be better to ensure some kind of use and occupation of the property rather than to leave it vacant and boarded up.

Of course, governments are usually the last to figure anything out, and for them it's either one designated "use" at a time:

In late 2004, though, as downtown revitalization gathered steam and property values began to rise, council and the Downtown BIA became concerned when landlords began to convert isolated individual storefronts to less desirable residential units not in keeping with its plan.

"The continuing trend of street-level residential uses has the potential to further negatively impact prospective development in the downtown core area," says the resulting staff report in June 2005.

So yet another zoning change to reinstate the ban on residential use at ground level was passed, but not on Kun, who had his previous permits grandfathered in (fortunately, since this would have driven up vacancy rates even more). This created a problem for the city:

The renovations were carried out gradually during 2006 and this year, so that most of the units were done and occupied by the time G.K. York's civic square private development and the public square reached completion. The two radically different forms of development are now fully apparent.

"The city is in no position to press its concern about all these ground-floor apartments, as long as they comply with property standards, the building code and other bylaws, " said Matt Reniers, the city's manager of policy planning and heritage.

Bylaws and property standards were not enforced? It sounds like the problem was they were being obeyed, so the city had to try another tack:

Again, quoted Mr. Reniers:

"They are considered a legal non-conforming use, so we don't have much control on that.

"About the only way the situation can be changed is if those buildings are demolished; they could be determined a discontinument of their present use, and any future development would have to adhere to the new bylaw."

And the rest is history. As I've said previously, the south side of Colborne was a stubborn holdout to the city governments "grand vision", so to punish it (and us), it must now be flattened.