Monthly Archives: June 2010

A foreword by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

Isn’t it about time politicians in the north end of Niagara, Ontario stopped treating people in the southern tier of the region like collateral damage when it comes to hospital care?

Niagara hospital care advocate Pat Scholfield

At long last, isn’t it?

If that sounds a little harsh, too bad. As a resident of Niagara’s north end, I can hardly say how sad it is that so few municipal and provincial politicians on my end of the region – so parochial and out of touch with the rest of the region they are in their vision – care so little about the gutting of hospital services in Niagara’s southern tier. And why is that? Is it because they feel they can take some comfort in the fact that the Niagara Health System – a body created by the former provincial government of Mike Harris and Tim Hudak – is building its spanking new hospital complex, complete with a regional cancer and cardiac centre, in the region’s north end?

That may be okay for them but what about residents in Niagara’s central and south ends who are seeing their hospital services, including emergency room services, gutted while the Niagara Health System moves forward with investing more than $1 billion for new services at a north-end site in west St. Catharines?

Don’t people in central and south ends of the region deserve fair and equal access to hospital services too? Why, when it comes to hospital services, should they be treated like human garbage? Continue reading →

By Fiona McMurran

I’ve just returned from protesting the G20 in the streets of Toronto.

A peaceful demonstration near Queen's Park before riot police moved in. Photo courtesy of Fiona McMurran.

Soon after midday, we assembled with thousands upon thousands of other protesters in Queen’s Park, getting soaked to the skin as the heavens opened. My march with other colleagues and friends from the Council of Canadians, was uneventful – we got back to Queen’s Park in mid-afternoon – about 4:00 p.m. – and then strolled the couple of blocks to O’Grady’s pub on College Street, now full of soccer fans cheering on Ghana against the United States.

Ghana beats the U.S. There’s much cheering and as fans take their leave, the TVs are switched to news channels. From then on, the talk in the pub is all about the events taking place a few blocks away. We are getting nervous as we wait for two of our foursome from Niagara to join us.
As the scenes unfold on the screen, and as other protesters entered the pub and the discussion to give us updates, my little group of demonstrators is caught in an odd sort of suspended animation.
 
We had all been more or less of one mind: a peaceful demonstration was what was desirable to get our various messages across. Anything else would be totally unwelcome. It would simply steal the attention from what we wanted the Canadian public – never mind the leaders, who haven’t and won’t listen to us anyway – to hear. We would condemn any individual or group that attempted to put our sincere protests in the shade. Violence of any sort is always wrong. It simply re-enforces the argument that all this expensive security was entirely necessary. Etc. etc. etc.
 
But that’s not what we are feeling as we watch the events in the downtown core. The sensation is that we are witnessing a game play out, one that both sides understand. One side has the numbers, the power. The other side certainly has the upper hand when it comes to tactics. It reminds me of nothing so much as the war in Afghanistan. Guerrilla warfare. Continue reading →

By Terry Nicholls

Propoganda. Got to love it! 

Another page from The Toronto Star. Click on this photo to blow it up and take a good look at the young giirl crying in a spot that was supposed to be a 'demonsration zone' for us Canadians. Is this the kind of country you want to teach that kind of lesson to in our Canada?

The police had to protect us from a criminal conspiracy, eh? Has anyone noticed how often the words “criminal conspiracy” have peppered the language of police spokespersons today? Too bad they were looking in the wrong place.

The G20 used up vast sums of taxpayers’ money to ensure that the wealthy continue to reap the riches of the world while the rest of us inherit the dirt. While the leaders of the so-called free world buddy up to keep banks and corporate leeches exempt from financial regulation or appropriate levels of taxation, the rest of us are condemned to austerity measures—which, if the European model is any indication of what’s coming to a government near you, may mean cuts of up to twenty-five percent in social program spending. Manufacturing jobs will increasingly be farmed out to the poorest regions of the planet where labour is so cheap it is often tantamount to slavery, and deaths due to lack of safety and environmental regulations are more acceptable, because life is cheap elsewhere, apparently. 

