Ontario premier Doug Ford has proposed extending so-called “strong-mayor” powers to 169 additional municipalities in Ontario, and the Town of Renfrew is one of them.
What makes a strong mayor out of a mayor?
Simply put, it allows the mayor, as Head of Council, to push forward agenda items without obtaining a majority vote of other members of Council. It’s something usually reserved for large urban areas like Toronto, or Ottawa, or any other densely-populated metropolitan areas.
But Renfrew? And also Arnprior, Pembroke, Deep River and Petawawa? Because they all made the cut, whereas urban powerhouse Douglas got left out, most likely because they’re part of a township government, and I guess we haven’t yet arrived at the point where rural townships require strong mayor powers.
The changes, if implemented, take effect May 1, 2025.
In a lot of things, there’s what we once did, what we do, and what we’re going to do moving forward.
I guess that statement seems to be a reflection of the fact that time doesn’t stand still for any of us as people, and it works that way for municipalities as well.
It’s the old “once we finally get things figured out and solved, something happens to change it” thing. It’s like you finally master your online banking interface, but then they change it to make it “better,” which of course means making it better for anyone not named you.
It’s like that in the garbage business, and by extension, the recycling business.
What was once a Stewardship Model has been replaced by government regulations changing things to a Producer Responsibility Model, which to most of us means next to nothing but to a municipality awash in recyclable materials, as they all are, it means quite a bit in terms of compliance, planning, re-jigging what had already been jigged, and then paying for the whole damned thing. The new regime takes effect on January 1, 2026.
If you thought there was two types of recycling, then you were right. Nothing’s changed in the mixed co-mingled and fibre distinctions, the big choice you have to make once a week when you’re trying to remember which blue box you’re going to lug out to the curb. A blue box full of stuff at the end of the day is usually your answer as to whether you made that choice correctly.
But now there are two other distinctions to recycling, eligible and non-eligible. And so the question arises, what makes eligible eligible?
As simply as I possibly can, things can be broken up into two categories, residential and commercial/institutional/industrial. The first group, residential, is considered eligible, as in edible for continued curbside pick-up, meaning the least amount of change brought by the new government regulations. The second, the businesses and industries that make up the commercial/industrial category, are no longer eligible for this level of service unless the municipality in question decides to take on that additional cost.
Poor Renfrew. To be saddled with eye-watering debt, cutting or reducing services, increasing property taxes, and now some other gawd-awful thing raises its stupid head to demand more financial resources that you don’t have. It’s a spend-more scenario in an environment of spend-less. It’s enough to make any councillor reach for that forty-pounder of rye they’ve been saving for their child’s Confirmation and putting a tangible dent into the thing. They should just go ahead and pass a bylaw allowing councillors, and only councillors, to drink alcohol during council meetings, just to take the edge off things and steady the hand on the tiller.
Currently, Renfrew makes 319 stops that will now be considered to be non-eligible, including every one of the places operated by the town itself. This is currently done at a rate of $15/stop, but you can be guaranteed that a price like that is on its way out the window. It’s these places that are going to be the problem.
If Council were to determine to continue picking up this stuff from these stops, what would that entail? What would that look like? How would it be funded?
Staff has already undertaken a brief survey of the battlefield, and found that some municipalities are already on the road to compliance, as Renfrew is, but have adopted styles unique to themselves. Some continue to pick it up, and others put the responsibility on business owners themselves to get their recycling to a depot specific to that purpose. In one case, in Mississippi Mills, the municipality was quoted a sobering $65/stop for the service, as compared to Renfrew’s current yet soon to be extinct $15/stop. It’s more than a four-fold difference, but Manager Amanda Springer is of the opinion that whatever cost eventually accrues to Renfrew, it’ll be less than the Mississippi Mills quote. So some small solace there.
The decisions facing Council are those of a short-term nature, and of a long-term nature.
It’s times like these where we, as Canadians, usually rise to our challenges. Sorry, where we always rise to the challenge in front of us.
We were there at Queenston, at Chateuguay, at Ypres and Vimy. We more than showed up for Italy and Normandy, and even Dieppe speaks to our courage in the face of overwhelming odds against, some of those odds courtesy of our friends, the British. We fought and won the Battle of the Atlantic.
Were among the most-feared and most respected in Afghanistan, and lost over 150 good people in that demonstration of resolve.
We fought the Americans twice, in the Revolution and War of !812 and turned them back both times. We fought the Kaiser’s army in World War 1 and earned the reputation as “shock troops” by the Germans who were always carefully aware of where the Canadians were along the front line. We fought the best the Nazi’s had at Juno, up through Normandy and into the Low Countries, and liberated Holland before joining the Allied thrust across northern Germany. And we chased the Taliban off of every battlefield in which they faced us.
So, in short, we’re more than up for the most recent challenge, economic war against the United States.
As much as that might be the language of your hairdresser, those were the watch words when it came to over five hours of budget deliberations in what would be the first of several meetings intent upon bringing forward a new budget for 2025 in Renfrew.
If there was any fluff, either real or imagined, in previous municipal budgets, then Council had a machete stroke to apply to it. There will be no fluff left unattended by the look of it.
