Plus ca change, c'est plus la meme chose...

With all the brouhaha that's unfolding about the Pan Am Games stadium site, I've been reminded of certain truths.

The first is that before you begin making decisions, you need to have answered the question 'What do you want?' (I know, I know; it seems obvious, but then how do you explain having two diametrically-opposed approaches to the eventual location, 'urban' and 'not-urban'? To me this smacks of negotiating the architectural details of an automobile race-track's design without beforehand agreeing to whether we're talking F1, NASCAR or NHRA.)

A second is 'Too many cooks spoil the broth.' You'd think that having almost a dozen-and-a-half people conferring on such an item might actually increase the chances of a sound decision being reached.

Third, that putting bizarre developments aside, it's actually possible to predict how a situation will look in five years, ten years, within surprisingly accurate parameters.

Finally, 'Nothing changes unless something changes.'

For me, connected to all this is the notion of 'city building' and the responsibility of corporate citizens within that process. As I've laid-out elsewhere, everyone's success leads to...everyone's greater success. The notion that businesses should be anything other than pretty-much self-serving is an unrealistic one within the societal paradigm we've constructed (I'm not saying it's 'right'), and yet to not understand how things work better when we all work better together...is not only sad, it's naïve.

Of course, given the photo at the beginning of this editorial, I'm focusing on Downtown Stoney Creek.

If nothing is 'changed' regarding the dearth of retail draws, if the profile of the area is not expressly grown (read that as: 'improved'), then what you see right now is what you'll see in five years, in ten years, yadda, yadda, ad-nauseam-yadda.

I guess the real question is where the leadership is going to come from to initiate this change, inspire (and form) the innovation and spirit of reinvention.

Politicians? For that to happen, there'd have to be some kind of consensus about Downtown Stoney Creek, some kind of vision, some kind of plan. (You know, like the 'Battlefield Park National Historic Site Master Plan'. Except that- Well, you cannot 'mandate' within our free-market, capitalist system.) And who does that involve, government-wise? Chad Collins (Ward 5), Brad Clark (Ward 9) and Maria Pearson (Ward 10)? Why would anyone else in the City of Hamilton care? (Actually, even though I've never read anything from any of these three elected officials that addresses the revitalization of Downtown Stoney Creek, I'm listing these three simply because all of their constituents are losing out because there is no 'downtown', and I'd prefer to keep this cabal small; please refer to the aforementioned 'too many cooks' aspect.) Will it bethe City of Hamilton's Manager of Downtown Renewal Ron Marini?

Will it come from existing businesspeople in Downtown Stoney Creek? Will there be some kind of push made from a current 'player'? Again, wouldn't there'd have to be some kind of common vision involved? Wouldn't there have to be some kind of 'plan' in order for that to happen? Some agreed-to concept, some kind of 'New Downtown' notion that people have embraced?

Will someone with a non-partisan interest in the welfare of the area be the one to drive things forward? I'm thinking of course of our very own newspaper, the Stoney Creek News.

Or maybe change will result by chance. Maybe one good, solid entrepreneur, by dint of pure luck will move in, and this particular entity will start a chain reaction, one that results in a slow trickle of the kinds of businesses as suggested in the penultimate episode of my 10-part series about re-imagining Downtown Stoney Creek, 'What to do, what to do?'. Maybe we'll just...

...get...

...lucky.

Honestly, I'm not sure how what I'd like to see happen in Downtown Stoney Creek could happen. Like it or not, many people -I'm referring here to politicians, to businesspeople, to the regular citizenry- tend to become attached to the status quo. (Label it as 'Inertia' or 'Complacency'...or 'Indifferent Flabbiness'.) So change tends only to happen either when theybegin to see things differently, or someone else who sees things differently comes on the scene and becomes a player. Otherwise? Short of calamity, what you see is what you get...and is what you're always going to see, what you're always going to get, at least until that calamity, or that change gets injected into the mix.

How depressing.

I almost wish we had something akin to the Old Boys' Club in 'The Legend of Bagger Vance', stepping in when the town needs a saviour: