I spent a little time in the Owen Sound Jail, though not, thank goodness, as an inmate. It was about 15 years ago, I recollect. I was taken on a guided tour of the facility with other members of the local news media.
One image from that tour still stands in my memory: a row of iron-barred cells, each cell about four feet wide by about nine feet deep, with three stone walls and no window. The word that kept coming to mind then, and comes to mind again now, is dungeon.
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, then someone in the Larry Miller re-election campaign might want to hurry on over to Shallow Lake, take a photo, and send it off to Conservative Party of Canada election campaign national headquarters as a striking illustration of just how well things appear to be going for the Conservatives in this part of rural Ontario: it’s just one Miller/Conservative sign after another, just like it was in the last federal campaign. Continue reading
There is a God. Just when it looked like a sufficient number of Canadian voters – albeit maybe only a little more than 40 percent of them – were getting ready to give Stephen Harper and his Conservatives the majority he so badly wants and, thus, a virtual one-man, “Harper Government” dictatorship for at least four years, fate and the Great Minds running his campaign have managed to shoot themselves in the foot. Continue reading
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s recent approval of a special licence for Bruce Power to ship scrap steam generators to Sweden for recycling this year is evidently just the first step, and maybe not the biggest one, to it actually happening. Continue reading
In naval warfare when the going gets too hot and the enemy’s shells are scoring too many damaging hits, you can do one of three things: run up the white flag of surrender, “make smoke” and hide behind it, or similarly, disappear into a fortuitous fog bank.
The great minds in the Prime Minister’s Office have chosen a combination of the last two, in response to the controversy over Bev Oda’s clumsy handling of a CIDA document recommending $7 million funding approval for the ecumenical, faith-based group KAIROS in 2009. Continue reading
More than four years ago I was among a large group of people, mostly members of the local community, who stood in the damp chill of a late fall day in a farmer’s field south of Lion’s Head and celebrated the start-up of the Bruce Peninsula’s first large-scale wind turbine generating electricity for the Ontario power grid. As the huge blades of the towering, made-in-Denmark, $3 million, Vesta Turbine pulsed overhead with the characteristic “swish”ing sound associated with them, we were told it could generate enough electricity to power a community the size of Lion’s Head, population 500.
I’m not in much of a mood these days to pass judgment on anyone. I think it’s fair to say most of us are trying as best we can to work our way through the challenges we or our loved ones face on a daily basis. Sometimes they feel overwhelming. Maybe we realize too late we’ve taken on too much, but somehow we have to find a way to meet our obligations of work or family; otherwise, the consequences of not doing so are bound to make things worse, or so we fear, and rightly so. Continue reading
This is a love letter.
My mother recently celebrated her 90th birthday. We had a surprise celebration for her in the activity room at Seasons Retirement Community in Owen Sound where she now lives. I had quite a time making sure it was a surprise, between putting out a public invitation to other residents at Seasons without Mom finding out, to making sure she wasn’t around when her three grown granddaughters arrived early to set up for the party. Continue reading
I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that sums up some of the most serious issues facing what I’ll call the “mainstream” Protestant churches quite as well as what Bob Giuliano wrote in his Dec. 10 Letters of Hope column. Continue reading
I’m sure Arlene Wright, newly acclaimed to her second consecutive one-year term as Grey County warden, can be taken at her word when she said after county council’s inaugural meeting earlier this week that the new council will “look at everything” to avoid increasing county taxes in 2011. And that’s while looking for ways to help the county’s financially stressed nine lowertier municipalities, including Owen Sound, find ways to cope with the rising costs, coupled with the prospect of further provincial funding cuts.
No doubt the other members of county council, as well as members of the lower-tier, local municipal councils would also say they’re prepared to “look at everything” in pursuit of solutions to the combined upper-tier/ lower tier financial dilemma.
Finding Hope Ness 