6- The Oakville Beaver Weekend, Saturday November 10, 2007 www.oakvillebeaver.com The Oakville Beaver 467 Speers Rd., Oakville Ont. L6K 3S4 (905) 845-3824 Fax: 337-5567 Classified Advertising: 845-3824, ext. 224 Circulation: 845-9742 The Oakville Beaver is a member of the Ontario Press Council. The council is located at 80 Gould St., Suite 206, Toronto, Ont., M5B 2M7. Phone (416) 340-1981. Advertising is accepted on the condition that, in the event of a typographical error, that portion of advertising space occupied by the erroneous item, together with a reasonable allowance for signature, will not be charged for, but the balance of the advertisement will be paid for at the applicable rate. The publisher reserves the right to categorize advertisements or decline. Editorial and advertising content of the Oakville Beaver is protected by copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited. 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Manager WEBSITE oakvillebeaver.com The Oakville Beaver is a division of Guest Columnist Finding the way back By Garth Turner, Halton MP If you thought we lost our way in Ottawa in the last few weeks, well, you're right. Completely. The government lost its way trying to be aggressive and partisan and cause an election. By bringing in a Throne Speech and a new agenda when we had lots of work left on the old one, it rolled the dice. Garth Turner By saying all MPs had to accept what it was doing, or there would be an election, it rolled again. And by telling Parliament that all new government bills had to be passed without amendment, so MPs were irrelevant, it rolled big time. The opposition lost its way, too, for thinking more about the Conservatives than about Canadians. We all got caught up in a drum beats of an election call. Suddenly, we were more focused on the polls, on campaign readiness, on how many candidates were nominated and who would fill seats in the next Parliament. Along with the media, we became obsessed with leaders, and the conflict between them. Arrogant, dismissive, dictatorial Harper. Beleaguered, weak, professorial Dion. The Conservatives pounded on the Liberals by attacking their past record, ridiculing their leader and suggesting the party is disintegrating. Liberals pounded Tories over allegations it's perpetrated financing fraud, tried to throw a municipal election, thwarts democracy and is amassing a database of secret information on Canadians. Meanwhile voters started thinking, the hell with you both. And so they should have. While we gouge eyes and knee groins on Parliament Hill, the people who sent us here are looking for leadership. Mortgage rates have risen and family finances worsened. Nobody's doing anything serious about fighting climate change yet. Thousands of manufacturing jobs are vaporizing. We're still mired in a confusing and controversial war without apparent end. Looming recession in the US has folks worried about their house values. Income trust investors still count their monumental losses. And what are we doing in Ottawa? Yeah, we have our knickers in a knot over a confidence vote on a speech citizens forgot about before it was over. This is not why I was sent here by the people in Halton. It wasn't why I ran to be an MP once again. Over the past five months alone, I've held almost thirty public Town Hall meetings across five provinces, and there are more coming. At virtually every one of those, people stood and said they feel alienated from Ottawa and shut out of a political system which is supposed to represent, and help them. No wonder. Most Canadians are not partisans. Less than 1 per cent of the population belongs to political parties. But they do care passionately about providing for their families, about the economic future, fairness for all Canadians, saving the environment for their kids, adequate health care and great schools, about keeping this country whole and strong, about lower taxes and politicians who care more about them, than themselves. Lately, at least in Ottawa, MPs like that are hard to find. I think we're all guilty myself included of getting swept up in a swirling vortex of posturing, brinkmanship and outright partisanship. We jostle over power when it is the people who should preoccupy us. Yes, I still look forward to the next election. In my view, it's the only way we'll get things like broad-based income tax relief, a climate change strategy with guts, government spending under control and family income-splitting. A vote can't come soon enough. Yet an election Canadians are cynical about, in which half the people stay