Tag: history

DRBIA SEEKS PERMISSION FOR HISTORICAL SIGN AND NATIVITY SCENE

The Downtown Renfrew Business Improvement Area — DRBIA.— is an arm’s length group that operates under the auspices of the Town of Renfrew, and as such receives a budget from the corporation to pursue initiatives and planning dedicated towards improvement and promotion of the town’s downtown core.

What makes such a group particularly effective is the fact that it’s composed exclusively of business owners and commercial property owners that all share a keen interest in the viability and economic success of downtown, the heart of almost any community.  These business and commercial interests all contribute to the DRBIA operating budget as well, as they’re all assessed a membership levy, something that presents a bit of an issue on another topic, but not to this one.

The point is that we have people who are invested doing the day to day stuff, but there’s also a financial and legislative tether that means that Renfrew Town Council is the supreme authority when it comes to DRBIA decision-making.

Two items related to DRBIA caught my attention recently in a way that made me want to comment.

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DEGRADATION OF LOCAL DEMOCRACY

Democracy is a frail and fragile thing.  In fact, it’s absolutely precarious, something we’re seeing all over the world, and, perhaps most noteworthy and alarming, right next door in the great republic to the south.

But democracy is imperilled here in Canada as well, and yes, it clings to life right here in Renfrew, where municipal mandarins and an either weak or complicit, perhaps even incompetent mayor team together to deny democratic process in municipal government.  

Owing to its fragile nature, it’s not terribly difficult for empire builders to trample all over its basic tenets, and people with personal or ambitious agendas represent the greatest threat to democracy, here and everywhere.

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JAIL TIME FOR TREE CUTTERS

I suppose they thought it might be fun.

It was a tree, not unlike most others, it’s most differentiating feature being its location.  But that location was kind of important, in that where it was is what made this particular tree as famous as it was.

It was the kind of tree that people travelled to get to, not to climb it, and not to linger in its shade, although people have certainly picnicked there.  No, this tree was the subject of photography, as in people liked to take pictures of it, and pictures of themselves in front of it.

Proposals were made in front of it.  Marriages performed.  The ashes of loved ones scattered.

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TURBANED TORPEDO

Fauja Singh is generally regarded as the world’s oldest marathon runner.

It’s pretty much a big deal if you’re recognized as being the oldest anything.  Hell, it’s good enough to be recognized for simply being old, which is kind of a big achievement in its own right.

But Fauja Singh was noted for marathon running, and at 114 years of age, I’m feeling that his hold on this title will be a relatively secure one, at least for awhile.  Mind you, he wasn’t pounding out marathons well into his twelfth decade, although he was still “running” until very recently.

He was credited with being the oldest person to run a marathon in Toronto back in 2011 when he completed the Toronto Marathon at age 100.  But Singh has no birth certificate, since he was kinda born before those sort of things made it into the public record-keeping of his native country, India.  As there was no record of his birth, there was no way to definitively peg his age, so his achievement is not recognized in some quarters as a result, including the Guinness World Book of Records.  Regardless, we know for sure he ran the marathon, and we know for sure that he’s old, in fact mighty old.  But because we can’t put a finger on exactly how old, then we’re not going to give him credit for being the oldest anything.

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TERRORISM WITH A WHITE FACE

They were young, male, and unforgivably stupid, which works both ways, one way against us and the other for.

The downside is that every man-jack of these idiots were acting service members of the Canadian Armed Forces, all of them infantry soldiers.  These are the boneheads who fight for our country, at least when the time comes, and as long as it doesn’t offend their ideological beliefs.  They are professional soldiers, although the use of the term professional is entirely undeserved.

The upside is the fact that every one of these losers is a card-carrying idiot-stick, and so extremely easy to discover, reveal, and as of yesterday, arrest.

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PROTECTING THE FUTURE OF OUR PAST

Many years ago, I undertook a project that would recapture and bring to life the histories of two places I has some familiarity with, St. Thomas the Apostle School and St. Francis Xavier Church.

In order to successfully bring that mandate to a successful outcome, I had to pour over hundreds of photos, documents, and other pieces of memorabilia that were stored in dozens of cardboard boxes.  These boxes, and the treasures they contained, were almost always tucked away in some out-of-sight-out-of-mind part of the building, something I suspect is the case for most places, and even families, who take the time to save the stuff for preservation then, having no plan beyond that, consign these treasures to the ubiquitous cardboard box for somebody to come along in a couple of decades to make sense of it.

But what if nobody comes along?

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JULY 1st IS MEMORIAL DAY IN NEWFOUNDLAND

It was all over in fifteen minutes.

When Canadians celebrate Canada Day tomorrow, they’ll be commemorating the birth of a nation, cobbled together in a process known as Confederation, a coming-together of former British colonies to form one, single, and united nation that would grow into what it is today one of the pre-eminent countries of the world.  It all started officially on July 1, 1867.

Newfoundland was a British colony as well, but didn’t elect to join the others to become part of the new Dominion of Canada.  They didn’t join the rest of us until 1949, becoming  a fully functioning province of that dominion.

It’s Canada Day in Newfoundland as well on July 1, but it’s not known as that.  In fact, the day is known as Memorial Day, and instead of a day of celebration, it’s a day commemorating the greatest tragedy ever to befall the province known as “The Rock.”  A tragedy that took place on July 1, 1916, at a place called Beaumont-Hamel.

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TOPPLED STATUES AND HISTORICAL ACCURACY

We keep putting him back up, and they keep knocking him back down.

We are the people of Ontario, as represented by the government of Ontario, and as driven by the premier of Ontario, meaning Doug Ford.

They are the people who protest the things that we do, and show their displeasure through paint attacks, graffiti, and pushing things over, even smashing them when possible.

The him is Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald.  Actually not Sir John in the flesh, because he’s long dead, but a bronze statue of him, this one in a prominent position at Queen’s Park, the location of our provincial government.

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CHARLES III COMES TO CANADA

Something will happen today that doesn’t happen very often, if at all.

Parliament re-opens today, or at least that part of it known as the House of Commons, and all the recently elected MPs, or Members of Parliament, will take their seats and ready themselves for the Throne Speech, or Speech From the Throne, an event that officially opens any new session of Parliament.

The Throne Speech is usually a task undertaken by the Governor-General, in this case the Right Honourable Mary Simon, on behalf of the sitting monarch.

But today, Governor-General Simon will yield that privilege to the monarch himself, in this case King Charles III, King of England and Great Britain, and also King of Canada.

To my knowledge, a reigning monarch has read the Throne Speech twice in our nation’s history, with Charles’ mother Elizabeth II having done so both times, once shortly after taking the throne, and the second in 1977.

So why now?

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THE STRIPES OF HBC

When Sears went swirling down the drain a decade or so again, I don’t recall shedding any tears.  I mean I shopped at Sears, more for something to do than anything else, but I had no real attachment to the place, even though I’d been around since it was Simpson’s, then Simpson-Sears.

I have to admit that Eatons hurt a little more when the doors closed, probably because it was a high-end department store and the place I used to get my Simon Chiang dress shirts, back when Simon Chiang used to make me dress shirts.  And Eaton’s, like Simpsons, was one of the Big-Two department stores that boasted a catalogue that would arrive quarterly, including the Christmas catalogue that kids from my generation would remember well.  They weren’t

wrong when they called it the Christmas Wish Book, because that’s exactly what it was, a book of Christmas wishes.

Plus the models were pretty.

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