TriumphAnt

Once in a while– very rarely, I’ll admit – but once in a while, I wake up with the feeling that it just sucks to be Canadian.

Early in the last week of November, in a co-ordinated torrent of announcements, a whole bunch of anti-poverty activist groups led by the Campaign 2000 coalition issued reports condemning the lack of progress on reducing poverty, especially child poverty, in this country.

Government spokespersons and editorialists leapt into action. By the end of the week, newspaper op-eds and letters-to-the-editor pages were filled with boiling arguments over the statistical standards that are used to define poverty in this country. In Canada, that argument revolves around something called the Low-Income Cut-Off (LICO) vs the Low-Income Measure (LIM). But it’s not even that simple. There’s an argument over whether the LICO should be used in a before-tax configuration, or an after-tax configuration.

No one, it seems, can agree. Because Canada has a “progressive” tax system, argue those in favour of pre-tax LICO, the taxes themselves have a bearing on the definition of poverty because they are used to fund services that poor people would otherwise have to pay for themselves, or go without. So defining “income” as the after-tax LICO, according to its supporters, means you should include services that people receive in addition to their actual cash-in-hand income. And that means a different level – a much lower gross dollar income level – at which one can be called “poor” than under the pre-tax LICO number. Which means fewer poor people. And so it goes.

Needless to say, the government loves the after-tax LICO as the poverty line. Because when the bean counters arbitrarily decide that, instead of being poor when, say, you have an annual household income of $25,000 or less, now you are poor when you have an annual household income of $20,000 or less. Suddenly all those people who fall in that $20,000 to $25,000 range are no longer poor! And out come the positive government news releases – in a flood.)

Many years ago, the Department for which I worked announced a new standard that it spent literally years to develop – something called a “Market Basket Measure” (MBM). It was remarkably uncomplicated. It began with a list developed by a massive bureaucratic process. The “market basket” was a week’s supply of ordinary but typically essential household expenses. And it factored in things like transportation and recreation, including some very reasonable leisure-related purchases such as admission to a community swimming pool or skating rink. The cost of that cost-of-living list, naturally, would vary depending on where in the country you live. (A bunch of broccoli purchased in a remote Arctic community’s general store is going to cost at least three or four times what a bunch of broccoli will cost in an Ontario farm belt supermarket, for example. But the standard, “a bunch of broccoli”, is something to which everyone can relate no matter where in Canada they live.)

What made you “poor” under the MBM? Again – ridiculously simple. If you could afford the basket where you lived, you were above the poverty line. If you couldn’t afford it, you were below the poverty line. The beauty of the MBM lay in its flexibility, its real world application to ordinary family needs and the fact that it was based on the daily cost of living where they lived. In short, it made sense; it was easy to understand; it was easy to explain.

It lasted about a year.

Not surprisingly, it melted away in a sea of discussion over details like why the MBM’s “standard” family car was a four-year old Chevy Nova, or why a car was even factored in as “necessary” at all in areas where public transportation is readily available. And on and on and on the dance went.

So here we sit – with everyone agreeing that we have poor people in Canada – but no one agreeing how many we have, at what level they stop being poor, or even whether the number has risen or fallen since the last time the census of poor people was taken.

From all this morass, this week the Government of Ontario launched its new four-year term with a quintessential Canadianism – a Speech from the Throne. And here’s what Premier Dalton McGuinty and company pledged to do about poverty in this province – verbatim from his end-of-November Speech:

"A new cabinet committee will begin work developing poverty indicators and targets and a focused strategy for making clear-cut progress on reducing child poverty."

Warms your heart in the cold winter month of December, doesn’t it? Problem? Poverty in general and child poverty in particular. Solution? Create a committee… to develop new indicators… that will form the basis of a new strategy… a “focused” strategy, mind you… that will give us… progress, clear-cut progress. No ordinary progress that. “Clear-cut” progress! Does anyone understand what the hell that means? Because I don’t.

