SOME THOUGHTS AROUND COLUMN NO. 700

AN UNCHANGING ASPECT OF PUBLIC LIFE IS THE INABILITY OF GOVERNMENTS AND REPRESENTATIVES TO SPEAK PLAINLY, WRITES TAYLER PARNABY

Fourteen years ago, I was in Quebec covering late stages of the nation's 40th federal election. It was mid-October, three weeks before Barack Obama was elected president, three months before I capped a 55-year broadcasting career by retiring from the airwaves of CFRB.

That morning, in Quebec,

the phone rang. It was the general manager of the Caledon Enterprise, Bill Anderson, with an invitation to write a weekly column for the paper.

The first appeared in late 2008 with an explanation about "talking" columns rather than writing the weekly comments in accordance with newspaper standards as defined by the style guide of The Canadian Press.

It would have been almost impossible for this radio guy to be converted from 'radio speak' to 'newspaperese' despite time spent as a Kingston 'stringer' for the Globe and Mail in the 1960s.

In any event, the intervening years, between Anderson's telephone call and May 2022, have flown by, marked by this week's column labelled #700.

In some respects, while much has changed over the years, some things have not. In an early column published in May 2009, I'd posed a question and offered an answer.

"Why can't governments and their agencies speak plainly?"

Answer: Too many butts to be covered!

"It's as if the governors are terrified that folks might fully understand what they mean. Too often, we're left trapped between the political art of obfuscation and the true intentions of those to whom we assign responsibility for so many of the goods and services we require."

It's not just governors and governments bent on scrambling our minds. Try making honest-to-goodness sense of the stuff you're exposed to from the electronic media, from the internet or from old-fashioned but never out of style con-artists.

What I'd written a dozen years ago stands to this day. "In plain English! People have had it up to here with those who can't say it straight knowing, from experience, that too often the ideas being promoted don't measure up to the promise.

My frustration at being misled or under-informed is a shared experience, that we're all looking for a little straight talk by people, governors included, who can look you in the eye, say what they mean and mean what they say."

We're in the early stages of an important provincial election and already promises that can't or never will be kept are being flung about with little restraint. In the fall, we'll have municipal and regional elections.

Already, present Caledon councillors Jennifer Innis and Annette Groves are preparing for what can be expected to be a feisty campaign.

Both elections are worthy of campaign candour, straight-up, in-your-face, telling-us-like-it-is debate.

Try making honest-to-goodness sense of the stuff you're exposed to from the electronic media, from the internet or from old-fashioned but never out of style con-artists.