We need you!
How will you know if things can get better? If you don’t participate in decisionmaking? If you ever wish things were better—or different—don’t you have to do something about it? Don’t we all have a role to play? In 2022, fewer than half of eligible voters cast ballots in our municipal election. It is a […]
The Five
No one wants to be critical. The ambition of creating affordable housing in our community is noble. Worthy. Yet there is a vast difference between wanting something and recklessly burning taxpayer dollars to make it happen. Just how hard is evidenced by the eight years of fruitless effort and vast resources expended by the County’s […]
Service creep
What is the County supposed to do? What can it do? And how are these choices/decisions to be sorted? These are some of the existential questions a team of individuals is posing in 2026— nearly 30 years after the municipality was formed. That no one inside Shire Hall thought to ask such questions before now […]
What Covid wrought
Steve Ferguson is a good man, surely guided by good intentions. Somewhere along the way, he came to believe he might be a transformational leader. One who would guide County residents to a bigger, better, brighter future. But Prince Edward County wasn’t changing. Not in the way he and others imagined. It was what it […]
Renewal
What does a school board do? There was a day not too long ago when the local board helped shape the curriculum— the information and materials actually taught in the classroom. No longer. Today, the curriculum is developed, stamped and syndicated centrally in the Ministry of Education in Toronto. There was also a day when […]
Accentuate the positive
Housing Corp chair reports to council Everything is going great at the County’s Affordable Housing Corp., according to its chair, Councillor Phil St-Jean. In his report to his council colleagues last week, St- Jean laid out a timetable in which a proposed eight-unit apartment block will begin construction next month and be ready to accept […]
Stand up
It doesn’t change anything. It was always an impossibility that 12,000 County taxpayers were expected to maintain the 1,047 kilometres of roads that criss-cross this place. It remains a futile job description. Beyond our capability. It is especially so for County roads 49 and 33 (Loyalist Parkway). These roads should never have been downloaded onto […]
Failure to communicate
Two dozen folks came to Shire Hall last week—worried about the impact of construction on Main Street in Bloomfield this year. (See story here). In a pair of project information centre (PIC) sessions held in the village earlier this year, residents and business owners were presented with three options to consider—as if their opinion mattered […]
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 […]
Broken shells
Are Canada’s municipal councils grappling with a new climate of hostility, from within and without? Such was the claim made in a weekend story in the Globe and Mail. It wasn’t posed as a question— but rather as a reported fact. The evidence presented is a mix of anecdotal— Whitby, Sarnia, St. Stephen, NB and […]