The View from Here column by Alan Pickersgill:

I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions anymore. I used to, and I’m thinking I should start again.

Every year it was a variation on what, I am sure, is the most common annual theme: becoming a better person through a healthier lifestyle. A noble goal. For me, it usually involved a pledge to stop smoking. I did eventually quit six years ago, but it wasn’t a resolution that did the trick. It was a heart attack that made me realize smokers are a dying breed. We get to choose between smoking and breathing. We can do one or the other, but not both. That heart attack did me so much good that I’m inclined to make a resolution to have a few more.

As I think that over, I’ll also mull over some noteworthy occurrences of the year. For example, our governing Conservative Party. They brought dishonesty and profligate spending to a new level. This past year we have seen the following lies, and many more: Peter MacKay about using a search and rescue helicopter as his personal taxi; John Duncan about the situation in Attawapiskat; Tony Clement about wild spending on frivolities in his home town during the G-8 meetings in Huntsville; and Peter Kent about the Kyoto Protocol. They should try to go a full month without telling a whopper, just to see if they can.

We learned about the amount of spying the government does on its own citizens. Undercover police infiltrated some of the more radical groups planning protests against the G-20 meetings in Toronto in the summer of 2010. It turns out the infiltrators urged them on to more and more ludicrous and dangerous forms of protest. If the mayhem in Toronto was a top story in 2010, the role of our government in organizing it should top the 2011 list. Except that it still hasn’t been properly investigated.

At the provincial level, the big story for Guelph should be the Health Protection Act allowing Wellington and Dufferin counties to spend our money without our consent. Their plan to add $10 million to our tax bill revealed a gaping flaw in the governance of public health in Ontario. The province should shoulder some responsibility for this and give some relief to the city.

A breaking provincial story as we move into 2012 is the preservation of the old-growth red pine forest in Temagami. Mining interests want to plunder the area, and Natural Resources Minister Michael Gravelle is playing footsie with them. Premier Dalton McGuinty can’t be just a little bit green. He can’t work for the environment through a Green Energy Act, then work against it when it comes time to protect sensitive areas such as this. Consistency has always been his Achilles heel.

The municipal story of the year should be how city council – and through them our mayor – gets blamed for everything that goes wrong. Senior staff turnover, construction delays, smelly compost, the GO train pulling in three minutes late. It’s always the mayor’s fault. Will she also get the credit for the biggest story to close out the year? Some university researchers in Toronto compared 378 North American cities to see which would be most suitable for Santa Claus if global warming forced him off the North Pole.

One of the researchers said they “used data from Statistics Canada and the United States Census Bureau to determine the number of cookie factories; milk producers; doll, toy and game manufacturing factories; postal workers and couriers; and department stores in each city.”

Guelph came first. Again. Thank you, madam Mayor and councillors