Category: Uncategorized

RENFREW’S IT DEBACLE

I guess there’s times in life where you just have to decide who it is you’d rather be sued by.

Imagine putting yourself in a position precarious enough that you can clearly see that, no matter what you do, somebody’s going to come at you with civil litigation.

Then, and simply for the point of making an argument, what if you were to put the corporation you work for in that precarious position?

At least to me, and I’m often alone in my thinking, none of anything above strikes me as good business, personal, corporate, or anything in between.

Getting sued, one way or another, is generally an indicator that something’s gone wrong, that somebody or group of somebodies messed up, that a grievance ensued, a grievance whose only remedy is cash.

The Town of Renfrew has signed an Information Technology (IT) service-provision contract with a company called OnServe, who by all accounts is a straight-up legitimate choice for the job had the award not been called into question, not by anything they did or might have done, but rather for the potentially and possibly fatally-flawed process that was utilized by town staff in awarding the contract in the first place.

That was a three-year contract worth approximately $85,000/year, which roughly extends out to $235,000 over the course of the deal.

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ORILLIA RECRUITS DOCTORS DIFFERENTLY

In June of 2024, I joined a growing number of Canadians who either don’t, didn’t, or no longer have a doctor.

This is a pretty jarring thing when you consider that this is the first time in my life that I’ve not had a general practitioner, or family doctor, and arguably it may be the most critical time in my life to have one.  But my doctor retired — as they’re allowed to do — and nobody jumped up to buy the business, if that’s what actually happened, or rather, didn’t happen.

I’ve been blessed with good health more or less, once you get past those three heart attacks and life-related stress, but all that considered, I feel like I’m in pretty good shape, so God does have some time to smile down upon me, which is fabulous, and I thank Him for that everyday.  Thanks to the Ottawa Heart Institute, I’m like a brand new guy in the heart department.  And thanks to the kindness and generosity of people generally, the stress department isn’t as over-worked as it once was.

There’s just one thing, though, and it’s kind of a biggy.  God, despite His splendour and magnificence, doesn’t write prescriptions.  As I think about potential flaws God may have, I feel this may be the only one.  But as I said, it’s kind of an important one.

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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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