April 9, 2008 Vol. 33 No. 36

Pic of the Past AFTER THE BATTLE -- Truckloads of jubilant Canadian soldiers celebrate their success after the Battle of Vimy Ridge, April 1917. photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada

Column -

Diving into the playoff pool

By John Barlow
Editor

It is as much a rite of spring as planting tulip bulbs, dusting off your golf clubs or packing up your thermal underwear.
You see, in the United States work came to a complete stand still last month with the beginning of March Madness. The gross domestic product for the United States in the month of March is roughly equivalent to that of Luxemburg.
North of the border, a similar phenomenon is about to begin — The Anguish of April.
This week offices, factories and retail shops will come to a screeching halt as every Hockey Fan in the country will be pouring over pages of National Hockey League statistics, injury reports and schedules and getting advice from everything from The Hockey News to the Farmer’s Almanac.
It is playoff time and that means NHL playoff pools.
It is the one time when a guy finds himself capable of focusing his attention on one thing. Even if you are offered a free Tim Horton’s coffee, Hockey Fans would not so much as flinch — they’re too busy checking the latest update on the Colorado Avalanche’s third line center’s toe fungus. A naked woman could sit on Hockey Fan’s desk while he prepared for that night’s draft and he would not give her a glance (okay, maybe a second glance, but certainly not a third) because he is too engrossed in the Philadelphia Flyers’ powerplay proficiency on the second Thursday of each month of a quarter moon in an arena that faces north and serves Molson Canadian instead of Molson Export.
No, this is a time for preparation, second guessing, deep thought, more second guessing, philosophical analysis and yet more second guessing.
There are many questions that must be given careful consideration. For example: Who is going to win each series? Who am I going to select if I get first pick? Do I even want first pick? Is that too much pressure? What will I do waiting for everyone else to pick twice before I get to pick again? Should I bring beer or can I mooch off everyone else? Will everyone like my mom’s blood pudding and headcheese pate recipe?
As you prepare for your annual gathering this week I would like to bestow upon you a few tokens of wisdom I have learned over the years. Take these lessons my friends, use them wisely and hopefully they will help lead you to glory (which means the opportunity to brag to your buddies that you whooped their butts in the playoff pool).
Lesson #1: Always hold your draft on a night when there is a playoff game on. This is an excellent opportunity to take advantage of the Kris Kontos Effect. Some of you may remember the 1989 playoffs when Kontos, a late season pick-up by the Los Angeles Kings, scored nine goals in 11 playoff games playing on a line with Wayne Gretzky. The Kontos Effect continued in 1990 when John Druce scored an uncanny 14 goals in 15 playoff games for the Washington Capitals after netting just eight goals in 45 regular season games. Although that was 18 years ago Hockey Fan still expects he will be the one to nab the next John Druce or Kris Kontos. So when you are in, say, the second round of your draft and Kris Beech scores the first goal for the Pittsburgh Penguins hold your snickers when Hockey Fan nabs him with his next pick. Just smile and say, “Nice pick.”
Lesson #2: Never be pleased when you get the first pick because you will get Sidney Crosby, but by the time it gets back to you your second pick will be Darren McCarty.
Lesson #3: Do not be happy with the last pick either. By the time your first pick comes around you will have had too many beers and you will pick Darren McCarty.
Lesson #4: Try and cheat your way to a middle pick. Bend the five of spades so you know which card to choose.
Lesson #5: Pick with your head, not your heart. It is okay to have one Calgary Flame on your roster for sentimental reasons, but don’t pick everyone from Jarome Iginla to Eric Godard. The Flames are likely Shark meat so get Iginla in the middle rounds and hope he gets seven or eight points in five games and be happy.
Lesson #6: Invoke a rule that if anyone chooses a player who has already been selected he forfeits his turn. This speeds up the draft and there is a nincompoop in every draft that will do it at least twice.
Lesson #7: Play a drinking game, like every time Bob Cole says “Oh baby” you have to drink. Your opponents will get plastered as you sip away at your O’doulls and when they pick Jari Kurri in the fifth round just say, “Nice pick.”
Lesson #8: Do not let women play in your hockey draft. Everyone will get distracted and, besides, you just know she is going to win.
Lesson #9: Take the best player available. Jason Spezza will score more in one round for Ottawa than Brad May will from now until the Ducks fly south for the winter — next winter.
Lesson #9b: This also includes Europeans. Let your pals preach the Don Cherry mantra of Europeans slinking away in the playoffs. While your friend takes a grinder like, say, Darren McCarty I will take Henrik Zetterberg thank-you very much.
Lesson #10: Lastly, never circle a player on your sheet who you are going to pick next because Murphy’s Law states in Paragraph 9-12b, that “yee opponent will then be most likely take your damn player.” It is slapping the playoff pool God in the face. Should this happen, never pout, “I was just gonna pick him.” Your friends will almost certainly call you a cry baby. Just take your blood pudding and headcheese pate and go home.
Now, those of you who are in my hockey pool ignore these lessons — I just made them up anyway. Oh look, I circled Darren McCarty on my list.

