Tag: politics

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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TOO MANY QUESTIONS

Too many questions.

That was the main reason cited by Renfrew’s mayor to explain his decision to “postpone” the regular meeting of Renfrew Town Council scheduled for this past September 9, 2025.  A decision made a couple of hours before puck drop.

Too many questions?

One has to wonder from whom, as in who has all these questions that brings the town to an abrupt halt, not so much in a functional day-to-day manner, but in the way things like democratic responsibility, democratic process, transparency, and accountability are handled, and by extension, respected.

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“FOR CAUSE” DISMISSAL A POSSIBLE TOOL TO ENFORCE ACCOUNTABILITY?

“Get the hell out of my office.”

When you say something like this to another person, you had better be confident in your own security, in your own authority, and have a pretty healthy and robust understanding of where you fit in the grand scheme of things.  

Otherwise, you’re just asking for it.

Those words up top, I’m sure, have been used innumerable times by innumerable people all across this great land of ours, but I want to hone in on them because they were said right here in Renfrew, by a Renfrew treasurer, to an elected Renfrew councillor.

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SPEED DATING PROPOSED AS A MEANS TO COMMUNICATE WITH SENIOR STAFF

Perusing the agenda document released in advance of Tuesday’s double meeting of Renfrew Town Council, I came upon what could only be characterized as an attempt by senior administration to try something bold, something new.

It appears, if you squint, that they’re going to make an effort to — gasp — communicate.  Well how about that?

Perhaps the brainchild of our own senior staff, or perhaps something picked up in fruitful discussions with other municipal CAOs and clerk types at the recent AMO conference, it represents a high-water mark in terms of providing insight into the dark mysteries that swirl in the closely-guarded backrooms of Fort Renfrew.

The plan is brilliant.

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MEASLES IN ALBERTA

This was entirely preventable.  Entirely.

The fact that it happened anyways is nothing short of a stinging indictment on a provincial government that has allowed itself to be kowtowed by a loud, resentful, closed, and suspicious demographic within the broader population.  A demographic with out-sized influence, but also one driven by the darkness of willful ignorance, which they happen to view as enlightened biblical interpretation.

These people, when set loose upon the land, are dangerous and can cause an awful lot of harm, both personal and economic, harms that don’t just impact themselves, but also the rest of us.

They are the religious right, who appear to be gravitating uncomfortably close to a form of religious extremism whipped to a frenzy by exploitative politicians and even more so by exploitative church leadership.

And, as a Christian myself,  it hurts me to say that the vast majority of these types causing all the trouble are Christian as well.  Radical, dogmatic Christians.

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TRUMP THREATENS O’DONNELL WITH HER CITIZENSHIP

When Donny’s pissed at you, it may not end well, particularly if you value your citizenship.

Remember when Elon and Donny got into it a few weeks back when Elon started to get all lip about Trump’s BBB — Big Beautiful Bill — that had just passed Congress.  Apparently, after taking a chainsaw to government operations as part of his leadership of DOGE — Department of Government Efficiencies — Musk was bent a bit out of shape by the fact that Trump’s bill actually added trillions of dollars to the national debt, something Elon felt was a bit counter-productive to his own efforts at DOGE.

He said some things.  He called The Donald some names.  He mentioned something about Jeffrey Epstein’s list, the most talked-about and speculated-about list in modern times.

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FEDS TO PUMP MONEY INTO MILITARY

The federal government has indicated that they will begin to spend billions of dollars more on national defence.  In fact, billions and billions.

If you think that’s something that should have been done all along, you’d not be incorrect.  If you’re someone who wonders about stuff like this, and further wonders where the money is going to come from, you’d not be alone.  And if you’re afraid it may come at the expense of social programs or other areas of governmental involvement, and you wonder which ones?

Join the club.  Get in line.  Here’s your t-shirt.

I suppose there’s another category of person out there, the type that feels government should get out of everybody’s face and simply allow economic Darwinism to be the prevailing thought, then good for you, but sorry, you have no place in any reasonable discussion around the military budget specifically, or the federal budget generally.  Go home and count your money, and please try to stay out of the way of the grownups.  In other words, stay out of our face.

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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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BAT 365: MIXING COFFEE AND POLITICS

It didn’t take long for the BATs — Boys At Timmy’s — to go sour on Mark Carney.

That’s not entirely accurate though, because in order to go sour on something, you must first have had some, albeit grudging, degree of sweetness, although that’s way too strong of a word to apply to the hard men who hold court at Tim Hortons franchises across this great land every afternoon of the week.  Long accustomed to being the primary political thinkers in their respective communities, they never really took to Carney in the first place.  Instead, when they saw the political winds shift biblically from the Conservatives to the Liberals, they decided to hold their fire and seek cover, at least and until their natural instincts of baked-in oppositional thinking kicked back in.

To see them, and to hear them rise from the metaphorical ashes and begin their campaign of perpetual sour grapes is sort of like watching a healthy ecosystem re-balance itself, like a creek snaking its way through a modern subdivision.  Except for the healthy part.

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