Author: CLARION

COUNCIL MEETING TONIGHT

If sparks fly tonight, I have to confess I have no idea where they may originate from.

Looking over the agenda of tonight’s Renfrew Town Council meeting, the content suggests a pro forma meeting where nothing terribly contentious seems to be on tap.

But one can never be certain, right?  Complacency is not something that I’d recommend, since it was only two weeks ago where I was fighting off sleep only to have a hockey fight break out.  Not that we approached anything you might see in the parliaments of places like Taiwan or Turkey or elsewhere where the gloves hit the ice and otherwise dignified parliamentarians clamber over furniture to get at their rivals, but still, you just never know if someone in the room has a motion hidden in their back pocket that they may brandish as a way to get some juice into the YouTube livestream broadcast.

My YouTube spotter informed me that there were over 300 people watching at one point last meeting, which is more people than simultaneously listen to Renfrew’s only radio station, something advertisers should take note of.

When we get to the point where we can sell ads on a municipal YouTube livestream, then we’ve really accomplished something of substance.  Additional scrutiny of those viewing metrics show that additional people watched the video after-the-fact, which is really something, and hopefully not an indictment of what’s on television on a Tuesday night.

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THE LIGHTS AT MA-TE-WAY

It was back in October 2024 when Councillor Andrew Dick announced at Council that the ballparks at Ma-Te-Way were going to be lit in the summer of 2025 and “It doesn’t matter what it costs.”

It’s February 2025 and baseball season is just a little over three months away, so we seem to be approaching a time of critical decision-making when it comes to this issue.

There is one thing that’s generally regarded as being certain and where agreement is unanimous.  The lights at Ma-Te-Way are a mess, and that mess is going to require some cash to fix.  And if the fix is to include the Dog Park and a parking lot, then the cash required will be more than to just light the three fields.

Councillor Dick is a ballplayer, so he’s close to the issue.  That’s not a problem in any way, as these ballparks are pretty heavily-used, and they do bring money into the community in terms of user fees and peripheral spending from ball teams on game day or on tournament weekends.  So, while calling the ball fields economic engines might be a stretch to a degree, any time a ball team comes to town or stays in town, that peripheral spending does have an impact on restaurants, convenience stores, motels, pizza shops, and yes, beer and liquor stores, although that last area can now be folded into grocery and corner stores as well.

The situation regarding lighting at Ma-Te-Way involves not a crumbling infrastructure, but rather a crumbled infrastructure.  In other words, the best-before date was, to put it bluntly, a long time ago, and perhaps mitigated by decisions that could have been made by past councils, but that’s a moot point in that they weren’t made, and so here we are, in the dark.

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THE CARBON TAX IS DEAD

Well, it’s toast, or about as toast as we’re gonna get without having the actual toast in hand.

Ding-dong, the witch is dead.

The witch I speak of is the Carbon Tax, perhaps the most hated thing to waft through the Canadian consciousness since, well, the Carbon Tax.  Or maybe the GST, but that’s still with us thirty-five years after it was going to be scrapped, which is what we do here in Canada when we don’t like something, we scrap it.

Scrap gives the impression of something cast away in disgust, almost as if garbage, almost as if we’re absolutely disgusted with it.  We can’t just get rid of it, or replace it, or make it better somehow.  In Canada, we scrap things.

Pierre Poilievre, more than anyone, can take credit for this, so give credit where credit is due.  At least when he sets out to scrap something, as in a tax on carbon, the only thing that suffers damage is the environment.  Doug Ford’s anti-carbon levy campaign has cost Ontarians the same environmental price, but also millions of dollars in losses to go along with it.

But it’s not just Conservatives now, it’s Liberals too.  The two front-runners for the Liberal leadership. Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney have both indicated that they will discontinue to Carbon Tax is they’re successful at replacing Justin Trudeau.

So I guess that’s that.

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CANADIAN UNITY MAKING A COMEBACK

Canada is a glorious country.  Canadians are a fascinating people.

Over the course of my lifetime, I’v seen much in the way of both national unity and national disunity.  I’ve seen much to be proud of, yet much to despair about.  

Sadly, it seemed that the despair had overwhelmed the pride and optimism as I witnessed an ever-hostile population, at least a seemingly oppositional population, gain the upper hand in our national discourse.

