What do you get when you simultaneously have a strong mayor and a weak or non-existent media?
This isn’t a joke, where there’s some amusing punchline to follow that question. This is a joke because this is what happens when the wool is being thrown over our collective eyes.
I’ve already written about strong mayors, about that senseless move by Premier Doug Ford to empower mayors unnecessarily, while at the same time seriously undermining local and municipal democracy.
This comes from a populist premier who champions things like “a buck a beer” and drinking alcohol in public parks. He’s the guy that allowed alcohol sales in corner and grocery stores, without fully mapping out how all those empties are going to be collected and processed. He spent millions in penalties to the Beer Store to break an agreement already on place just to get that booze into those stores. All this from a guy who doesn’t drink himself.
Ford is a guy who moves based upon whatever the last horoscope might have said, or whatever the last lobbyist may have promised. He’ll bash ahead with his newly-discovered mission until we make him stop. Then he apologizes, gives us the patented “Gee, golly, shucks,” and we forgive him for it, even giving him credit for having the political courage to admit when he’s wrong.
He is the quintessential ask for forgiveness rather than ask for permission kind of fellow.
And full disclosure, I’ve voted for him. Not every time, mind you, but I have.
The Strong Mayor thing is another fly-by-the seat-of-our-pants kind of policy, the prevailing rationale being that it was put in place to assist municipalities in cutting through “red tape” in order to address the housing shortage in Ontario.
That said, the government itself, and the newly-empowered mayors, can’t fully articulate what it is and how it works. Renfrew even brought in a municipal affairs expert and lawyer to give council a report on this new item that pulls the relevancy rug right out from underneath them. Apparently, the town can be run just fine, and just dandy, by a man who pulled in 850 votes in the last election. That’s fewer votes than every single councillor managed to obtain, yet they’re superfluous, their input no longer needed. Yet the mayor’s input is sacrosanct, his opinion the only one that matters.
And that expert, in many aspects, didn’t seem to have a solid handle on the concept himself. That’s because there’s nothing to hold on to.
Does anyone out there have what it takes to call horseshit?
So far, Mayor Sidney has not shaken his new stick to build any new homes, at least not that I can determine. But in fairness, who knows what he and his staffers have cooking behind the scenes. Of the three strong mayor items I’ve seen to date, one kept the McDougall Museum open (It was closed the day I visited last week, so much for that) and another one gave the Clerk, Caroylnn Errett, a promotion to Department Head and a big fat raise.
But nothing yet on housing starts. Nothing yet on the elimination of red tape with respect to housing starts. The only housing starts I’m aware of are County initiatives, and they don’t count, because, well, it’s the County doing it, not the town. Our reeve, Peter Emon, happens to be the Warden of the County, so perhaps props should be directed his way. And I don’t even think wardens have strong mayor powers of their own, unless they have Strong Warden powers. It appears that Emon, and the County, can manage to build houses without special baubles from the premier.
The delegation of super powers to small town mayors is a reckless undertaking, no matter the rationale and justification behind it, and no matter how spurious those justifications might be. And what makes it even more reckless is that such powers are granted to men and women in towns where there is no media presence to hold them accountable.
Like here in Renfrew, where there is zero media of any significance. What is present is nothing short of a joke in its own right, an embarrassment that nobody addresses, and a situation that most people are totally unaware of. As it stands, local media is simply an adjunct to the local news-makers, and is totally prepared to print whatever they’re told to print, or just trot out a news release form wherever, word for word, and pass that off as some form of journalism, when it’s not.
There are three sources of news media in Renfrew. A former newspaper now exclusively online, a radio station pretending to have journalistic chops, and an out-of-town weekly paper that has all the hallmarks of journalistic quality and integrity, but is sadly closing its doors sometime next year.
One is Metroland, the folks who bought out the former and iconic Renfrew Mercury only to bury it in a shallow grave. They still put up a pretence of covering local news stories, but they don’t to any significant degree. So as it stands now, if you want to know what’s happening in Smith’s Falls, Carleton Place, or Rideau Lakes, then go to the online Renfrew Mercury, since there’s very little coverage of Renfrew, but plenty of stuff from all the other places that Metroland bought out. There doesn’t appear to be anybody covering Renfrew from this outlet, and if there is, they’re no good at what they pretend to do.
Speaking of a radio station, Renfrew has one, and as a radio station, it’s not bad. There are better, and there are worse, and I’d have to say that ours leans more towards the former than the latter. But that said, their news gathering is a sad attempt at journalism. Their on-air stuff isn’t bad and is entirely consistent with what a lot of radio stations do, but their online presence is woeful. I’d call it the McDonalds of journalistic quality, but there’s nothing in me that wants to gratuitously slander McDonalds like that.
What stories they have are “cheater” stories, in that they’re covered extremely superficially, unless it’s a press release from the OPP, whereupon they’ll simply print that as-is with no questions asked. There is not a single sniff of anything approaching the type of critical media that holds anyone, particularly local strong mayors to account. But then again, why would there even be a need, since the guy that runs the radio station has a lot of pull over at Fort Renfrew, despite securing an extremely unfortunate naming rights deal as part of the Ma-Te-Way imbroglio.
The so-called articles on the radio site are embarrassing, in that when they do any writing, they do the barest minimum. I chose the top six “articles” on the site today to get a handle on the word count.
| STORY | WORD COUNT | PHOTO |
| Bonnechere River Trail | 136 | YES |
| Gender-Based Violence | 475 | NO |
| iAdopt Event | 297 | NO |
| Missing 14 Year-Od Boy | 131 | YES |
| Local Gas Prices | LIST | NO |
| Silver Chain | 236 | NO |
Well that’s just terrific. Totalling all six stories gives you a grand total of 1,276 words. By comparison, this article, at this point, comes in at 1,318 words, and I’m not even done yet.
In my opinion, that’s just sloppiness and laziness on their part, yet they run around in their myFM “news” cruiser giving the impression that something’s actually happening. All that’s happening is the advertising the station gets as an employee goes through the drive-thru on a Timmy’s Run. But news? Hardly.
Plus, the photography is notoriously poor. Perhaps not poor in intent, but poor in presentation. You get this little thumbnail pic accompanying the “story” that can’t be enlarged to have a better look. The photos themselves border on amateurish, as groups of people are almost always shot head to toe with no consideration of what night be in the background. The world obviously needs another tiny picture of seven people standing in front of an overflowing garbage can at Ma-Te-Way. These are Photography 101 rules regularly broken by point and shoot self-styled photo-journalists.
The third media entity, the Eganville Leader, is exactly that, the Eganville Leader, which has a mandate of coverage that involves a fairly large swath of Renfrew County, and therefore has only minimal space to devote to Renfrew. Yet, despite that potential limitation, the Leader still does a really good job of getting their resources in place for Renfrew stories. Right now, the Leader’s Bruce McIntyre appears to be the only legitimate journalist walking the streets of Renfrew, and I include myself in that assessment. Unfortunately, as I indicated before, the Leader is scheduled to close down, and even if that were to be forestalled through a last-minute sale or other reprieve, the essential mandate of the paper would likely remain unchanged.
So, in short, we live in a media wasteland, and that’s the perfect environment for any potential abuses in local government, and that would include any ham-handed moves a mayor might wish to make if he/she is confident that nobody is looking and nobody is asking any questions.
As to strong mayor powers, several Ontario municipalities are asking the province to remove their communities from the list of strong mayor power recipients. They’re doing so because they have the capability and capacity to recognize something as being deeply flawed and wanting no part of it.
Sadly, we appear not to have that same capability or capacity to do the right thing.
1589 words.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 