The Percent for Art program & Jan Harder

The following letter to the Editor of the Ottawa Citizen was send shortly after Councillor Jan Harder decided that the Percent for Art program in the city was not serving her ambitions at this time so it should be cut or eliminated.  It is interesting to note that Councillor Harder's own "householders" have advertised on numerous occasions that a call for submissions for Public Art was open for projects in her ward.

September 17, 2012

Letter to the Ottawa Citizen,

One fact about the City of Ottawa is that if you wait a bit you will have the opportunity to fight old battles again.  So it is with the Percent for Art program.  As a two term member of the Arts, Heritage and Culture Advisory Committee of the city (one of the few to be retained by the city), in 2003 I fought to ensure that the Percent for Art program was adhered to by city managers.  Although it was instituted before amalgamation, the program had been largely ignored by city managers.  Indeed, I remember when I asked for a copy of the directive for the program; the best the city could offer was a photocopy of a fax.  It had never even been retyped into the city policy files.

Now, in 2012, the fight begins again.  Councillor Jan Harder wants to cut the program in half or even eliminate it, all because her own project-of-the-week needs more money.

The purpose of the Percent for Art program is to spruce up facilities around the city, make the city more visually appealing and to the support the arts.  I may not agree with some of the art selected under the program but I will be the first to defend the need for it.

Let me offer Councillor Harder a bit of advice.  Instead of chopping at a program like Percent for Art, why not learn to work with it.  Why not find a way to incorporate art as an integral part of the project… let’s say a sculpture of a person on a bench, that also serves as a bench.  That would save the cost of a bench in the project.  If you need some help with that idea, check out what they did at the new City Archives building where architectural art complements what was already a stunning building.

Of course the Citizen decided not to print the letter.  I wonder why?

Having it both ways?

I am reading a book describing a conspiracy surrounding the disaster in New York on 9/11.  The critics of the book call the author, and a huge number of persons that believe it, Conspiracy Theorists.  They call the people who critically analyze such events as Pearl Harbour and the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations - Conspiracy Theorists.  This moniker is designed to tar the analysts as nuts or at least delusional, blowing them off rather than addressing the issues they raise.

Let me say right here that I am not a Conspiracy Theorist, as defined by the right-leaning pundits.  I believe in empirical research and the right to pursue the truth.  However, if I am proved wrong by facts, not innuendo, then so be it.  But you cannot prove me wrong by just lumping me into a pile labeled "Conspiracy Theorists".

But let's look at the other side of the coin.  In November, Fred Litwin and his so called Free Thinkers are showing a movie that labels the Occupy movement in the US and, I assume by association, those in Canada as conspiracies by militant groups who want to destroy democracy, or at least destroy capitalism.  I am not naive enough to think that there are no radical elements in the "Occupy" camps, but the fact that conservatives tout this as a conspiracy seems to me to be a stretch.

But regardless of who is right and who is wrong, the makers of this film, a conservative non-profit organization whose goal, strangely, is citizen-action, and those who blindly believe it must be, by their own definition, Conspiracy Theorists.

The Arrow versus the F35? Tell me it isn't so.

Lewis Mackenzie is not my favourite retired Canadian officer, that would be General Richard Rohmer; mostly, because Lew is a self-promoter, while Rohmer is a behind-the-scenes-get-er-done kind of guy.

But every so often Lew gets it right, even if his idea is pie-in-the-sky.  Take for instance the article in the Arguments section of today's Ottawa Citizen.

Lew is making a case for the Avro Arrow design to be updated into Mark 3 and Mark 4 models and built of today's materials here in Canada.  Instead of buying the F35; spend the money in Canada, reboot the Canadian aerospace industry and get a better aircraft for the effort.

For guys like me, and there are many of us, this is music to our ears.  All in the CF105 was the class act of fighter/interceptor air craft when it was designed and built in the 1950s.  The decision to scrap it was a political one made for political reasons.  These things happen.  Read my article on the Burnelli lift-body design that never flew for political reasons (http://www.mysteriesofcanada.com/Canada/Canada_Car/ccf_part_3_CBY3.htm).

For the same reasons that the Burnelli designs were never built, the CF105 will never be built in any Mark format.

Nice idea, Lew, but it just won't fly (sorry for the pun).