First step
Bold is good. Bold disrupts. Stirs urgency. Bold ideas are welcome, and likely necessary, to rouse a stodgy, risk-focused bureaucracy in which inertia has become a defining characteristic. And this was a bold move. Last week, Andreas Bolik, the first-term councillor from Ameliasburgh, sought and won support to direct management to find 10 per cent […]
Two paths
There was a time not so long ago, that the County built homes at roughly the same pace as Quinte West. Those days are gone. For the past decade, new home building in our communities has been going in different directions. In the first half of this year, Quinte West issued building permits for 200 […]
Stewards all
Most of us recognize that farmers are the best stewards of the land,” argued Janice Maynard. It was a rather sweeping statement, meant to discourage her fellow council members from even considering the benign protections offered by a proposal to protect treelines and fencebottoms before them last week. The proposed Official Plan wording presented to […]
Bridges
Last Monday, seven children (aged six to 16) were injured, one seriously, from an explosion in a playground in Pashena Balka, a village in the centre-east part of Ukraine. It is unclear whether the blast came from a misguided missile or if the kids were playing with an unexploded ordnance they had found. This tragic […]
Caring signal
This is big. A much larger, modern and all-new HJ McFarland long-term care home has been approved by Queen’s Park. To be built and move-in ready within three years. It is tangible evidence that the desperate needs of rural Ontario are once again registering at Queen’s Park. The winds have changed. MPP Todd Smith was […]
Invest
The symptoms are troubling. Eight years have come and gone since Shire Hall discovered it had to take action with the convenience store, and the creek that runs underneath it, on the main corner in Wellington. It has been nine years since the Dukedome went dark. Yet it sits there abandoned, with no clear plan […]
End Catholic school funding
I resent that I am compelled to burn this page today to denounce the advice of the local Catholic Church—advising Catholics and all Christians to stay away from Pride events or risk contaminating children with such ideas, going further to encourage dissent among our elected institutions in order to stymie such events. To be clear, […]
Connecting history
It’s about the stories. It’s about the connections a discarded piece of wood or an iron school bell can make between people separated by generations. It’s about fusing an almost forgotten past to our lives today. Ernie Margetson has tended a simmering passion for the old ways of rural Ontario his entire life—for the buildings, […]
Crawling from the wreckage
Readers of The Times were graced with the insight of former deputy minister of education Charles Pascal, last week in an op-ed headlined Mindless cuts to education puts our future at risk. In it, he offered a scathing assessment of the current provincial government and its proposals to cut the cost of education. Pascal doesn’t […]
Focus
The province moved to spur the pace of residential development in Ontario a couple of months ago. For the sake of getting directly to the meat (lightly seasoned) in this column, I will assume that most readers understand that new homebuilding is not only desirable in our community, but rather a necessity if we hope […]