 Two of the leaders, we hear, found the meeting so thrilling that they bunked off for the afternoon to watch World Cup football on TV. While these privileged few were preparing to sit in isolated splendor, humming; “We are the world”, twenty-five hundred well-informed and socially committed folk gathered in Massey Hall on Friday night to hear speakers from across the globe—including John Hilary, (executive Director of War on Want), Pablo Solon (Bolivian ambassador to the UN), Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!), Dr. Vandana Shiva, Naomi Klein and Maude Barlow—discuss the REAL reasons why MILLIONS of us should have been taking to the streets to protest the disgusting policies being pursued by our Governments in our name. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

“I am convinced that if we succumb to the temptation to use violence in our struggle …unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to them will be a never-ending reign of chaos.”

Crashing windows of retailers in Toronto, from the pages of The Toronto Stard

That comment was made more than 40 years ago by the late American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who had his own non-violent movement infiltrated from time to time by some hoping to draw it into criminal acts that would discredit it.

If I woke up the little bit of paranoia we all have napping inside us run wild, I would swear that someone who didn’t want the public at large to hear what the peaceful protesters at the G20 summit in Toronto have to say about climate change, health care, poverty, famine and so many other issues, paid a few hundred hooligans – these anarchists or ‘Black Bloc’ or whatever they call themselves – to steal attention away from them.

Indeed, if someone didn’t pay these thugs to infiltrate the crowds of peaceful demonstrators before covering them selves in black from head to toe, and running off to smash windows and torch police cruisers, they might want to consider it come next summit, because it certainly did work to draw media attention away from individuals like the Council of Canadians’ Maude Barlow and social activists like Naomi Klein, who have messages their fellow citizens should hear. Continue reading →

From Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

Most of the messages G20 summit protesters wanted to get out may have been hijacked by a few hundred thugs bent on smashing windows and torching cars.

Ole Woody Guthrie

But social activist and writer Naomi Klein was at least able to get a column in The Globe and Mail this June 28, talking about how unwilling the G20 leaders did to control bankers and other financial institutions that played such a major role in causing the latest global recession.

Coincidently enough, and just a few days prior to the June26/27 summit, CBC Radio’s The Current interviewed American folk singers Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger about protest songs fitting for events such as this.

During the interview, Arlo Guthrie read the following lines written by his father, the late folk-singing legend Woody Guthrie, more than half a century ago but in too many ways, still just as relevant today. They read as follows; “I never stopped to think about it before, but you know a police man will just stand there and let a banker rob a farmer or a finance man rob a working man. But if a farmer robs a banker, you would have a whole darn army of cops out shooting at him. Robbery is a chapter in etiquette.”

Meanwhile you can read the Naomi Klein column by clicking on the following link – www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/opinion/sticking-the-public-with-the-bill-for-the-bankers-crisis/article1620729/ .

(Click on Niagara At Large at  www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to residents in our greater binational region.)

By Doug Draper

Anyone of us in Ontario, Quebec or the northeastern United States who has spent any time  in front of a television over the past 30 or so years, has no doubt watched and heard the commercial jingle for the Marineland amusement park in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

Protesting in front of Marineland this June 26. Photo by Doug Draper

“Everyone loves Marineland,” the last line in the jingle goes.

Everyone?

Like most marketing lines, they are cover over, like icing on a cake, with more than a little exaggeration. Jules Henry, the late American sociologist and a student of advertising strategies, called these exaggerations “pecuniary pseudo-truths” in the sense that they are “a new kind of truth … which may be defined as a false statement made as if it were true, but not intented to be believed. No proof is offered for a pecuniary pseudo-truth, and no one looks for it. Its proof is that it sells merchandise; if it does not, it is false.”

Getting back to that marketing line; “Everyone loves Marineland,” no sane person could literally believe that if they were out in front of the 50-year-old amusement park this June 26 while more than 30 activists for animals, including members of Niagara Action for Animals, picketed in front of the park while countless cars drove by offering them honks of support. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

The chairman of Niagara, Ontario’s regional government has won support from Canadian and U.S. municipal leaders around the Great Lakes a resolution calling for more public access to the lakes’ shorelines.

A stretch of Lake Erie shoreline, fenced off to the public in the Fort Erie area.

 The resolution was passed by the municipal leaders at the annual conference this June of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Cities Initiative in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In its own words, it “encourages the U.S. and Canadian federal/ provincial, First Nations and tribes to work collaboratively with municipal governments and other parties to affirm support of the right of all citizens to walk along the shoreline of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence (River).”

