As Town of Bonnyville council prepares to embark on a diplomatic quest to show just how well it can play in the provincial government's metaphoric sand box, and as school children pack up their backpacks and move into back-to-school mode, the parallels between the two situations are practically impossible to miss.
Both are facing new and unknown territory. The children at Duclos School will be learning to navigate the potentially treacherous risks associated with a new playground. There are monkey bars yet to be tested by hands which have lost their monkey bar blisters over the summer holiday, there are slides whose edges have not been worn down by the repeated application of sliding children and the friction resulting from their fresh-from-Wal-Mart new school pants.
There are other dangers of the playgrounds, of course. Children will be learning to navigate potentially tricky social situations, as they fight for their place in the social hierarchy, rife with bullies, the bullied, and those lucky enough to be well-adjusted, happy, untormented, and able to play their games in peace, whatever those games may be.
Town council faces a similar diplomatic game. The consequences are not life-and-death – they do not face a complete breakdown of any and all chances for social success that would follow them from elementary school to middle school and beyond, for instance. But the Town of Bonnyville does face social ostracism on the provincial political scale, should they fail to, as Genia Leskiw, MLA for Bonnyville – Cold Lake, so eloquently put at a meeting earlier this summer, “play nicely in the sand box.”
With the provincial government's decision regarding the tax reassessment of the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range looming in the near future, it has become more critical than ever to master the complicated rules associated with sharing one's toys while playing in the sand.
The problem is, it seems, at least in Town council's view, as if Cold Lake has all the toys and Bonnyville has been left with none to share. Bonnyville, in fact, seems left with little option in the matter, other than to sit back, point at Cold Lake, and say, “That's not fair!”
Meanwhile, Leskiw keeps saying, “You should have learned to ask nicely.”
Bonnyville keeps insisting they haven't even been invited to play, while Leskiw promises they haven't been forgotten and they can petition to use whatever is left over when Cold Lake has had their fill.
The City of Cold Lake (built out of sand and crumbling, if we continue with this metaphor), certainly needs help. Sand is notoriously delicate, as far as building materials go. Roads are drifting in the breeze, melting back into sand dunes, and to cap it off, there's a kid nearby with a bucket of army men and airplanes, building up an impressive fort and insisting the kids building the City of Cold Lake let some of the guys live in the little huts they carefully constructed out of sticks and leaves.
There are more children playing on Cold Lake's side of things and their sand city is bigger. So maybe it makes sense the bigger kids (Leskiw and her provincial government cohorts) side with them, making sure they have enough buckets and plastic shovels to shore things up and repair them to make room for all the other children being drawn to the sand box, abandoning ship at the poverty-stricken water table (that's the East coast) to join in the game.
But the fact of the matter is children are taught to share, to take turns on the slides and the monkey bars. We teach our children to be fair, to share, and to be inclusive. We teach them it is wrong to bully, fight, and take things from others.
Children learn so much by watching what the grown-ups around them do. We teach through modelling the appropriate behaviour.
So as the children of Duclos head off to learn the ropes at their new playground and the Town of Bonnyville prepares to get dirty in the metaphorical sand box, I have to wonder.
What sort of example are we setting?
