Fields, owned by HBC/Zellers is closing on Toronto Road in the town’s west end as it closes other Ontario stores; waving the white flag on a project that just didn’t take in this province, even while it is successful in western Canada.  The Port Hope Fields store was probably not ideally located, and competition from the newly opened Giant Tiger was inevitable.

Shopper’s Drug Mart is closing the former York Super Pharmacy on Peter Street iin the town’s east end, a move that’s been several years coming after the opening of their eyesore by the Ganaraska river.  While all employees there applied for jobs at the new store, only two people will transfer to the other location.  This leaves the town with only three drug stores (if you include the one located in the Independent Grocer) as opposed to five a few years ago, and leaves people in the east end forced to fill prescriptions downtown.

Most people on our street will not bother. Circulation has never been that newspaper’s strong point.

Quite easily, actually; though it’s interesting that hospital parking fees are now surfacing as a national issue, with horror stories of people delaying needed visits to specialists or tests because of the costs.  An additional health care cost?  I suppose it is.

So the idea of charging youth to use the room that has been designated for them in Cobourg’s new community centre shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone either, I guess; though a few observations have to be made.

First, kids don’t always have money.  If they have a part-time job, maybe.  A working teen is part of a generation that has the highest disposable personal income of any generation in history, especially with Ontario’s ridiculous minimum wage at $10.35 /hour.  But a lot of teens go without lunch at the high schools because the necessary loonies and toonies simply aren’t lying around the house. 

Second, the community centre is located directly west of a neighbourhood where the aforementioned poverty is especially acute.  So the user fee for the centre becomes particularly burdensome, unless these are the exact people you’re hoping to ‘weed out’ in order to cater to a more ‘average’ collection of Cobourg youth.  Never having lived in extreme poverty, I can’t speak to it; but from what I’ve read putting a luxurious facility like this almost in the middle of a poorer section of the city, and then charging a fee that the poor can’t pay is likely to breed a kind of anger that results in reprisal.

Third — and I am going to try to say this as kindly as I can — as youth rooms or teen drop-in centres go, this one simply isn’t all that great.  In fact, when we first toured the building, as people who have worked in and around Church-based youth ministry, one of the glaring things we noticed was the youth room.  Rather cold and sterile, we felt at the time.

Fourth, just because seniors can pay a fee doesn’t mean teenagers must.  There is no place in the world where this law of logic is written down.  In fact, a couple of the seniors ain’t too happy about this either.  (See hospital reference in first paragraph.) 

Finally, there is much to be said for the value of keeping kids engaged in a supervised facility when you consider the other options.  Keeping kids “off the streets” is a noble goal, but it should have been the community centre’s overarching goal to begin with.  Not one that necessitates additional revenues or even additional sponsorship.

…

My most recent visit to the centre included a delightful ten minutes watching some boys trying to break a tie at the end of what was obviously a tiring hockey game.  It was the first time I’ve heard the sound of skates on ice in about 15 years and it brought back some great memories.  I think the teams appreciate having an audience for their efforts. 

But how much longer before someone like me is charged for simply watching a game like theirs?  The problem with user fees is that you’re never done thinking up ways to nickel and dime the public. Your friends, co-workers and neighbours are seen as a potential source of revenue.

Unless people speak up, the next thing you know they’ll be charging you for every bag of garbage you put out at the curb.

…

Wait; they what?

While cleaning up this week I came across a copy of The Port Hope Guide for Thursday, July 29, 1993; and there on page 9 was the headline “Fur flying over roaming cats.”  The story was about Cobourg and a rather celebrated ongoing case at that time, involving a man who was trapping cats to keep them out of his mother’s prize-winning garden.

19 Years later, it’s a Port Hope story, not Cobourg; and the protagonists are different people, but the issue is still the same: People want to see cats treated the same as dogs under the law.  Not having a cat in the house at present, I can say this more objectively: Cats are a different species with a different set of behaviors and a very definite limit on their size and the damage they can do. Furthermore, even so-called ‘outdoor’ cats stay inside during most of the winter, and spend their summers in siesta mode under trees.

To legislate where they can go, and to force expensive licensing on cat owners in town to me seems counter-intuitive.  We tend,  as a society to make laws for things that are common sense.  If I own a cat and my cat does damage; yes I should be accountable.  I should be responsible for seeing that vaccinations are kept up to date.  Unless Fluffy is a purebred or a real beauty, I should be practical and reasonable when it comes to spaying or neutering. If I live in town, I definitely should not keep a dozen of the things; yes, that’s a health issue.

But beyond that, anything else is a cash grab on the part of elected officials and the civil service.  We’re being legislated to death as it is.

Next post:  Charging teens user fees to visit Cobourg’s new community centre.  Is this what people did fundraising and donated for?

No more cat stories this month, I promise!

Gratuitous cat picture

I had this feeling I had read the article before.  In truth, I had and I hadn’t.

