Into temptation
Municipal politicians must roll over at night and cry out for a divine hand to shield them from the howling press. From the grievance seekers. From the second-guessers. The backseat drivers. The allure must always be there. The gnawing desire to debate municipal business behind closed doors is surely ever-present. Life would be much easier […]
Start fresh
The County made a deal. In 2008, Shire Hall reached a settlement with the Waring’s Creek Improvement Association in which it agreed to study the sensitive watershed serving this waterway. It didn’t happen. The County reneged on its deal. Time and lawyerly interpretations have eroded the municipality’s strict legal responsibility, yet a powerful moral responsibility […]
Ticket to ride
In the department of things-the-municipality- ought-not-be-doing, the latest candidate must surely be County Transit. It is a layer of municipal bureaucracy, that, despite its name, doesn’t actually deliver transit services. In fact, Quinte Transit provides transit services in Prince Edward County. It owns, operates, licenses, maintains, and eventually disposes of all buses used in the […]
Breaking point
How doth the little crocodile How neatly spreads his claws, And welcomes little fishes in, With gently smiling jaws! C.S. Lewis—an adaptation of the poem from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland The folks who live at the Legion Manor in Wellington have had a front row seat to the pointlessness of the County’s feeble affordable housing […]
Breathe
It should be a time to celebrate. The looming weight of hundreds of millions of dollars of spending has abated. The threat of forever-soaring water bills has, for now, diminished. The immediate danger has passed. It should be a moment to breathe a sigh of relief. And in big, important ways it is. The fantasy […]
Full stop
For more than five years, Shire Hall officials, Mayor Steve Ferguson, and a majority of Council insisted that many thousands of new homes would soon be built in Prince Edward County. Four thousand new homes were imminent, they said. Eight thousand new homes would be erected within 10 years, they said. Over and over again, […]
Fiasco prone
Maybe it is as good as we can do. Maybe we have to take out a 45- year loan (which will cost $6 million by the time it is paid back) to fund a $2.8 million eight-unit walk-up apartment block in Picton—in which just four units will be considered affordable. Maybe we—County ratepayers—must subsidize the […]
Parallels
It’s another new year, and I am compelled once again to zoom out with a wider lens to worry about our place—our moment in time. The questions keep returning unbidden to my tired old brain: How is our moment different from Europe in 1933? 1934? 1935? And even if but an echo, what are we […]
Hopeful
It will be a good year. I make this bold prediction of 2026, fully acknowledging that my prediction powers are feeble. Unreliable. Unworthy of the ink being spilt to print these words onto 6,000 pages. Yet, I feel a duty—a primal compulsion—to be hopeful on the threshold of a new year. And thankful. Grateful for […]
Choices
Spring is a joyous time. A time of rebirth. Of surviving another cold, hard winter spent clinging desperately to the shores of Lake Ontario as snowbombs give way to blizzards, joined by long bouts of punishingly cold temperatures. But the rapture of an emerging spring is always short-lived in this place—quickly subsumed by the dread […]