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Canada’s registered political parties are such scurrilous creatures that they must be kept well away from the green and pleasant world of municipal politics. This is certainly the impression you would take away from our recent election. A lot of people expressed joy and relief because they weren’t involved. Political parties couldn’t participate in the election even if they wanted to. It would be against the law. Cities in Ontario exist at the pleasure of the provincial government. The premier of the province is pretty much the mayor emeritus of every county, region, city, town and village in Ontario. As we witnessed recently in Toronto,Read More →

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You might be thinking of acquiring a new widget or re-acquiring an old city councillor. In either event, you are responsible for checking the quality and suitability of goods or services before making up your mind. If you make the wrong decision, you have no one to blame but yourself. It’s called caveat emptor: buyer beware. One thing to look out for is false information. These days it has been branded, by the American president, as “fake news” but it’s not news. It isn’t even new. Reduced down to a four-letter word, “misinformation” becomes “lies”. Nothing more, nothing less. It has been part of ourRead More →

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Michael Logue was the reason I went to Glasgow for a week in July. He was a good husband, a good father, a good grandfather. All in all, a good man. He fell in love with my cousin Patsy 40 years ago, when he was 17 and she was 15. Their love and friendship endured through the years. They raised two sons and a daughter who, in their turn, brought three girls and a boy into the family. Michael worked on ships assigned to various off-shore projects. As he explained it to me once, it had to do with global positioning systems. The textbook scientificRead More →

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When activists design campaigns and craft their slogans, they should pay more attention to the message they put out. When I walk around our neighbourhood these days, I see a lot of lawn signs telling us to say no to Nestles. That’s good. I’ve been saying it for a long time. I think the signs are to promote the campaign to stop excessive water-taking for the Nestles bottling facility in Aberfoyle. As a corporation, Nestles had been on my shit list since the late 1970s. That was when it became increasingly clear  they were poisoning babies in the third world. The company gave away freeRead More →