Precedent
In the 1990s, I worked from rented offices at 99 Sudbury Street in Toronto. It’s cool now. Hip and urbane. It wasn’t then. It was more Parkdale—petty crime and drugdealing violence—than Queen Street West. That sensibility was still a mile or two east of Dufferin. The Drake hadn’t yet arrived, nor were there any funky […]
Be the badger
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe we should be content that the tax levy is rising by just 5.5 per cent, rather than the 11 per cent hike proposed at the start of the municipal budget process. It was a remarkable turn of events. Indeed, most folks absorbing the news that the tax increase is now […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]