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Right in the centre - You can't fix stupid

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Published on Thursday, August 11, 2016

By Ken Waddell

Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press

They say you can’t fix stupid and there’s plenty of it to go around. It’s at all levels of government, sometimes found in the business world and often in our individual lives.

A recent case came to light about an Ontario winery and the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). According to reports, the winery in question produces a nice wine, had a license to do so and a license to sell tasting samples to tourists. But they wanted to serve customers by the glassful in a scenic farm setting. Not legal unless they sell the wine to LCBO on paper, buy it back and then sell it to their customers. Going through LCBO, even on paper, doubles the cost of the wine. As the winery owner points out, a winery in Italy can sell to whomever they want to in Italy and to LCBO if they choose to do so. In Ontario, it all has to go through LCBO. It has nothing to do with quality control or food inspection. That’s a separate issue, it has to do with taxation.

The same thing happens in Ë®¹ûÊÓƵ with cheese. A dairy farmer might be able to make the finest of cheese, but they can’t use the milk from their own cows in their business plan at their cost of production. They have to sell the milk, on paper, to the Ë®¹ûÊÓƵ Milk Marketing Board, and buy it back on paper before they make the cheese. Absolutely ridiculous. Again, nothing to do with quality control or food safety but simply a money grab.

Inter-provincial trade in Canada is tougher than trade within the province and, in some cases, tougher than international trade. The current premiers have vowed they are going to fix that but we have heard that story before. Hope they do it this time.

Stupid exists in individual lives as well. How is it that people can complain about being short of money but have money for beer, hard liquor, snack foods, cigarettes, cigars, tattoos and body piercing? They can find money for huge bags of pet food and no end of money to buy expensive pets. All those things listed are not essential to life or happiness so should never contribute to a person being short of money. People today would laugh at my parents’ generation. Snack food was a rare purchase, in fact it hardly existed as the demand for such a thing was almost non-existent. Drinks, soft or hard, rarely came into the house. Tattoos were something a sailor sometimes got when he thought he was in love with a girl. Body piercing was simply not on the agenda. Happiness, or more importantly joy, was celebrated every day in small triumphs like baby’s first steps, a family thanksgiving dinner or a birthday cake and candles. Spending money on unnecessary items was not part of the equation.

Stupid exists in a lot of businesses too. Seems the larger the company, the more stupid they become. Many times they don’t do all that well because they forget that  they are in business to serve customers and serve communities. Instead, they slide quickly to the conclusion that they have to serve the shareholders. Making a profit is a good thing, but if you have to do it by ignoring your community or your customers, then you will suffer. Not wanting to disparage any particular company, I won’t name them, but it doesn’t take much of a perusal of the financial news to see lots of evidence of stupid in business.

One of the dumbest things that local communities do is fail to refresh their leadership. There is a definite need for continuity in leadership and in core projects, I get that. But, a community needs to always be bringing new leadership on board. The councils in many communities are very male and very old. There’s a reason for that. Older people, especially older men, are often the ones who have the time to sit on councils and be part of the grinding process of council life. That needs to change. Many councils meet during the day when a large percentage of the population simply can’t get away from their place of work or their business. That traditional and hide-bound adherence to day time meetings eliminates a lot of potential councillors.

Then there’s the council meetings themselves. They can take all day or at least many hours. Then there’s the committee meetings. They can be mind-numbing; I remember attending a committee meeting one time where most of the time was taken up debating if swim fees would be $2.50 or $2.75. Absolute insanity!  The council, or the committee, should tell the administration that they are prepared to invest (or lose) a certain level of dollars on a pool, a project or a facility and then tell the admin side to go run it and minimize the losses and maximize the usage. That’s too simple a concept for some councils to adopt. That’s only one example. Councils can discuss matters to death and they do. I have said it before, that councils are the place where good ideas go to die. It’s a special kind of stupid that allows the very life of a community to be ground to a pulp when the councils should be leading the parade to prosperity.

You can’t fix stupid, but you don’t have to keep doing it. Doesn’t matter if it’s an individual, a business or a community, don’t fix stupid, just stop doing stupid.