Assets
The municipality of Prince Edward has a lot of stuff. Hundreds of miles of roads, dozens of bridges and many miles of pipe—some to carry water to our homes— others to carry it away. Our municipality owns trucks, graders and fire engines. It has more than 120 properties it knows about— more than 80 these […]
In other news
Canada’s jobs numbers are generally improving in 2013. Ontario’s job picture, however, is getting worse. Overall Canada’s economy added 13,200 jobs in October, nudging the jobless percentage below seven per cent for the second straight month. While Quebec, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland were adding new jobs, Ontario lost 14,700 jobs last month, pushing the unemployment rate […]
Two minutes
How are we to remember? They weren’t our stories. Not our experiences. My dear friend Ralph Margetson presses me with increasing urgency to remind readers of the price paid in war. The lost lives. Broken bodies. Wrecked families. Bright futures torn to shreds and scattered on the wind. But how do we do that? Or, […]
Searching
Adeep dark sadness has gripped this community and much of the County in the days since Sandy Rutherford failed to return home from an afternoon of fishing on West Lake. It is now more than a week since he pushed his Zodiac out into the lake on a late autumn Saturday afternoon. The boat has […]
Split
Justice Marc Nadon has had a bumpy ride on his ascendancy to the Supreme Court. Questions have arisen about his qualifications and the truthiness of his claim to have once been a draft pick of the Detroit Red Wings. (It turns out he was at best scouted by the Red Wings team, but was never […]
Unexplainable
A Times reader called from Picton Thursday morning looking for an explanation. The 78-year-old resident wanted to know how council could ignore the direction given to them by the question on the ballot related to the size of council. She hoped that since I had witnessed council toss aside that direction and the recommendation of […]
81 per cent
A disappointingly small number of folks filed into town halls across the County over the past couple of weeks. Few, it seems, are interested in how many councillors, or how few, sit around the council table at Shire Hall. Neither are they terribly keen to come out and discuss the shape and size of the […]
Where we live
The first house Kathleen and I owned still sits at 11 Amroth Street in Toronto— very near Danforth and Woodbine. It was, as I recall, a crooked little house on a street that friends, from better parts of town, likened to living in Beirut. The house was 13 feet wide. The lot was 14 feet […]
Perilously divided
In 1998 the County was pushed into amalgamation by a provincial government that believed all ills could be cured and a vast treasure of savings could be released when smaller councils, hospitals and other public institutions were huddled into larger ones. They were terribly wrong on both counts but it seems provincial mistakes cannot be […]
The cure
Prince Edward County Memorial Hospital is the best community hospital in Ontario, according to its patients. That is now an established fact. Folks here have known it all along. Now everyone does. It cannot be denied nor diminished. It cannot be dismissed as “sitebased protectionism” as Scott Rowand described this community’s fierce loyalty to its […]