The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Home Newspaper of Halton Hills Established A Division of Canadian Newspapers Company Guelph Street Georgetown Ontario DAVID A BEATTIE Publisher and General Manager BRIAN Editor Phone DAN TAYLOR Advertising Manager Second Mail RcgbtrmJ Pages THE HERALD Wednesday January ID 1990 Editorial Facing a crisis Homeowners all over Halton Hills who have been quietly renting out their basement apartments have good reason to be nervous The town recently managed to make an example of a Toronto man who turned an Albert Street home into three apartments without obtaining the proper permits by him to court The homeowner was given the largest fine in the town history for such an offence 4 The incident came to the town s attention when homeowners around the housecome apartment building complained It took them seven months and a court battle but they won The case sets the mood for things to come In Halton Hills hundreds if not thousands of homeowners have adjusted to skyrocketing mortgages by renting out their basements Without those basement apartments many young Hills residents would literally have nowhere to live in town But residents who purchase houses in a neighborhood predominated by single family dwellings are anxious to protect their investment And the Albert Street residents showed it can be done Now the town is saying if you ve got a problem with legal apartments in your neighborhood tell us and we 11 do something about it You cant blame the town s civil servants for doing their jobs and enforcing bylaws but it s a very worrisome thought to ponder the possibility of hundreds of young pie many of them supplying the local work force tossed out on the street Halton Hills has not coped with the affordable housing crunch well For a long time the town has had a per cent vacancy rate for apartments and a quick check in local newspapers classified sections shows a basement apart ment goes for as much as a month One of the few things we can do is to legalize basement apartments Such houses usually mean only one extra car but it s a blessing for homeowners and for the apartment dwellers No doubt the apartment owner s taxes would have to be increased Currently someone who converts a house to contain an apartment pays the same taxes as a single family living in a house even though the house containing an apartment draws more of the towns services and resources But these are problems with solutions Finding an affordable roof to put over your head in Halton Hills isnt as easy The towns building code enforcement officer John Holmes acknowledges the town is facing a crisis People are desperate If someone has a basement apartment they have no problem renting it he says In the coming months Halton Hills councillors will be looking over a report on illegal apartments now being prepared by town staff Its imperative that councillors look upon homeowners with basement apartments with leniency The Albert Street case was a blatant skirting of the law according to Mr Holmes It was a case of an absentee homeowner renting out the apartments Most people t complain about pursuing such a case But if the issue spills over to basement apartments Halton Hills could soon be dealing with the worst social crisis it has ever faced Similarities between parties shortchanges the electorate The sameness of the I New Democratic and Progressive Conservative parties of Ontario has often been remarked upon in this column And how that short changes the electorate Now TV Ontario has produced a six part series Left Right and Centre Party Politics In Ontario that generally agrees about the sameness but considers it a virtue rather than a vice A somewhat longer version of the TV series is also available in print The series has just on television but will inevitably run again And again Left right and centre of course is the shorthand term many people use as an alternative description of respectively socialism vatism and liberalism Executive producer Mike set the tone for the series when he noted in the print version the difficulty of pinning these labels on the three old line Canadian political parties There is a right in Chile and a right in Canada a left in Cuba and a left in Canada and we all know they are very different things CANADIAN MEANINGS Why da these terms fail to cap ture the same realities here as elsewhere The answer in a word is Canada Our geography history and cultural patchwork have all conspired to give these historical terms uniquely Cana meanings he suggests The seeming sameness of the parties is by an absence of extremes which is characteristically Canadian and should be seen not as the wimpish blandness sometimes ascribed to the Canadian character but rather as a strength a sensitivity to others born out of a realization that this nation survives because its leaders stay in and around he ideological centre he added That doesn t answer who defines where the centre lies on an issueby issue basis but at least the series tries to tackle the broader question of what is this muddy middle The show calls it liberalism which histonan Ramsay Cook in the TV series suggests is parliamentary government the rule of law certain kinds of rights about citizens participation in politics the right to free speech and the sense that the in dividual position in society relates somehow to property and property holding How the Liberals New Democrats and PCs differ is in their interpretation of how to apply these ideas In a general sense since all three parties are liberal their arguments come down to an em upon either market liberalism or welfare liberalism this last merging into social democracy INDIVIDUAL Market liberalism gives more weight to the individual and to the marketplace and decries govern ment interference in the pursuit of capitalist economics Welfare liberalism which we had in Canada since the 1920s or 1960s depending on how you look at it accepts the market but sees government as a positive force which by implementing various social programs could free people in a way the market couldn t Social democracy takes the con of equality of opportunity that underlies both market and welfare liberalism and insists people are not really free until there is also equality of results the end of in dividual failure in the pursuit of op portunity recommend watching the series to see how the mainly liberal analysts apply those categories to the parties None of the analysts share my belief that all three parties want to force and twist the market to make it achieve social democratic goals And only a few touch on the economic issues such as the British imperial connection that have shaped our politics the disap pearance of which has temporarily contributed to the blurring of the three parties Serious consequences will arise if Meech Lake is defeated Prime Minister Bnan and Quebec Premier Robert are probably correct in predicting some senous conse quences for Canada should the Meech Lake constitutional accord go down the tube But the sad irony is that both of these men will have made major contributions to these senous con sequences Had they put a lid on their rhetoric from the beginning there is no doubt the consequences the iccurd failure would fir less severe It s not through serious study that a majority of have come around to the view that if the accord is not ratified they would support some form of in dependence for the province Very few people in Quebec or elsewhere bum the midnight oil trying to unravel the complexities of the accord The vast majonty of us are get ting our information and view points from political leaders Con sidenng some of the things being said it little doubt that opinions are changing The Lake accord was agreed upon by Mr and the 10 premiers back in the spring of And months ago September opinion polls showed that only 29 per cent of Quebec would support limited in dependence if the accord was not ratified Now a mere three months later we have a poll showing that per cent of feel thit way I- AST CHANGE Obviously our political leaders have played a major role in these fastchanging viewpoints And in that threemonth period there was certainly no shortage of rhetoric from the political stage Far too many of the leaders in eluding the prime minister and the Quebec premier have been leav the impression that a rejection of the accord would be a direct slap in the face to Quebec Outside the province the pression is different and Mr Mulroney has often said that the accord is not just the best in of Quebec it is in the best interests of Canada it is good for Canada However within the province the emphasis is on Quebec and how its citizens could be expected to in a rejection of the accord Mr tells an audience that Quebec will not sit passively witch with indifference the milium up