Elizabeth Laurie High sounds like a great name to me

By Craig Westcott

I understand it, but I still don’t like the trend of naming public arenas and other big venues after corporate sponsors.
The Little Caesars (Pizza) Arena, where the Detroit Red Wings play just don’t have the same cachet as Joe Louis Arena, where they used to play, named for one of the greatest boxers of all time.
And while I love Pepsi and drink far too many gallons of it, The Pepsi Centre is a silly name for the Colorado Avalanche’s home rink.
The saddest name for an NHL rink though, has to be the San Jose Sharks’ SAP Centre.
Just why?
Nearer to home, I can still remember the thrill I as a kid listening to NAHA games on the radio when the Caps would travel to Corner Brook to face the Royals in Humber Gardens, or the Cataracts at Joe Byrne Memorial Stadium. The roar of the crowd would send the imagination soaring with images of people rising in a wave below the rafters cheering and cussing at every play.
When I hear someone is playing at the Pepsi Centre, all I can think of is sugar. Or buying a wrench, when the Ottawa Centres are playing at home at the Canadian Tire Centre.
Calling a stadium the Mary Brown’s Centre sounds like a joke. Better to name it after the Roberts family itself, who bought the naming rights. The Roberts family of Triton are one of the most entrepreneurial families in Newfoundland. There’s nothing wrong with recognizing them.
It just seems more respectful to give a rink, or a school, or a public facility a proper name, something that honours someone or something about the place. The old Memoriam Stadium had a great name and represented something important about St. John’s and about Newfoundland. It was named in memory of our fallen in the First World War.
The passing last week of Paradise town councillor Elizabeth Laurie got me thinking of a fitting way to mark her contribution. Almost certainly, with a provincial election on the horizon, there will be promises from both major political parties to finally give Paradise its own high school. Elizabeth Laurie High sounds like a great name for that new academy. It has a ring to it and would honour someone who left a lasting legacy on her community.
The Paradise Double Ice Complex also deserves a real name. The one it has now sounds like it was coughed up by a committee of civil servants. It’s bland. How about renaming it the Ralph Wiseman Centre? The former mayor was the one wearing the chain of office when Paradise landed the funding for the complex, and it was Wiseman who pushed the idea of using the money to build two ice surfaces instead of just one. Might be nice to rename the place and honour the man while he’s alive, instead of thinking of it years from now.

Housing Policy Looks Iffy

The federal government is on a spending spree to build new housing.
It’s out of control immigration policy has flooded the country with millions of immigrants, which has driven up rents and house prices and literally thrown some of Canada’s most vulnerable citizens onto the streets.
The housing spendathon is as much a public relations drive as it is a public policy measure. The federal government is borrowing tonnes of money to make it look like it’s doing something useful to address a serious problem.
But Ottawa may be creating a new problem by trying to fix the first problem it created. This past week’s housing announcement in Mount Pearl is a case in point. The area’s MP, federal Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan, emphasized the deal will see the City of Mount Pearl change its development rules to allow more units on smaller lots. He added the City will revamp its rules so that permits, and presumably inspections, will be done faster.
No doubt there is too much red tape at all levels of government. But loosening our standards could be a recipe for ghetto building – pushing more and more people into smaller and smaller living spaces that are slapped together faster and faster.
There’s something about an individual or family getting a home, however modest, with a little strip of grass in front and a yard in the back that makes it seems like they have more of an investment in their own future and in the future of our country. If you want to boost housing naturally, make mortgage payments tax deductible. Bigger lots can also generally be equated with better neighbourhoods.
Both levels of government are selling the idea of smaller units as being designed for seniors. That’s definitely needed in many places. But in the cities and bigger towns, after the seniors die off, who is going to fill them then? It will be immigrants and the poor living in overcrowded multiunit complexes, the kind of places that breed drugs and foster crime.
Oh, but they’ll have a bus route, you say?
I guess that makes it alright then.
Look, the easiest way to fix the housing crunch, and alleviate inflation, would be to curtail immigration back to reasonable numbers. We are letting so many people in now, it’s unlikely many will ever be assimilated like newcomers were in the past. Not only is it throwing vulnerable people onto the streets who can’t pay the higher rents, it is driving up the cost of government by having us borrow billions for new services, and threatening our democracy as some of these people import values – such as support for Hamas terrorists – that are not in accord with traditional Canadian values.
The public university and college system is adding to the problem by using immigrant students to subsize the cost of their bloated administrations.
Typical of the changes that unfettered immigration is foisting upon us is a press release Wednesday from something called the Palestinian Youth Movement, which bragged about shutting down two of Canada’s weapons manufacturing plants.
Shutting down our armaments factories is a threat to public safety.
Let’s be clear, there would be no housing crisis if not for the unprecedented numbers of immigrants pouring in over the past three years. Canadian born Canadians are not reproducing at a high enough birth rate to need any new housing. The sudden urgent demand for new housing, and the need for Ottawa to borrow billions to bankroll it, is totally caused by the government’s out of control immigration policy.
Yes, we need some immigration, but not so much that it creates more problems than it solves.