FEEDING KIDS AT SCHOOL

You can go ahead and call me crazy if you want, but I’m adamant in my belief that Catholic kids have the same right to eat as their non-Catholic counterparts.

And, of course, who’s going to argue with that?

Times are tough all over, as the saying goes, and when times are tough, it’s often children that bear the brunt of it. And sadly, they often pay the price for tough times by going hungry more often than they should.

It’s easy to say that no child should ever go hungry, ever, but the sad truth of it is that it happens all the time. Derelect adults, neglectful parents, down and out care-givers more concerned with their next fix or hit, all of this kind of stuff happens in the world, and you’d have to be wilfully blind to think that it does’t happen right here in Renfrew.

Right under our noses.

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May 25, 2025

BARRIERS TO TRANSPARENCY

I’m back for another ride on the acountability/transparency train, not because I like the view or because I’m a train guy, but more because I feel as if I lost my wallet on a previous trip and have hopes that it might turn up.

Fat chance.

Today, I’m going to rant a little bit about agendas, as in meeting agendas, as in the ones that are released out of the Clerk’s office a few days before any general council meeting that’s open to the public.

Agendas are important, not because they’re road maps for discussion, but also because it gives the boys and girls at home and on our ships at sea an opportunity to get some idea as to what the topics for that meeting are to be. It does double-duty as an informative and handy reference for anyone attending a meeting in person or viewing the process via the YouTube Livestream service offered by the town.

We all know, or ought to know, that accountability of public officials, whether elected or staff, is something more than merely the mouthing of words. Words are cool and everything, but for accountability to have any meaning, those words have to be consistent with deeds, with real and appreciable evidence that efforts are made, and things done, to ensure that those words and deeds match up.

As it goes for accountability, so too does it go for transparency.

We can say transparency is a matter of critical importance to us, but then go about our business in such a way as to render our lofty ideals as being practically useless. No good idea is a good idea unless it’s backed-up and followed-through by good action to implement the good idea. Anything short of this is lip-service, window-dressing, chimera, fool’s gold.

Take your pick, they’re all bad.

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April 25, 2025

SPEAKING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

I don’t know if it’s because of the impending budget, or if it’s merely a matter of coincidence, but Renfrew Town Council meetings are becoming longer and longer, marathons really, with last night’s gathering consuming five and a half hours before going into closed session, which is pretty wild given the fact that I left at about 11:15 PM. That means the closed session extended beyond that, which has me feeling entirely sympathetic to the plight of a local municipal politician and municipal administrators.

That the agenda was chock-full was evident from the 400-plus pages of agenda materials released last Friday. Also last Friday, a Renfrew staffer gave me a bit of heads-up that Tuesday’s meeting was going to be on the brutal side in terms of length. I remember laughing somewhat at that piece of fore-knowledge, because I’ve sat through a lot of sessions of people hot air and gassing for hours at a time, so I felt I was up to the task.

But for the love of God, almost six hours? And again, that’s six hours before being chased out of the room so they could talk among themselves. You can throw a hood over a guy’s head and waterboard him all day and it would be like a light swim compared to this exercise in democracy, both time-wise and often content-wise. More meetings like this one may trigger a Geneva Convention investigation.

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March 27, 2025

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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February 7, 2025

AUSTRALIA TO BAN SOCIAL MEDIA FOR KIDS UNDER SIXTEEN

Australia has passed legislation that forbids children under the age of sixteen from having social media accounts. To be clear, this is not a cellphone ban so far as I currently understand it, but rather something targeted at kids’ ability to sign up for social media accounts in the first place. I guess the feeling is that, once you take the social media out of the phone, the device just becomes this inert piece of irrelevant technology.

Yeah, right.

In the Australian situation, being monitored breathlessly by provincial governments here in Canada who like to make big noises that have little impact, the gatekeepers, the people responsible for ensuring compliance with the age requirements, are the creators and operators of the social media companies that are being shut out of one of their most lucrative markets. There’s those damned foxes again, in charge of the gate to the hen house, so to speak.

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December 6, 2024