Daily Archives: January 30, 2010

 By Doug Draper

Reilly Anzovino would have been 19 years old this Jan. 26.

Some of her friends gathered at her home in Fort Erie on that day to celebrate her life and, at the same time, console grieving members of her family.

Reilly Anzovino

Lest we forget, Reilly was the young woman involved in a tragic accident on a stretch of Hwy. 3 in her hometown of Fort Erie this past Boxing Day and whose chances for survival drained to a point where she passed away slightly before or after she arrived in a 19-and-a-half-minute ride on a cold, icy night to the emergency at the Welland hospital.

Since then, thousands of residents in her community and others across this Greater  Niagara Region, including her parents Denise Kennedy and Tim Anzovino, and three of Niagara’s provincial members of parliament – Kim Craitor, Peter Kormos and Tim Hudak – have called on Dr. Andre McMallum, Ontario’s chief coroner, to hold a public inquest into the circumstances surrounding Reilly’s death.

They want to know if the decisions by two agents of the Liberal provincial government of Dalton McGuinty – the Niagara Health System (NHS) and Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brand Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) – that lead to the closing of emergency rooms at hospitals in Fort Erie and Port Colborne last summer may have had a hand in this tragedy. Continue reading →

Until the wee small hours, the region's meeting on our transit future drags on

By Doug Draper

“Patience, patience,” Port Colborne Mayor Vance Badeway implored others on the regional council and dozens of us listening in the gallery as the marathon meeting over whether or not the region should play a role in cobbling together an inter-municipal transit system for Niagara dragged on and on.

Patience was not in the cards for some.

Judy Casselman, a veteran regional councillor for St. Catharines, looked frustrated as she stressed more than once that any further delay in moving forward with an inter-municipal transit system would show a “void of leadership” to far too many in the public, including students, seniors and lower-income people who’ve been waiting for years for  a good, reliable transit system to get them to school, to job, to visit with a loved one in a hospital, or just get out to buy a few groceries.

St. Catharines Mayor Brian McMullan said he walked into the special meeting the region was holding on transit services this Jan. 28 expecting to participate in a “historic” session in which, after 40 years of the region running hot and cold on the idea of building a transit system for all Niagara’s residents, it was finally going to do it. Anything less that driving forward with a launch of an inter-municipal transit system amounts to “failure,” McMullan added, “and I don’t accept that.” Continue reading →