Editorial-

Hospital needs Okotoks’ support

Shh, we need to keep this quiet. High River has a hospital, but we do not want everyone to know.
Last Saturday the High River District Health Care Foundation held its annual High River Hospital fundraiser at Lynnwood Ranch near Aldersyde. The event raised more than $80,000 which will be used for various enhancements at the hospital such as a new cardiac monitor.
The annual fundraiser has always been exceptionally successful in raising money to augment services at the High River Hospital.
The banquet and auction raises money to fund “wants” at the hospital rather than “needs.”
These wants are becoming more and more imperative as the community in the Foothills region continues to explode.
In order to keep pace with the exponential growth, the foundation is lobbying for more support from communities outside of High River — specifically Okotoks.
For years the High River Hospital has been promoted as “our hospital” and the hospital and foundation representatives have been adamant in stating “our” includes Okotoks. Each year more and more events are held in Okotoks to help increase the hospital’s exposure to residents in this community.
The foundation is also actively seeking an Okotokian to represent the community on the foundation’s board of directors — a position which is currently vacant.
However, it appears many Okotokians are not ready to jump on board with the slogan “our hospital.” Okotoks has its own medical facility, the Okotoks Health and Wellness Centre, and the community joined the Black Diamond Hospital’s fundraising branch several years ago to form the Oilfields/Okotoks Health Foundation.
So, why should Okotoks embrace High River Hospital as its own?
The Okotoks Health and Wellness Centre has been a welcome addition to the community and offers a wide range of services from public health to grief counselling to mental health. However, the anchor of the wellness centre is the urgent care facility - which means it is not equipped to handle emergencies per se. Emergencies would be transported to High River.
High River Hospital also has a cancer care clinic, obstetrics, a long-term care facility and, of course, a full emergency department which is open 24/7. These are all services one cannot access in Okotoks, but are available at the High River Hospital. Many new residents to Okotoks likely do not realize High River even has a hospital.
High River Hospital is indeed Okotoks’ hospital and “our” community should support it.
Of course, if they don’t that is fine because it will remain a hidden gem for the rest of us and the emergency room wait times will still be under two hours. Everyone else? They can go to a Calgary emergency hospital — good luck with that.

Correction

In last week’s Western Wheel it was incorrectly stated that there will be a performance on Sunday, April 27 of Holy Trinity Academy’s musical theatre production, Good News.
The correct dates and times for the performance are Thursday, April 24 at 7 p.m., Friday, April 25 at 7 p.m. and Saturday, April 26 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.
To reserve tickets, which are $8 for students and $12 for adults, call the school, (403) 938-2477, or visit their box office, created just for the show.
We apologize for any inconvenience this error may have caused.

