Merciless
It’s the smell that hits you first. The sweet, earthy fragrance of wet decay. Of death, releasing oils and nutrients from former living matter into the atmosphere. It is not an unpleasant aroma. Petrichor is the clearest signal that you have arrived in this strange and wonderful place. Soaring cedars deliver regal majesty to the […]
No escape
Shire Hall has spent at least $50 million, so far, to facilitate a residential housing developer in Wellington. Not its own money, mind you; instead, it has splashed around waterworks’ customer money. It was a colossal mistake. Water customers, across Prince Edward County, must now ask their council members: What did we get for $50 […]
Québécois
The Montreal Real Estate Board shared a floor at 1080 Beaver Hall Hill with the passport office. The short distance from the elevator to the board offices each morning meant navigating an orderly queue of anxious folks in transit. Neither here nor there. One didn’t choose to line up outside this office for hours to […]
The disruptor
Rachel Prinzen has managed to aggravate her school board colleagues so intensely in her short tenure as trustee that they suspended her. Twice. Suspension means barring the elected official from board and committee meetings for 90 days. In both cases, her suspensions were overturned. (Ms. Prinzen represents the north half of Prince Edward County, including […]
What to do
Our economy is in trouble. The County wine sector has been the engine of investment, job creation, and economic vitality for the past 25 years. But today the sector is in crisis. The founders are aging out. Potential bidders are put off by rules that squelch expansion or opportunities to diversify. Those who persist face […]
Richer than you think
I don’t blame Scotiabank. It is responding to the incentives that Canada’s regulatory system has erected to protect the big six banks. These protections helped establish a solid and towering financial system, but they have done so at the cost of deteriorating service to communities and to their employees across this geographically vast country. Canada’s […]
Economic dementia
There was a time when I would open the hood of my car, confident that I could fix whatever was in there. I could adjust something. Turn a screw. Tap a solenoid. No longer. I don’t know anything in there anymore. Once there was air around the oily motory bits—some room to move around. Now […]
Baseline
How do we know? Is the County economy healthy? Sickly? Or just stumbling along? How would we know? More to the point, how do we know the resources the municipality spends on nurturing/stimulating/promoting economic development are working? Helpful? Worthwhile? Road needs are generally apparent. Leaking pipes signal a waterworks issue. But an ailing economy is […]
Decade of excess
Shire Hall tends to go through phases in which it forgets what it is. Who it serves. Where it exists on a map. It uses terms like “sustainable finances” and “affordability” as if it knows what the words mean. Yet Shire Hall repeatedly demonstrates that it doesn’t know—or doesn’t care—that it is part of the […]
Permission
It’s a lesson most of us learned early. “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too?” It was how our parents explained the dangers of peer pressure. It underlined the recklessness of following the inclinations of the herd. If that reasoning didn’t stick, we were told of lemmings that hurl themselves […]