Thursday, July 24, 2008

Larry Di Ianni and QZH talk Liberally for 90 minutes

Quintin Zachary Hewlett: First of all, I want to thank you for meeting with me. I wasn’t sure that you would want to afford my questions after our email exchange. Let’s just leave the past where it is – I am not going to bring up Red Hill or any other bugbears. Let’s just get to the Green Shift plan. I like it, and I have to say that for the first time in my life I’m considering voting Liberal.

Larry Di Ianni: Thank you. Hopefully you will like what I have to say. Well, at any rate I’ve come to appreciate the plan. When it was first being talked about, I thought Oh Gosh, how confusing is this? People are going to be totally confused by it. All of the stuff that you hear, that this is not the time, the economy’s bad, energy prices are going up. In fact, this is the answer. This is not the problem. It really is the answer, so I’m quite enthused about it.

QZH: Is that the primary problem that the Liberal Party is faced with? Essentially a PR campaign about this plan?

LDI: Well, I don’t know if it’s a public relations campaign, although PR is always part of politics. Or, at least getting the message out, which is how most politicians would put it rather than public relations. But certainly informing people and dealing with some of the myths. The Conservatives after seeing the plan have ridiculed it. I was sort of offended, personally, by their reaction.

QZH: I’d like to focus on the latter part – we’ll deal with that shift in a second. I think there’s two aspects of it which are important. One of which you just mentioned: the shift in taxation, and I’d like to get to specifics about that. But just before that I’d like to deal with something that’s perhaps on the minds of Hamiltonians more so than those from other large municipalities. Shift of course invokes cars, invokes transportation. There’s a mall in Oakville, one of the larger ones, and there advertising campaign is “Shift into High Gear”, and they have luxury items on display. Of course, you have to drive out to the mall, there’s no real transit to get there otherwise and it’s not near any residential areas. I’m wondering specifically for Hamilton, which is very much predicated on the highway model and has been for a long time – you just have to look at King and Main streets, and from an infrastructure point of view the rapid transfer of people using individual [automobiles] is the ideological framework for this city’s development. I’m wondering very specifically about the Infrastructure Surplus commitments in the Green Shift, how can Hamiltonians very specifically and Canadians in general come to understand that this fund is not necessarily going to go to highway development but instead to mass transit, which is so required for Hamilton.

LDI: Let me refer to this simple and useful book...

QZH: It’s well-produced. I read it.

LDI: Have you read Dune?

QZH: The Frank Herbert series? Yeah. Actually, when I was about six, I went to see the bad David Lynch version of it in the theatre. Disappointing.

LDI: The novel was better.

QZH: Well, [oil] is definitely our spice, and there’s no easy way to get off of it. Considering that costs are going up almost exponentially, and they’re not going to go down. A good indicator for this can be seen in the tarsands, because while most of the tarsands is deemed “industrially-recoverable”, it’s only deemed recoverable when oil reaches a certain price point.

LDI: When I was a kid, we were talking about the tarsands. This is generations ago. We’ve got oil galore, it’s just too expensive to retrieve it. Once the price reaches a certain level, it will be economic and we’ll have oil coming out of our you-know-whats. We’re at that point now, and the fact that we can make it an economic reality means that things have gotten to an exorbitant level. And then, we weren’t thinking of the environmental impact.

QZH: We’re still not really thinking about the environmental impact.

LDI: Yes we are! The Green Shift certainly thinks about that. [laughs]

QZH: Well, again I hope that it is legitimate. I do believe in Dion, however.

LDI: A decent man. I got to know him last year. I don’t know him well, but we’ve been at many functions together and we’ve had a few chats. He’s chalk full of integrity, very bright, thinks well on his feet. He answered some tough questions at a function a week or so ago about with humour and good solid information. But he’s not a sound-bite type of guy.

QZH: That’s the problem with having knowledge and integrity: you don’t fit the media.

LDI: That’s something that you either have or you don’t perhaps. But I’m hoping that people can see beyond that. That there’s a man with substance here. And there’s strength; he’s not a weak man. I read a biography on him he’s an interesting individual because of his background. How he grew up, the influence of his father, how his own thoughts were gelling as things were developing in Canada. Nationalism was flourishing in Quebec City where he grew up. And he took some principled stands in very much a Captain Canada way. He told separatists that they were not going to break up the country on a whim; there were rules for such things and [Dion] implemented those. He was reviled by the separatists in Quebec because of that, because he made it difficult and you couldn’t fudge things any longer. I quite like him, and I hope that Canadians give him a chance. I hope that they see the integrity in him and the passion. When I was mayor, I went to a sustainable cities conference in Montreal. It was great, and they had environmentalists from all over the world, it wasn’t just Canadian folks.

QZH: Who flew in on their jets...

LDI: Well yes, they had to get there and they were from all over the place. But they’re sincere people.

QZH: Yes.

Complete transcription available here.

here's the audio for the conversation:

Larry and QZH

Monday, July 07, 2008

Fat Tuesday Masquerade



Nudes by Melanie Gillis and Ward Shipman
Mask Art by Laura Hollick, Ryan Price, Michelle Purchase
and countless local mask-making newbies
Fire Spinning by Hot Carl


You can find information about this facet of this month's James North Art Crawl by clicking here.