“Cobourg Pet Store Helps Humane Society” on page nine of the January 6th issue of Northumberland News, is not significantly different from “Cobourg Pet Store Helps Animal Shelters” on page twelve of the December 16th issue.  My goodness, it’s even the same reporter, Karen Longwell.

So let’s have some fun trying to guess what’s going on here; which one of these possibilities intrigues you the most?

• These pieces are actually advertorials; paid ads made to appear to be articles.  If that’s the case, there should be a flash or some other indication that these are paid advertisements.
• The reporter is getting kickbacks from the store.  I like this possibility because it shows that somebody is being industrious.  If this were true, and she were found out, does she get to write up the story herself?
• The store is simply manufacturing fresh press releases on a regular basis.  The squeaky wheel gets the coverage.  There are courses you can take on how to get all kinds of free publicity for your business, and knowing how to write a good media release is one method taught.
• The newspaper has a predilection for anything that allows it to publish photos of cats and dogs.  I blame YouTube for this.
• The reporter is playing games with the editor(s); trying to see if anyone in charge actually reads their own paper.  After five successive “Cobourg Pet Store” stories they write about it in other media and start showing up on the talk show circuit.
• The newspaper was going to run recurring animal shelter stories anyway; but now they found a way to link this to a local entrepreneur.  In a sense, the store in question has bought naming rights to the animal adoption issue.
• In a nod to the book Animal Farm, cats and dogs have taken over and are publishing the twice-weekly newspaper.

So bear in mind the phrase above, “…let’s have fun…” and don’t get all uppity about this one.   I just find it curious that the repetition is so blatant; and in a larger city newspaper, the repeated piece would attract a lot of attention.

Besides, some of my best friends are dogs and cats.

When we walked in the younger children in the shallow pool were packed in tighter than riders on the Yonge-University subway line at 8:15 on a weekday. There was nowhere for the kids and parents to go, but to simply stand there and splash a little. It looked like some third world country where there are millions of people and only swimming pool in the entire country.

The pool has a capacity of 200, but of course no way of knowing what the actual distribution of those 200 is going to be. The larger pool was relatively quiet with only a few kids jumping off the diving board and another handful playing water basketball at the opposite end.  I counted less than six adults doing lengths. 

But the situation in the kids pool was almost comic, and that body of water apparently has no specific occupancy limit. The only consolation to lifeguards had to be that no one was actually doing any swimming; it’s hard for kid to get into distress when all they can do is stand there.

Where’s a photo-journalist when you need one?

Of course, I have absolutely no idea what chemical cocktail produced this perfect road condition, but I was grateful at the time, and besides, we drink bottled water now, though we do shower and do dishes with the water that falls victim to the runoff of all we use to keep the roads clear in winter.

Today, Cobourg wasn’t scoring so well as of 5:30.  I think everyone forgot how to mix the aforementioned cocktail, or was at home drinking one of another kind.  Is today a lieu day for Boxing Day?  Maybe time-and-a-half is too expensive.  I think it just caught everyone off guard.  Port Hope at 5:45 was no better, though I live in a part of town the municipality does not know exists, though they know where to mail the tax bills.

I opted for the 401 this time, which was in better shape, though everyone did 80 km/hr out of respect for the first major snow. I’d attach a picture to this item, but the OPP now frowns on that as you’re driving.

So to those of you read this from other places, all is quiet on the western front here in east-Central Ontario. Just not seeing any issues that are causing me to take pen to paper, so to speak. Or maybe I’m learning that you can’t fight city hall. To those of you read more locally, guest posts are always welcomed. Or perhaps you can bait me into reflecting on a current issue.

If I had to sum up what I would write here if I had endless time, probably everything would fit nicely into three categories:

1. It’s so nice of the people at town hall to find ways to spend our money in a manner that would never happen if the town were a business that we each had an ownership stake in.  Government corrupts and small town municipal government corrupts absolutely.  Give us a 5% decrease in our 2012-13 taxes. I’m dead serious.
2. People are people no matter where you go. You can’t assume that just because it’s a quaint little historic town that the people you do business with are not going to screw you somehow.  Or that because it’s not New York City we are more polite drivers.  Etc.
3. Despite the above, this is still a pretty good place to call home.  You can breathe (most of) the air and (almost) drink the water. The people who use Pt. Hope and C-burg as bedroom communities and never plug into the local life of the place are really missing out.  They should at least try to enjoy the best of both worlds.

I’ll try to pop back here over the holidays when hopefully time won’t be such a precious commodity.

Water pumps that new shouldn’t fail, but the crisis is possibly somewhat manufactured to ensure the province steps in with some funding.  Besides it’s good practice for a real emergency originating from you-know-where.

Still, it’s got some residents utterly panicked. A woman this morning was afraid to make coffee, and you don’t want to separate Port Hopers — or anyone else in Canada — from their java.

So… what are we; chopped liver?  Any tourism initiative Leeds and Grenville can do, Northumberland can do better.  A precedent has been set.  Let’s see if the province will grant a similar opportunity to Northumberland at the Port Hope ONRoute and the westbound Trenton ONRoute.  But first we have to ask.