You can ruddy well bet that one group that won’t be poor will be the dozens, perhaps hundreds of bureaucrats who will be involved in the process of crafting that committee, sending it on a round-the-province whirl of “public and stakeholder consultations”, and developing all the reports and events through which it will herald its own “success stories” in the coming years – all in the name of developing a “focused strategy for making clear-cut progress”. Those stories will be trumpeted in news releases loaded with language like “bold new initiative”, “aggressively committed to dealing with the issue”, “an agenda for excellence measured in progressive strides taken to reduce poverty”.

Heck, maybe we’ll even get a whole new provincial government Department with a “broad mandate aimed at giving families a hand up, not a handout”.

But if you have any doubts at all what “throne” that speech comes from, here’s a hint: the flush handle is right behind the speech reader.

= =

There is no end to the learning curve of being a homeowner. I say this because I am, even as I write this, still learning about the system with which our house is heated. And I am doing that now (learning, I mean), because it recently broke and we are in the process of having it fixed.

Here is what I have learned so far:

1(a) If you use a pipe made of something called black iron, there are two things with which it should never, ever come in contact: water, because water rusts iron (which you might already have known), and concrete, because the lime in concrete will corrode black iron (which might actually be news for you, because it was for me).

1 (b) I have just learned that our heating system includes a 15 to 20-foot length of water-carrying black iron that is buried underneath the cement of our basement floor. Not surprisingly, apparently it has corroded.

Our heating system is called a “hydronic” system, (which I personally believe to be a combination of the Greek words for “water” and “haemorrhoid” – to put it colloquially, a big wet pain in the ass).

In a hydronic system, water comes into the house, is heated by a boiler almost to the temperature of steam, and then is pumped through pipelines into radiators throughout the house. From the last radiator in the chain, a return line then returns the now cooler water back to the start.

There are many elements in the system whose very names suggest not only the system’s inherent safety, but also a varying range of possibly calamitous outcomes should any of them fail: a pressure relief tank, a low pressure cut-off switch, individual radiator bleed valves, Mrs McGillicuddy’s ointment for first-degree scalding burns, to name but a few.

It is a closed system. This means that if something happens to interrupt that closure, such as a leak or the accumulation of enough air to create a system-blocking bubble (a hydronic system’s equivalent of an embolism) then it is likely that the pressure will fail throughout the system. If that happens, there are two ways a system will attempt to rebalance itself.

The worst water interruption you can experience with a hydronic system is if the water flow is cut off by a leak along the line that brings it into the system. Because what will happen next is that your boiler will begin firing itself up to do what it thinks is heating water – because your upstairs thermostat is calling for hot water to warm the radiators that heat the house. And the boiler, lacking a brain (I was just kidding about it “thinking” in that previous sentence), will just go right on firing until, as our gas inspection guy told us recently and a little too cheerfully, I thought, something could melt – maybe the burners after almost constantly burning in the blue bath of a natural gas flame.

This is not a good outcome, and is what a low water cut-off switch is specifically designed to prevent. If it should ever happen that the water is interrupted as it flows into the system, the cut-off switch, which is set to a very safe low pressure level, will immediately shut off the burner. Nothing melts. Of course, nothing gets any warmer either, which means that if this happens on a really cold day, you will want to get it repaired before your house looks like a local domestic setting in the movie, “The Day After Tomorrow”.

If you’re still with me here, you will not be surprised to read that the other place a leak can develop is in the water return part of the system. In this event, warm water will leak – slowly or quickly, depending on the size of the leak – out of the system until the leak is either patched or bypassed. Sometimes you will be lucky and it will be readily apparent where in the water return line the leak is occurring. However, in a closed hydronic system, there is typically not a whole lot of lines that are in plain view. Most of the system – being pipes – is usually placed out of sight, unless your home’s original designer was big on “industrial chic” or his previous job was designing your local East Side Mario’s.

