Where Have the Ratepayers’ Groups Gone?
Why don’t Collingwood’s ratepayer groups and associations last? In the 25-plus years I’ve lived here, I’ve seen several come and go. Every one has dissolved, evaporated or imploded within a…
Municipal politics
That WTF Moment
WTF. Those three letters crudely but superbly sum up the two-page response made to the two members of council who recently sent out an inappropriate media release, pretending it came…
No Morning Line for by-elections
There are two types of by-elections. There is the one that gets a pre-selected candidate into a seat and then there is the scramble version that is almost impossible to…
Lessons from the paper
There’s a story on page B2 of the January 1 Enterprise Bulletin (not online yet*) that offers us three lessons. Two lessons on how the local media fails us, one…
“The last election under first-past-the-post.”
That statement by our new prime minister is likely to be the one to haunt him for years to come. It is like many such statements in the heat of…
Life in a world without heroes.
There are no longer heroes in North America. Small children used to look up to police in their uniforms and want to emulate them. Now they fear them. And it…
Pay yourself first.
It is a rule that the rich have to follow. They are taught that you always pay yourself first. It is how they stay rich. Take the situation of Chief…
Every time you bug this 85-year-old city councillor, your library could lose a few books! Have you got that, people?
PHOTOS: St. Albert City Councillor Bob Russell – fending off annoying letters from voters since 1950-something! Time to send him back to the greenhouse? (St. Albert Gazette photo.) Below: A…
Our Know-It-Alls
Collingwood Council obviously knows more than anyone else in municipal governance. More, in fact, than anyone else in the entire country. In fact, they may all be geniuses in local…
Climate Change and Collingwood
Climate change is arguably the single most pressing, most important, most challenging issue to affect governments at this time. Our world is suffering and weather is getting extreme in many…
Feathers A-Flying in Collingwood
Chickengate: despite urban chickens being outre among the trendy these days; a fad long abandoned by hip who are now pursing some new form of glitzy hobby, some folks in…
Go big or go home.
It hardly matters what level of politics you are contesting. “Go big or go home” are the watch words. The entire country witnessed the scenario through the recent federal campaign…
The high cost of affordability
Affordable housing is crucial to the economic and social vitality of every municipality. Without it, people cannot afford to live here, which means they will look for jobs in places…
Apps are making us criminals
Almost every week you read in the news about another taxi driver protest against Uber and its drivers. Taxi drivers go on strike, some rage against Uber and attack the…
What editing standards at the Toronto Star?
It has always been an understood thing that the editing standards in the sports section of a large newspaper are often more relaxed than those of the general news. The…
If you fail to try, you are guaranteed to fail.
While watching from the catbird seat in Barrie, Toronto is still our city. We were both born in Toronto. We wept for the Leafs through the 70s and 80s. We…
17 Pages of Blather
Zero point zero zero zero three eight. That’s the percentage of the population of Collingwood who made the effort to comment on council’s much-touted, revised, 17-page code of conduct before…
Fortuna: Why Plans Fail
Niccolo Machiavelli used two words in his book, The Prince, to describe the factors that influenced events. In English these are virtue or character (virtu), fortune or chance (fortuna). Only…
Team Assessment
Following my last piece on the relevance of Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, to Collingwood Council, I felt I should explore some of Lencioni’s ideas, as…
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
You can’t help but think, when you read that title, of five block-thinking, dysfunctional members of Collingwood Council. But, relevant as that description may appear in our political sphere, it…