Tag: news

CARS AND CAMERAS

Did you realize that the Town of Renfrew was part of a conduit operation whereby cars stolen in Southern Ontario, primarily the Greater Toronto Area, are transported through the town en-route to Montreal before being shipped overseas?

Drivers of these stolen vehicles are paid to get them to Montreal.  With the heat rising in terms of law enforcement along Highway 401, the back highways have become more attractive to these Pony Express types, and a lot of those secondary routes will take these drivers, and these vehicles, right along our very own Raglan Street and O’Brien Road, or Burnstown Road.

The thing is, we’re on to the dirty little bastards.

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A MUNICIPAL EXERCISE IN BLAME SHARING

The Town of Renfrew wants your input.

Actually, they want your complicity.

The town is pumping a survey of theirs where they hope to get some direction on where to go as they approach the time when they have to do The Big Reveal, also known as the 2025 Municipal Budget.

It’s not a document they’re overly excited about, mostly because it’s going  to be brutal on you, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer of Renfrew, Ontario, the people who foot the bill and the people who will be most angry when their tax bill shows up in the mail.

The very people who will be most angry at…them.

They’re going to present this as an example of their commitment to openness and transparency, to demonstrate to you how sensitive they are to your feedback, how they’ve discovered the advantages and benefits of being up-front with the people they provide services for and to.

Sure it is.

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A FESTIVAL OF ERRORS?

In conversation with all the gossip-mongers out there who specialize in small-town hogwash, perhaps the topic that comes up most often, outside of Ma-Te-Way of course, is the Renfrew Bluegrass Festival, or more particularly, the cancellation of the Bluegrass Festival once hosted by the Town of Renfrew.

This festival, and its cancellation, appears to have been in the gunsights of Mayor Tom Sidney from the get-go after his election as mayor in the 2022 municipal elections.

Landslide Tom — he won by 13 votes — apparently told his newly assembled Council that the Renfrew Bluegrass Festival was no longer going to be a thing, and that he was going to be putting the boots to what a lot of other people seem to think was a wildly successful venture.

Why?

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ANGER AS A CHOICE

My tone can be harsh, and my barbs can be sharp.

To read my material, one could reasonably assume that I was one miserable human being.  Depending on the day and the topic, one could reasonably be correct in that assessment.  And I completely get that.

By my account anyways, I’m kind of a good guy.  If this was a movie, I’d want to be one of the fellers riding along with the loveable but crusty old  sheriff in pursuit of Black Bart, that bastard who robbed the bank and shot up Miss Kitty’s saloon.

So why the tone?

It’s sometimes an uncomfortable reality that, when you’re fighting the “bad guys,” even the good guys have to employ the kind of tactics that the opposition use to advance their own causes, to use language that they might not appreciate. 

If these were people who could be reached through rational, good-faith  discussion, then sign me up, I could do that all day.  But many of these types are well below that bar, are dismissive of rational argument, and couldn’t give a fig about what we may think. 

To get their attention, you have to piss them off.  And to piss them off, you have to get under their skin, expose their anger, flush them out of their smug certainty that being the loudest voice in the room is the one that ultimately prevails.

It’s tough to land a punch on people like this.  And sometimes, with some of them, you have to take the elevator to the basement to even get within range of landing a punch.

So welcome to the basement.

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RUNNING FOR MAYOR

Who would want to be the mayor of Renfrew?

Other than perennial candidate Cal Scott, what person would have the willingness to take on a thankless position at the head of a table of squabbling councillors and overly-confident and assertive administrative types?

Is it the base salary of $20,425?  Add committee and board assignment remuneration to this base salary, but where does that get you?

As recently as 2022, the mayor landed some $42,400, so one could maybe be forgiven for assuming that the mayor’s position took an almost twenty grand haircut in the two years since.

My point here is that it can’t be for the cash, at least not in 2025.  Maybe in 2022, when it was all rainbows and cherry blossoms, but not now.  At least I don’t think so.

Trying to get information on this sort of thing is like sitting in the dentist’s chair while they take multipole measurements of each tooth in your mouth while everyone in the room gets older.  Because of this, I’m going to take the $42,400 number as my working number, and to hell with what the internet says.

So, after all that, my question remains, who would want to be mayor of this place?  Is just over forty grand enough money for the self-abuse that surely follows everyone who wears the chain of office?  And if it’s not, how much salary would be enough?

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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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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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