With a leak in the water return end of the hydronic process, what will happen is that your system, seeking to maintain its pressure to keep even the most distant radiators warm, keeps calling for the water necessary to keep its internal pressure up. In this scenario, nothing melts, but if you don’t get the leak fixed or bypassed, eventually you will find you are being billed for roughly the same amount of water as that required to stage an Esther Williams movie remake.

At this writing, we are in the middle of the repair process. First, nothing melted (*phew*). But we have been hearing an almost constant gentle stream of water being pumped into the system. Pressure is holding, because our upstairs radiators – the ones farthest along the line – are warm. So – those of you still awake should by now (correctly) have concluded that we have a leak in our water return line.

And is it in a part of the line that is easy to get at? No, of course not.

“Watch this,” said the plumber we brought in to confirm the process. Pointing what looked like a fat automatic pistol at our basement floor, he pressed the trigger and a bright little laser light spot appeared on the floor. Meanwhile, a small LED screen mounted on the back of the pistol registered a temperature. “This,” he said, “is the temperature of your floor.” As he moved the laser dot across the floor, suddenly (and I mean suddenly) the temperature reading shot up about 10 degrees. “That shouldn’t happen,” he said. “It means something is under the floor making it a lot warmer than the rest of the floor.”

“I think that’s where your water return pipe is leaking.”

“But,” he added quickly – obviously noting that my face reflected the gawd-awful possibility of smashing my basement concrete floor apart to excavate and replace a leaking pipe – “there’s good news.” I looked at him bleakly.

“Your return pipe comes into the basement on the other side of that wall” (he pointed to one end of our basement), “and comes out right there” (he pointed to a pipe emerging from the floor very close to our boiler). “And on the other side of that wall” (pointing back to the first location), “is your crawlspace.”

I’m not the world’s fastest thinker, but immediately I saw a possibility and asked him, “Can we just cut the leaky part of the line right out of the loop, patch a new length of pipe into the line from there (now I pointed to the first location) to there (second location) and just bring it across the top of the floor – maybe tucked right against the wall?”

“Yep, yep and yep.”

So that’s what we’re going to do. The bad news for the City’s water department is they’ll have to find someone else to fund their staff Christmas party this year because pretty soon, the municipal coffers we’ve been swelling will dry up – quite literally in fact.

And now I know a huge pile more about home heating the hydronic way.

Now if I can just get my hands around the neck of the idiot who used a length of black iron pipe to carry water right through a concrete floor. (Because, added our plumber, this is not new knowledge. Black iron is typically used to carry gas, and its combination water / concrete corrosion properties have been known for... forever.)

= = =

Finally, a couple one-offs…

My wife and I were recently kicking around the difference, if any, between “among” and “amongst”.

I honestly didn’t know, but my suspicion has always been that the latter is simply an archaic version, because for the life of me I can’t think when it would apply, and “among” not do so.

So off to Google… Well knock me over with a feather! (Admittedly after a skin-deep quick internet search) I was unable to find an online dictionary reference site that allows it, despite Amazon.com’s listing it in a whole lot of places, often (as will be seen) amongst the titles.

Our Compact Oxford (snarf -- that's the massive two-volume edition with a combined weight of about 30 lbs and a typeface so small that you have to read it with a magnifying glass "compact") allows it, but it ain't pretty. They call it an "adverbial genetive" version of "among" that essentially was a 16th C "corruption" of "among". No wonder you won't find it in too darned many contemporary dictionaries.

= =

‘Tis the season. A lot of radio ads are using all manner of enticements in the coming consumer orgy in a sustained promotional effort by various merchants to get you to come into their stores to do your Christmas shopping. So why not a car for Christmas, asked one local auto dealership whose ad I recently heard? And to get you to visit and into (hopefully) one of their cars, they were also offering a “free gift” with every test drive. Which – me being an anal dork and everything – begged the question, what other kind of “gift” is there?

Until la prochaine.