The Nature of Power

It has been a vivid demonstration of how power really works. A week ago, Robert Mugabe was still the undisputed ruler of Zimbabwe. He was 84, and he had reduced the country to ruin: four out of five adults are unemployed, inflation is running (officially) at over 100,000 per cent, and one-third of the population has fled abroad in search of work, mostly to South Africa. Yet nobody in his own party, Zanu-PF, dared to question his rule, the police and the army remained loyal, and ordinary people lived in quiet desperation.
The silent submission of the population owed a good deal to the brutality of the police, but what can explain the loyalty of his own colleagues in the party and the army? After all, Zimbabwe is their country, too, and nobody likes to see their homeland dragged in the dirt. Moreover, it was all Mugabe’s fault, brought about by policies that he freely chose to pursue. He is not 10 feet tall and he has no magical powers. Why did they obey him?
They obeyed him because he has been in power for 28 years, longer than the great majority of Zimbabweans have been alive. (The average Zimbabwean woman is dead at 34, the lowest life expectancy in the world. Men make it to 37.) They obeyed him because he was the hero of the independence struggle and an icon of African liberation.
Most of all, they obeyed him because his rule was apparently the only thing that kept them out of the desperate poverty in which most Zimbabweans live. Powerful people who defied him were rarely killed, but they were cut off from the flow of wealth and had a very hard time of it.
So, the regime cruised on almost unaffected by the ruin of the country, and Mugabe even felt secure enough to allow more or less free elections on March 29.
He had been under heavy pressure by the African Union to clean up his act, since Zimbabwe has become a profound embarrassment to better-run African states, and in particular to neighbouring South Africa. The farther away the potential investors are, the harder they find it to tell the difference between one African country and another, and Zimbabwe’s bad reputation was hurting the whole region. So, Mugabe made what seemed to be a harmless concession.
Typically, in Zimbabwean elections, the cities vote against Mugabe, but the countryside, where 75 per cent of the people live, votes for him. At least, it seems to. Rural people are more easily intimidated, opposition observers can easily be chased away from isolated rural polling stations, and many things can happen to the ballot boxes on the way to Harare to be counted.
Mugabe was so confident that he didn’t even send out Zanu-PF’s storm-troopers, the so-called “war veterans” (most of whom were not born during the liberation war), to frighten people into voting the right way.
But he had made one crucial miscalculation: in response to pressure from the African Union, he agreed to let the vote be counted locally, with the results posted up outside each polling station.
So the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) sent members to photograph the results at more than 8,000 polling stations, and it suddenly got very hard to manipulate the returns at a central location. And it turned out —maybe it had been true at every previous election, too — that around half the population had not voted for Zanu-PF despite all the pressures.
Mugabe’s party has already lost its majority in parliament, but the real transformation has been in Zanu-PF itself. Suddenly, the “old man” is not the object of fear and adulation any more. In the eyes of some senior party people and their military and police colleagues, Mugabe has become a bargaining counter.
If the jig is really up, maybe they could trade Mugabe and power for a peaceful retirement with no awkward questions about where their wealth came from. Of course, Mugabe would also have to be allowed an honourable retirement himself, but as one of the last heroes of Africa’s independence generation, he was guaranteed that anyway.
Or, maybe they should declare martial law, annul the election and push Mugabe aside — or leave him out front as a figurehead and flak-catcher. He must be very disconcerted, after 28 years of absolute power, to discover that it was just a confidence trick all along.
But the game is not over yet. While both those options remain open, the party elders and the security forces have opted for the moment to play more or less by the rules: a run-off election in two weeks between Mugabe and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
That gives them time to deploy the bully-boys, re-intimidate the rural population and pull off a second-round victory for Mugabe. Or, if that strategy doesn’t look like it’s going to work (for once people have lost their fear, it’s much harder to get them back in the mood), then they still have time to exercise Option A or Option B.
So what has this episode taught us about the nature of power? That the more absolute and illegitimate it is, the easier it is for it to dissolve overnight. And that democracy is a good solvent.

Letter to the Editor -

Media biased in coverage of Pound Rescue debate

Dear Editor,
Yeah, I know, newspapers buy their ink by the barrel. Tackling the press has its risks. But, the awful bias and misinformation evidenced in the March 26 Western Wheel coverage with respect to the proposed amended Animal Control Bylaw defies description.
Consider for example that even the slightest perception of a violation of the freedom of the press guaranteed by the Charter would cause your local press to go ballistic. But Animal Control Bylaw that affords your would-be storm troopers the virtual unfettered right of trespass on your private property? “Nada” (if I may borrow the words of our esteemed Editor).
The Wheel’s reporter and editorial staff just didn’t get it. If the draconian changes proposed in the Animal Control Bylaw find their way into the amended legislation, the trespass implications will potentially impact us all. And, when the dog catchers can write the bylaws they sometimes enforce — everyone of us need ask: “Am I next?”
The Mayor is offside on this one. He is dead wrong. Citizens are encouraged to make every effort to attend the April 14 meeting of council (commencing at 1:30 p.m.) Questions from the public will be entertained at 3 p.m. It could be a long day.
Laurie Hodson
Okotoks

Shelter will not replace Pound Rescue

Dear Editor,
I would like to clear up any confusion around Pound Rescue that has arisen because of my proposal of a regional animal care facility and the amendment to the Animal Control Bylaw that hopefully will not be approved by Okotoks Council on April 14. The purposeful obfuscation of this amendment by Town Council and their supporters has worked. I get daily inquiries asking me what is going on.
Based on one complaint, the amendment was written to directly affect Dr. Barrie and her ability to continue her work. Dr. Barrie, after 10 successful years, would have to sign away her Sec. 8 rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, allowing bylaw officers to enter her home, without notice, any time they want. That’s what it says.
One big reason for the success of Pound Rescue is that it is not a facility. Dr. Barrie has her supporters’ respect and devotion, because she takes the weakest, the sickest, the most severely damaged and wounded animals in our community into her home where she lovingly nurses these helpless animals back to life. Will this 24-hour, devoted care to the most damaged, transfer to a new facility? I very much doubt it, and yet I am the person promoting it.
Let me be clear. Zoning controls for the future? You bet. Building an animal care facility for a booming region? You bet. Forcing a tiny woman who runs a small charity to accept a police invasion of her home? Scary stuff and we should all be saying “No way.”
Cheryle Dobbyn
Turner Valley