Canada is broken.  Canada is this, that, and the other thing, all of it bad.  To hell in a hand basket was the where we were heading and how we were going to get there.

Sentiment advanced by one of our two major political parties, one that polls show would win an overwhelming majority government should a federal election happen today, despite not having a single policy on anything that I can identify and reasonably articulate.  Ironically, I feel the only thing that can save us from this party is their leader, who is easily in my Top 10, maybe even Top 5, of the most unlikeable human beings that walk among us.  If I exclude Americans, he jumps to Top 2 status immediately, duking it out with the deplorable Jordan Peterson and just ahead of the reprehensible Kevin O’Leary.  But I digress.

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TEACHING CANADIAN HISTORY

I have a bit of a concern with the education system, but I don’t want to come across the wrong way.  I only hope to articulate my thinking in such as a way as to not come across the wrong way.

History can be a complicated thing, mostly because it’s often a story told by the ‘winners” of the conflicts big and small that are woven through the tapestry of the human story.  For millennia, human history was often conveyed as oral storytelling, and as such, would often take on the feel of grand stories often involving the participation of deities, gods, merchants of evil as much as the actual doings of the actual humans who often serve as principals of these stories.

Recorded history tightened that up a bit, but only a bit, and it wasn’t really until Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press that recorded history was available to people in written form, that is, of course, if they knew how to read, which most didn’t.  And even with this, recorded histories were still subject to human bias in storytelling, so that even today there are often competing versions of events that some people interpret one way while others interpret differently.  Bias is still a big part of it, but it also comes down to the reality that if three people experience or witness the same event at the same time, you can count on three different versions that may be agreeable generally but differ on the specifics.

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DISUNITY ON COUNCIL (EDITED)

It started out as the offering of an olive branch by Councillor Kyle Cybulski  to Reeve Peter Emon.  It ended up being a bit of a stick in the eye for Renfrew’s longest-serving council member.

Cybulski brought forward the motion, to amend a previous motion, that would remove sanctions applied against the reeve as a result of an acrimonious  back-and-forth between Emon and other members of council where each side made attempts to have the other removed  from committee business.

This comes two weeks after Integrity Commissioner Tony Fleming handed down a report recommending apologies from two council members, the other being Councillor Andrew Dick.  In the case of Emon, Fleming found that the reeve did undertake to retaliate against other councillors for their sponsoring of a motion to have him removed from committees.

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A STATE OF DISREPAIR

CLICK HERE FOR VISUAL PRESENTATION

When the roof’s caving in, it’s generally regarded as a sign that you’re in some trouble, if not right this minute, then sometime awfully soon.

That’s the kind of thing we’re facing with several properties, or buildings owned by the Town of
Renfrew.  Roofs leaking, structural fatigue, mould, and other conditions that make the properties untenable, unsafe, or both.

The short version reads that Renfrew needs to undertake some serious moves towards fixing up or replacing these buildings if we’re to continue to lease them out or have them as a base of operations for municipal staff who use them on a daily basis.

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WHERE DID ALL THE GOOD PEOPLE GO?

VISUAL PRESENTATION

Phil McGraw is proof of one indisputable fact.  That is that America has never met a jerk it didn’t ’t want to embrace.

Phil, also known as Dr. Phil, is another one of those Frankenstein’s monsters that Oprah Winfrey is responsible for foisting upon us, taking a small beer grifter and elevating him into a national phenomenon, much as she did with that other huckster Dr. Oz, or Mehmet Oz, purveyor of fine dietary supplements proven to do absolutely no good other than to line his very own pockets.  And for the record, Phil makes Oz look like a choirboy when it comes to the art of sleaze.

At his very core, Phi McGraw is nothing short of creepy, right down to the hand-holding exits from set that he makes with his wife, who seems to be thrilled with her own fame accrued by sliding through life on her scuzz-ball husband’s coattails.

This is America writ large.  We’ve been begging for replacements since Jerry Springer, Morton Downey Jr., and Judge Judy went the way of the Dodo, as in dead or just plain gone.  But as soon as we knock one down, another rises from the muck.  Now they have one as a president, again.

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