Ted Barris

In 1979, I met and interviewed a seaman named Steve Prentice; he was in his 80s then. Just before midnight on April 14, 1912, the ship on which he served, RMS Titanic, struck an iceberg 600 kilometres off Newfoundland. As a junior purser, his job was to serve the needs of passengers and crew.

That night, he happened to be close to the bridge of the Titanic, just as the ship’s designer Thomas Andrews told Bruce Ismay, the chairman of White Star, and Titanic’s senior officer Edward Smith what he’d seen below decks.

“What’s her position?” Ismay asked Andrews.

“The position, sir, is that she’s going to sink,” Andrews said. “The water’s coming straight up. The bulkheads won’t help her in any way at all.”

Young Steve Prentice then spent the next 90 minutes convincing as many passengers as possible to get to the lifeboats. It was his job. Far too many of them believed the “Titanic is unsinkable” myth. Only when he’d done his best to get people to lifeboat stations, did he try to save himself.

Steve Prentice understood the term “service.” He honoured the fact that with his position came “responsibility.” I offer his experience as tangible example of what’s missing in the Conservative’s handling of the Greenbelt scandal.

Since these are the first few days of a new year – new in the sense that Labour Day signals the return to regular schedules – it’s time to pay attention again. That’s right, school’s back in. Traffic’s back. Regular Monday-to-Friday’s back. And I’m guessing few have paid much attention to the serious stuff – news, political events and the state of our Greenbelt.

In case you missed it, last Monday midday we learned that Steve Clark, minister of housing quit. In his resignation letter to Premier Ford he wrote, “I realize that my presence will only cause a further distraction from the important work that needs to be done.”

It took him 21 days to acknowledge his responsibility in the wake of Auditor Bonnie Lysyk’s condemnation of his department’s decision to remove 7,400 acres of protected Greenbelt lands.

“The process,” she said, “was biased in favour of certain developers (who) could ultimately see more than $8.3 billion increase to the value of their properties.”

Worse, it took another seven days for Clark to answer accusations from Integrity Commissioner David Wake that Clark’s ministry “failed to oversee the process by which lands in the Greenbelt were selected for development.”

Former Clark chief of staff, Ryan Amato, waited nearly as long to depart, but when Wake exposed that Amato “was the driving force behind a flawed process which provided an advantage to those who approached him,” he finally lived up to his responsibility.

Now the buck that apparently stopped at Clark’s desk, has moved up to Premier Ford’s desk. Or should we call it the 8.5 billion bucks. No, those dollars won’t end up in the Premier’s pocket. But we’ve already seen 104 acres of former Greenbelt that reporters discovered were being “shopped around to other developers” in Ajax, go back to the Greenbelt.

In other words, the Premier’s office wasn’t paying attention. Developers were about to flip protected acres for profit, not transform them into affordable housing.

Well, now that it’s no longer summer, now that people are paying attention, Premier Ford had a media conference on Tuesday. He pledged his government will conduct a system-wide review. Really? Sorry, Premier Ford. Some of us have been paying attention over the summer.

Auditor General Lysyk and Integrity Commissioner Wake have already reviewed those developer deals, those flawed processes, those ethics. Their independent assessments demand that the government put the green back into Greenbelt, put the 7,400 swapped acres back where they came from.

That’s why checks and balances exist. That’s what living up to responsibility of elected office means.

On April 14, 1912, when RMS Titanic was vertical in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland, minutes from sinking, and only after he had honoured his service to passengers, did Junior Purser Steve Prentice leap into the frigid Atlantic to try to save himself.

He told me that one of the last lifeboats rushing away from the sinking ship had one empty seat, and he was saved.

Why the Titanic metaphor? About a month ago the Ford government hit an iceberg, most of which (like an iceberg) was hidden. Nothing, not obfuscating, not denying, not even shuffling deck chairs (i.e. Cabinet or past processes), changes the “unsinkable” myth.

And finally, the law of responsibility requires the captain to go down with the ship.