Looking forward
Road trips are great settings to sort out life’s big issues. They offer time to decompress. An opportunity to stare at a different horizon. To allow your playlist to present an uninterrupted soundtrack for the adventure and miles of road ahead. The best part of a road trip—in regards to relationship mending, the focus of […]
Dark places
We are cavefish. This strange creature lives mostly in dark caves and underground lakes where the ability to see offers no advantage. As a result, the cavefish have lost, through many generations, the ability to see. It is blind. Vestigial eyes are covered with scales. It can only exist in the dark. Your municipal Council […]
It matters to us
Heading east out of Swift Current, the TransCanada stretches forever. Nothing but sky and the tabletop carrying you homeward. The effect is numbing. Unrelenting flatness. Time slows. Brain chemistry changes. Then, from the swaying yellow fields of canola, a strange lake emerges. Stretching to the horizon. The sudden body of water is wide, still and […]
Principles first
A reader last week urged your correspondent to set aside criticisms of the municipality’s dangerous $300 million waterworks expansion plan for a week and instead offer some solutions. I’ve been writing about municipal waterworks and escalating water bills for 20 years (to the understandable weariness of some readers). When water rates surged 12 per cent […]
Make believe
The arithmetic doesn’t add up. The scale of the project is monstrous. No one at Shire has undertaken anything like this before. And, nearly all the risk they are taking will fall to residents (municipal water customers) who don’t need it, won’t use it and didn’t ask for it. But surely the most frightening bit […]
End times
That should be the end of it. The $300 million plan to take water out of Lake Ontario in Wellington and deliver it to Picton was always a pipe dream. Unprecedented in scale, cost and risk, the plan was never going to work. That much is clear now. Worse, it risked a massive financial failure […]
Ghosts and elephants
Some folks don’t worry about Shire Hall spending $300 million it doesn’t have. They aren’t bothered by the fact that the County has never seen a project of this size and complexity. They aren’t troubled by Shire Hall’s lack of experience in planning or building anything on this scale. They don’t worry about debt. They […]
July 24
Would you run your household this way? Your farm? Your business? Imagine a married couple with no kids. They’ve been married for more than a few years, and they want children. They want them badly. But nothing yet. So they keep trying. Then a sales rep comes along and explains that if they buy this […]
Another summer
A few weeks ago, The Times presented Jordan Yarrow’s story. He owns a building lot in Wellington but can’t build a house on it. He would like to build a house, but Shire Hall won’t let him. It has committed the remaining waterworks capacity in the village’s waterworks to a single developer who owns the […]
Echoes
Must we experience every lesson? Must we feel searing pain and lasting scars before we know that some choices can be dangerous? Are there some things we can learn from others? From their experience? A couple of stories from across the province over the weekend. In Norfolk County last week, the council scrapped a plan […]