Doug Rochow is a certifiable good guy. He’s the kind of citizen any community would be proud to count as one of theirs.
You’d think.
Each winter for years now, the Ottawa native has routinely shouldered his snow shovel every time it snows and waded into a nearby public park to clear a path so that visitors can get through in comfort and safety. He doesn’t charge for his service; nor does he brag about it. He does it so that people won’t slip, fall and hurt themselves on uncleared paths.
The city of Ottawa has ordered him to cease and desist. Why? The bureaucratic reasoning is impeccable. If Doug Rochow clears paths through the park, more citizens might be encouraged to walk on them, thus increasing the city’s exposure to lawsuits.
Hopefully the city bureaucrats won’t stop there. They should erect a ten-foot fence around the entire park perimeter patrolled by security guards. For sure nobody would get injured then.
It’s a shame Prime Minister Harper won’t scuttle his King Canuteworthy scheme to saddle us with $25 billion worth of U.S. F-35 fighter jets. He could divert a fraction of the money saved to create a Department of Common Sense. The new agency could be tasked with torpedoing dumbass official decisions like the one that deprived Rochow of his philanthropic pastime.
They could open a branch office in Edmonton to address the school board that has suspended high school teacher Lynden Dorval. His crime: assigning a mark of ‘zero’ to students who failed to complete their assignments.
Mister Dorval is an old-fashioned guy. He actually believes that — and this is a quote — “High school students are not little kids. It’s time to become an adult and take responsibility for your own actions.” How naïve is that?
The superintendent of the Edmonton School Board (which is firing Dorval) explained to reporters that students don’t get zeroes at Ross Sheppard High School anymore. Instead, they get a chance to ‘make up the work’.
Whatever that means.
Where does such disconnection from reality end? I’m not sure but I know it made a pit stop in Windsor, Ontario last year. Doreen Wallace, an 82-year-old woman who was visiting her dying husband at the Greater Niagara General Hospital slipped at the entrance and broke her hip. Nasty turn of events — but at least she had the good luck to fall in front of a hospital, right?
Wrong. Hospital workers told her companions that they’d have to phone for paramedics and an ambulance to come and ‘officially admit her”. For half an hour visitors literally stepped over the grandmother as she lay waiting, moaning, on the floor.
Viral insanity touched down in Elliot Lake recently as well where, as the world learned to its horror, the roof of a shopping mall collapsed. The disaster was no surprise locally. Elliot Lake residents had been making bets among themselves as to when the leaky and shoddily built structure would finally crumble.
Nobody took responsibility.
Two people died.
It’s not just the Elliot Lake mall that’s poorly built. How is it that the bureaucratic structures we build to make our lives better so often turn out to be worse then the problem they were constructed to solve?
The American critic Brooks Atkinson once said, “Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy.”
U.S. President Harry Truman had a solution to the problem. He had a sign on his desk that read: “The buck stops here.”
We need more people with the gonads to say that.
