Politicians in Niagara should stop driving there to save money and protect the environment, writes James Culic
RResearchers have found that people appear more trustworthy during a Zoom meeting when there are books or plants in the background.
When I’m on a Zoom meeting, the only things in the background are Nintendo games, Gundam figures, and occasionally my daughter singing the Sesame Street theme song. I’m not sure how trustworthy this makes me seem, but it paints a very accurate picture of me as a very cool guy.
I love Zoom meetings, they are incredibly convenient and I find it amazing that it took the pandemic for anyone to even bother using the technology when it was already there.
What I find even more astonishing is that things that had made the seamless transition from the real world to the virtual world during the pandemic have inexplicably regressed and abandoned Zoom.
Which brings me to the colossal waste of time and taxpayer money known as AMO, whose annual meeting and trade show is currently underway in Ottawa. For those unfamiliar with the acronym, AMO stands for Association of Municipalities of Ontario, which should actually be AOMOO, but that’s a topic for another time. Bad acronyms aside, my problem with AMO is that it’s an annual conference that’s little more than an excuse for municipal politicians to leave their sleepy towns and party in the big city for a week at taxpayer expense.
Nothing happens at AMO that couldn’t be done as a Zoom meeting. AMO is just boring city hall politicians and staff meeting with provincial politicians and pretending they’ve done something worthwhile.
AMO’s main export is embarrassing photos of infrastructure directors in city hall posing with the parliamentary assistant of a mid-level MP. No real work gets done at AMO. Every August for ten years I asked local politicians what concrete commitments or specific agreements had been implemented at AMO and the answer was always the same: none.
Every single quote from a local politician after the AMO summit reads exactly this: “We have had many very productive meetings with our colleagues at the provincial level and we will use these synergies to make concrete progress together on some of our most important initiatives.”
They just go there to chatter about trivial things and then come back and chatter about even less trivial things.
That’s just talk. They just go there to talk about trivial things and then come back and talk about even less trivial things.
This year’s AMO conference featured a keynote address on “Land Use Planning, Resources and Climate Change.” Climate change, you say? Hey, here’s a hot tip on how AMO could actually do something about climate change: Don’t take it personally.
Thousands upon thousands of municipal politicians and city hall employees from across Ontario drive across the province to convene in Ottawa, their cars blithely emitting CO2 the whole way, only to arrive and be told by some blue-haired hippie how to save the ozone layer or whatever.
Let’s do a rough calculation. Let’s say each municipality in Niagara sends six people to AMO. A single person’s one-way trip from Niagara to Ottawa (500 kilometers) causes 0.1 tons of CO2 emissions per person.
So if 11 municipalities each send six people back and forth, that’s about 13 tons of CO2 that Niagara releases every year by participating in the futility of AMO. For comparison, a one-hour Zoom meeting emits about 150 grams of carbon. So for the price of sending our Niagara politicians to AMO in person, we could have 86,700 hours of uninterrupted Zoom meetings. That’s 3,612.5 days non-stop. That’s 9.89 years non-stop.
But we don’t. Instead, we send them there in cars. And who pays for the gas for those cars? We, the taxpayers. And who pays for all their expensive hotel rooms, meals, and other expenses while they’re up there? We, the taxpayers.
What a colossal waste of time and energy. Stop it. Stop it. Make it a Zoom meeting. I’ll even equip every politician in Niagara with their own Nintendo games and Gundam figures to place in the background of their Zoom calls to make them look cool.
James Culic likes Zoom meetings because he doesn’t have to shower. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or zoom to your keyboard and type a snarky letter to the editor.