Councillors Kyle Cybulski,John McDonald, and Andrew Dick sported the sharpest knives during the opening session, at times making Elon Musk look like just some guy with a chainsaw. The three councillors were the most heard-from when it came to a line by line presentation by Renfrew Treasurer Charlene Jackson.
In fact, it was Councillor Cybulski who showed up with a document representing twenty-some hours of homework whereby the councillor determined that axing any number of expense items was the way to move forward, because, as he said, “it all adds up.”
By now, everyone knows we’ve taken a 25% tariff hit from our erstwhile friends and compadres the Americans for the sole reason of, well, I don’t know because they make no sense to me. That puts me roughly on par with all the economists and tariff experts out there who are pretty-much all saying the same thing.
There’s no doubt that there’s something afoot about what Trump and his acolytes are up to something nefarious., including the possibility that he and they are all Russian puppets bent on weakening America and its western alliances, which if true, would mean they’re doing nothing less that one hell of a job.
I think that, as Canadians, we’ve also done one hell of a job of absorbing these hits to our economy and our sovereignty. Yes, we’re mad, in fact mad as hell. But I still hold on to the belief that what we’re seeing is another example of that famously stereotypical Canadian restraint. But our restraint is nothing compared to that shown by the inhabitants of Heard and McDonald Islands. Sure, they were only hit with 10% tariffs from the Trumpers, but still they’ve been victimized like seemingly everywhere else, and one would think that they’d show some sort of disinclination, disappointment, or outright rage. But they don’t.
Of all of the nations on this Earth, which one has the greatest level of national debt? If you answered the United States of America, then you’re absolutely right. It appears the world’s richest nation is also the one carrying the biggest debt load. If you think that statement to be one that self-cancels, or doesn’t make any sense, then you haven’t considered why the “Land of the Free” is also the nation with the most citizens behind bars, another little oxymoron that competes with many others. How about the nation with the greatest medical expertise in the world having over 40% of its population without health insurance?
You get the point. The U.S. is a nation of many dichotomies. And debt is one of them.
As the name implies, it’s a company specializing in providing services to rinks, something we have two of now with the Ma-Te-Way expansion yielding a second ice pad for community use.
Specifically, it’s a company that paints the ice, as in paints the markings on the ice, the lines, the graphics, the whole deal. If you’ve ever wondered how they get the ice so perfectly marked up in our hockey arenas far and wide, then companies like Eastern Rink Services come into the conversation.
The company came to my interest during the last Renfrew Town Council meeting when a contract came up for painting the markings on the ice at Ma-Te-Way for the 2025-26 season. Shawn Eckford, Recreation Operations Supervisor, had the item tucked into the agenda, the type of decision-making minutia that makes up a large chunk of a council meeting. These things fly past Council all the time, routine matters that often don’t provoke much discussion, just a show of hands and we’ll be on our way. If Council had a drive-thru window, it would be stuff like this that gets done there.
The term was used by Mayor Tom Sidney to describe somebody, or somebodies, who level commentary and/or criticism of Council decisions, actions, inactions, and procedures.
It would seem that, by this comment, the mayor is demonstrating the possibility that such commentary, from whatever source or sources, is starting to strike a bit of a nerve, if that nerve hasn’t been tweaked before.
The comment came as Council was discussing debt load, debentures, and possible impact on rate levies, which is municipal-speak for the amount of money you pay in property taxes.
Renfrew County is asking Renfrew Town Council to support them in the construction/building of forty modular units on the grounds of the Bonnechere Manor property.
The units will be of the prefabricated type, and will be a step towards alleviating some of the pressure felt by citizens when searching for affordable housing.
The target demographics are seniors not yet ready to enter long-term care/supportive accommodation and support workers who work either with these people, or with the people in the Manor proper. A possibility exists that affordable housing for people not in the first two groups might also be made available through the project.
The County is asking the Town to waive the usual fees associated with the building of homes or housing, a number that’s in the area of some $58,000 in lost fees.
When you’re at war, you usually find out pretty quickly who’s-who and what’s-what. It’s in moments of high import, or a crisis, where you find out a lot about the people in your life, whether they be family or your circle of friends and associates. Your colleagues at work fall into this as well.
We’re at war with the United States.
Economically, yes, but just like any shooting war, they aim to cause us harm, are doing it intentionally, and have as their end-goal the weakening of our own country to the point where we desperately request to be officially absorbed by them, or annexed if you will.
Whether it be done with bullets and missiles or tariffs and dollars matters little.
They have intentionally set out to cause us existential harm. That, to my mind, meet the criteria for a declaration of war.
Never mind their nonsense involving hordes of undocumented immigrants pouring over the Canadian border into the United States. And ignore their stated intention to stop the dangerous flow of fentanyl across that same border, a peril of epic proportions, what with 43 pounds of the stuff having crossed in the past year, about one one-thousandth of the amount sneaking into America through Mexico.
This is the casus belli of the American attack, their justification for being the jerks that they’ve become. But it really has nothing to do with any of that, since the real problem at the Canadian border has to do with hard drugs and guns that flood across in the opposite direction, as in into Canada from the U.S.
It appears that, when it comes right down to it, they’re the problem at the border, but that doesn’t sell at home, so they blame us for their own failings and use it as a pretext to come after us and our country.
