A project to develop a new school curriculum about this area’s long-neglected history of black settlement is a great idea, of course. Better late than never. But I can’t help but wonder how those early black settlers might feel and what they might say, knowing it would take so long for their presence to be celebrated with such interest. I have an idea, based on a brief conversation I had many years ago with an angry man in a place called Amber Valley, an historic black settlement in northern Alberta. But more about that later. Continue reading
Month: April 2005
Are Safeguards Adequate at the Bruce Nuclear Site?
Worse has happened, and is still happening, to Lake Huron and the other Great Lakes than the spill of “mineral oil” into the lake from the Bruce Nuclear site after a recent transformer fire there. Continue reading
Ontario Taxes Will Indeed Go Up
It’s that time of year again across the Canadian landscape: the taxman cometh. And many are the howls of outrage here in Grey-Bruce, and elsewhere in Ontario, at the rate property taxes are going up to help support the cost of municipal government. Bruce County’s 13.2 percent increase in county taxes especially raised some local eyebrows. But it may be a sign of things to come for a lot more municipal taxpayers in Grey-Bruce and elsewhere in the province, if somebody at Queen’s Park doesn’t soon do something fundamental about fixing the Ontario eight-year-old downloading fiasco. Continue reading