Cheers & Jeers

Cheers: to art imitating life. Corner Brook artist Tara Manuel is putting together a puppet show to explain how the Muskrat Falls project was handled. Manuel’s is creating “Muskrat Dreams: A Love Story,” a political puppetry play aimed at adults and youth. She’s calling it a love story, as we reported last week, because politicians and bureaucrats may have had good intentions. “A lot of them believed they were doing the right thing, but the fact is they let us down,” Manuel says. “They were so cavalier with just throwing away billions and billions of dollars of our money, of our future, of our children’s birthright.” We like the twist: this time, it’s the politicians’ turn to be the puppets, instead of the province’s voters and ratepayers. (Sorry — Manuel says she doesn’t want her puppet production to be mean, but we couldn’t resist a dig.)

Jeers: to bad ideas redux. Last Monday, we wrote about a plan in Georgia to let teens get their driver’s licence without having to take road tests. All they needed was a parent’s permission. Well, by Wednesday, 19,483 Georgia teens had apparently taken the state up on that offer. Won’t be driving in Georgia any time soon… Or Wisconsin — that state is also temporarily dropping road tests, and expects close to 10,000 teens will be eligible for untested licencing. Wonder how car insurance companies feel about that?

Jeers: to messy situations. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a halt to a service normally delivered by the City of St. John’s that many people might not give a second thought about. Until, that is, they need it. For years, city staff have come to homes to clear blocked sewer lateral lines — the lines connecting individual houses to the city’s sewer system — for free. The service is, in part, because, in older parts of the city, the problems with the lines are a mixed bag of old lines, strange and Byzantine sewage mains, and curious circumstances, right down to ancient clay pipe bedevilled by tree roots and other issues. For some homes — especially those where several houses share short sewer collection lines linking to the mains — the service can be needed close to annually. With the city halting the service to protect workers from possible COVID19 infection, homeowners have had to turn to often-expensive private contractors — meaning, in the process, that private workers are exposed to COVID-19 instead. A blocked sewer line is not an optional repair, even if you can’t afford it; emptying the family chamber pot at the curb to let it run “down the drains” just isn’t acceptable like it once was. Luckily, after a series of Telegram stories about the problem, St. John’s Mayor Danny Breen says the city is looking at ways to restart the city service.