home, is hardly the path to better government. In many ways, sadly, we MPs deepened that cynicism in the last weeks. Parliament may sit on a hill, but right now there's precious little high ground around it. Garth Turner is MP for Halton. Reach him directly at garth@garth.ca. IAN OLIVER Group Publisher Media Group Ltd. Mississauga Business Times, Mississauga News, Napanee Guide, Newmarket/Aurora Era-Banner, Northumberland News, North York Mirror, Oakville Beaver, Oakville Shopping News, Oldtimers Hockey News, Orillia Today, Oshawa/Whitby/Clarington Port Perry This Week, Owen Sound Tribune, Palmerston Observer, Peterborough This Week, Picton County Guide, Richmond Hill/Thornhill/Vaughan Liberal, Scarborough Mirror, Stouffville/Uxbridge Tribune, Forever Young, City of York Guardian RECOGNIZED FOR EXCELLENCE BY: Ontario Community Newspapers Association Canadian Community Newspapers Association Suburban Newspapers of America THE OAKVILLE BEAVER IS PROUD OFFICIAL MEDIA SPONSOR FOR: United Way of Oakville TV AUCTION Celebrating the last birthday before the teen terror years I magine, empathetic readers, a man of my advanced years crammed in a car for a prolonged period of time with a gaggle of giggly girls, all hopped up on sugar, excitement and expectations for what lies ahead: specifically, a few games of glowin-the-dark bowling followed by a pizza party and sleepover at our home in celebration of our daughter's 12th birthday. Alas, the road to the bowling alley is long and winding, and the drive is taking forever, and with each passing minute the noise levels in the car are rising as the girls get more and more hyper, and I become more and more claustrophobic. I'd jump out of the Jeep and abandon them at the roadside, but in all honestly, the amateur sociologist in me is having too much fun listening in on their conversation (I'd say eavesdropping, but it's more like they're wholly oblivious to the fact that I'm even in the vehicle). They talk about classmates. They talk about boys. They tell really bad jokes. They talk about their families. They tell more really bad jokes. And as they talk, as I try to keep up with the conversation, it becomes hopelessly clear to me that what the girls are saying to each other is, to my old ears, hopelessly unclear. I don't know if it's the way they speak (100 kilometres an hour), or the lingo or secret code they employ. Regardless, it makes me think of Dr. Deborah Cameron. In case you're not in the know, Dr. Cameron is an Oxford University philologist who recently wrote a tome debunking the popular notion that "men and women are genetically unsuited to communicating successfully with each other", a theory that Andy Juniper had been advanced in the Dr. John Gray bestseller Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Dr. Cameron contends the Venus and Mars thing is a stack of myths. Among the notions she says are myths: that women talk more than men (Cameron says studies are divided on this, with some concluding that men actually gab more than women); that men and women communicate differently (Cameron says linguistic studies have concluded that men and women share a 99.75 percent overlap in the way they communicate, the only small differences being that women smile more and spell butter, er, better); and, finally, that men interrupt conversations more than women (actually, Dr. Cameron says, females interrupt just as much). Well, I can say with certainty that on the last point, Dr. Cameron is bang on. As we trek to and from the bowling alley, as the party continues at our house over the next twelve hours, I marvel at how much these girls interrupt each other: no sentence is left uninterrupted. As for Dr. Cameron's other contentions, I'm just not so sure. These girls sure talk more than any boys I've ever met. And if these females don't communicate differently from me, then why am I at a loss to understand them half the time? It's only after the party, after conferring with my wife, that I discover that she was experiencing similar difficulties. Thus, we determine, the communication gap is not a gender thing at all, so much as it's an age thing: we can't comprehend what the girls were saying because we're too freakin' old! But even fossils like us manage to appreciate kids like this. Full of curiosity. Polite. Full of wonder. Determined to have fun. And not yet jaded and full of attitude. That nonsense, the experts say, comes early on in the teen years. Ah, something to look forward to! Andy Juniper can be visited at his Web site, www.strangledeggs.com, or contacted at ajuniper@strangledeggs.com.