[ 
Mood: Angry ]
"Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest."
– Lady Bird Johnson
So budget time has rolled around in my city. A new mayor was elected last year on a promise of a 0% tax increase, and the citizens fell for it.
After Mike Harris and Stephen Harper, you think they’d know what that really meant.
So to keep his promise, the proposal has the city shutting ten library branches. That’s right, ten. 1 followed by a 0.
One of these branches is my local branch. It sits in a typical inner city Ottawa neighbourhood. To afford to own a house in this area, you have to be firmly in the middle class. Mixed in with these lovely single family dwellings and condos are lots and lots of rental property. Those are the people I am worried about. Many of them are my students.
Within easy walking distance of this branch are two schools with huge lower income and welfare class populations. Many of them are recent immigrants. They don’t have the money for extras like books. The library is for them a lifeline. Every time I am in there, I see a student reading, working on homework or using a computer. They walk over after school on a regular basis.
Will it affect me? Yes, but I am middle class. I have a car and can drive to another branch. Many of my students, however, are not. Their parents are not going drive them to the next branch. And our bus system is set up to take people in and out of the downtown, not across town.
And that doesn’t take into account the fact that another proposal of the budget is to raise the transit fares.
One of the interesting things about our mayor is that he is a millionaire business man. Another millionaire business man, Andrew Carnegie, spent the latter part of his life building libraries. It seems our mayor is going to spend his golden years closing them down.
Somewhere, angels are weeping.
"The only true equalisers in the world are books; the only treasure-house open to all comers is a library; the only wealth which will not decay is knowledge; the only jewel which you can carry beyond the grave is wisdom."
– J. A. Langford