Approved by the multi-member organization on June 17, the resolution goes on to call on the three levels of government on both sides of the international border “to take back into public ownership waterfront properties along the Great Lakes as they become available to ensure public access for future generations.” Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

The chances of the headquarters for Niagara, Ontario’s police services remaining in downtown St. Catharines appear to be growing dimmer ever time the region’s council meets to discuss the subject.

One of the two buildings the Niagara Regional Police occupy now in downtown St. Catharines. Possibly soon to be evacuated. Photo by Doug Draper.

This June 24, a majority on the council swept a report by St. Catharines Mayor Brian McMullan aside, making an 11th hour case for keeping the Niagara Regional Police Services’ headquarters in the downtown of his city. Following hours of discussion behind closed doors, the council decided instead to consider sites for a new police headquarters in Niagara Falls and other undisclosed locations.

Where ever a new police headquarters goes, it could cost the taxpayers of Niagara, Ontario as much as $100 million or more – possibly the largest capital expenditure for any single facility the region has approved in its 40-year history.

While no one on the region’s council is publicly disclosing sites for the new facilities, the current rumor is that the preferred location is in Niagara Falls, off Harold Stone Road and Stanley Avenue, on a ‘Brownfield’ where the old Cyanamid plant was located.

If the police headquarters is ultimately moved out of St. Catharine’s and the city altogether, it will obviously be a blow to that city’s downtown. At the very least it will mean another loss of many high-paying, professional employees from the city’s core – people who frequented local restaurants and perhaps spent a little time shopping downtown before returning to whatever suburb of whatever municipality in Niagara they live in.

But then, this isn’t the first time St. Catharine’s has lost and will continue to lose high-paid jobs in and near its downtown core. A mere six years ago, the city’s council still had a chance to put up a fight to put a 21st century hospital complex downtown, when the Niagara Health System was pushing to locate it on the fringes of the municipality, beyond a jungle of big box stores in west St. Catharine’s.

So one might reply to McMullen and company, why get all high and might now, and insist that a major public institution remain in an urban center, according to the province’s ‘Places to Grow’ plans, when there was no interest on the part of your city to keep an institution as significant as a hospital downtown? Who are you representing? The interests of your downtown or those who are profiting from this hospital being built on old west St. Catharines farmland, where developers have been having a field day speculating on the lands around it?

In other words, never mind trying to impress the province or the public with the idea that a major public institution like the police headquarters should remain in the city’s downtown. On the hospital file, you’ve already blown it!
So here are in Niagara, with our regional councillors working to decide where a new police headquarters for the region – one that could cost us $100 million or more – should go.

Among the questions we should continue to be asking are these – ‘Do we really need to move the regional headquarters out of St. Catharines and why? Why can’t the current buildings be made to work? And if we do need a new location, why can’t the public have a say in where, at least generally, a new headquarters , should go?

In other words, why can’t we, as the taxpayers finally have some say in this matter after all the closed door sessions our duly elected regional councillors have had? Why can’t we?

(Click on Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary of interest to residents in our greater Niagara region.)

By Doug Draper

There is another one of those editorial cartoons that can drive a columnist like me crazy, even though I love it.

We may think we still live in a democracy. But they need a wall to keep us out.

This one, by veteran cartoonist Brian Gable and featured last week on the editorial pages of The Globe and Mail, shows a nice old grandmotherly type who happens to be living inside the security zone in Toronto near the convention centre where the G20 summit is about to be held. As she is planting something in her yard, police armed with clubs and shields yell at her through a bullhorn; “Put down your elderberry!!! … Resistance is futile.” A caption accompanying the cartoon reads: “Toronto – Saplings removed because they could be used as weapons by G20 protestors.”

The reason I say a cartoon like this can drive a columnist crazy is that a great cartoonist like Gable can, with one drawing and a few words, capture the essence of an issue with as much, if not more punch than a columnist can deliver in hundreds of words. And this particular cartoon, in my view, sums up just as well as almost any column I’ve read over the past few weeks, the dark, draconian lengths our federal government is going to this month to provide security during the G20 summit in Toronto and G8 summit in the Muskoka area.

I have no illusions that I can match the punch of Gable’s June 17 cartoon with my words here. But as one Canadian who came of age feeling proud of our country’s image and its role as a democracy and peacemaker in the world, I can’t help but make some remarks on the spectacle that is unfolding for the rest of the world to see in the heart of one of our country’s largest cities. Continue reading →

A Commentary by Doug Draper

Well, it is a start.

Buses pull up to board passengers at a major transit hub in Welland. Photo by Doug Draper

For those of us who have been waiting and hoping for years that Niagara, Ontario’s regional government would finally take the wheel and launch a robust regional transit system that serves the residents of every local municipality across this region, the June 23 decision to cobble together the possible beginnings of such a system seems like a rather anemic step in that direction.

For those just pleased to see the regional government do anything to ignite a start on inter-municipal transit services in Niagara, the June 23 decision by a committee-of-the-whole meeting of the region’s council to grant the cities of St. Catharines, Niagara Falls and Welland eight new buses and a few million dollars in operating cash to make it happen may, as some declared, be a ‘historic occasion’.

There most certainly was, at the end of it all, a round of applause from members of the public and representative of local transit authorities sitting in the gallery of the regional council chambers when a majority of the councillors finally voted to start a system that grants transit authorities in the three cities the buses and funding to provide more rides between municipalities. Continue reading →

Niagara At Large features the following announcement for our readers’ information and for our readers comments. Please feel free to wade in to the discussion and debate in the comment boxes below.

NIAGARA FALLS, ONTARIO, June 24, 2010 – The City of Niagara Falls today celebrated the groundbreaking of an addition to the Children’s Aid Society office for Family and Children’s Services in Niagara. 

Federal minister John Baird and Niagara Falls, Ontario MPP Kim Kraitor join a child in a groundbreaking for new facilites in Niagara for kids in crisis.

Canada’s Minister of Transport and Infrastructure John Baird; the Honourable Rob Nicholson, P.C., Q.C. Member of Parliament for Niagara Falls, Minister of Justice, and Attorney General of Canada; Kim Craitor, Member of Provincial Parliament for Niagara Falls; and Michael Boucher, Vice President of the Board of Directors, Family and Children’s Services Niagara, participated in the groundbreaking ceremonies for this important infrastructure project. 

“The work of the Children’s Aid Society is vital to the people in our region,” said Minister Baird. “Helping to fund a new Family Centre through Canada’s Economic Action Plan is another way that the Government of Canada is supporting Canadian communities and we are pleased to be a part of this worthwhile project that has such a positive impact on this community.”

“The children, youth and families of the Niagara region will benefit immensely from the improvements this new facility will bring to the important work of Family and Children’s Services,” said Minister Nicholson. “The federal government is committed to helping communities by contributing to important local infrastructure projects such as this one.”

“Today’s investment demonstrates our government’s commitment to strengthening Ontario’s not-for-profit sector,” said Laurel Broten, Minister of Children and Youth Services. “Our Open Ontario plan ensures that we will continue to deliver valuable community services to at-risk families and children.” Continue reading →

A Commentary by Doug Draper

Many of you may have heard the legendary tale about the dance band on the Titanic playing the mournful hymn ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’, after the giant liner struck the iceberg and was slowly going down. Actually, according to the accounts of Titanic survivors, the band spent most of its last gig playing more cheerful music, including upbeat ragtime hits of the day like ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’.

The Niagara Health System's annual general meeting of board was an exercise in self gratification. Photo by Doug Draper

I thought about the Titanic dance band, playing on while both it and the ship it was on was sinking into oblivion, as a I left the annual meeting this June 22 of the Niagara Health System’s board.

For all of the many challenges and controversies this board – responsible for managing most of what is left of the hospital sites in Niagara, Ontario – it was a meeting It was a meeting that lasted all of 30 minutes, at the most, with a good part of it taken up by the NHS’s CEO, Debbie Sevenpifer, and the board’s chair, Betty Lou Souter, making self-congratulatory remarks about the achievements of the past year and even better things they feel lay ahead. All while most of the rest of the board members – appointed by Sevenpifer and her minions – sat there like a lump.

“Together, we are all up for the challenge and I am excited to work with others to raise the bar (for health care) in Niagara,” said Sevenpifer, as she discussed efforts to reduce waiting times for patients in what is left of Niagara’s emergency rooms and for patients awaiting surgery. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

“The sense of urgency that seems to have been lost in the efforts to expand the Buffalo-Erie river crossing should be renewed. ….”

Arlene White, director of the Binational Tourism Alliance representing many tourist, business and other partners in our greater Niagara region, speaking at a forum earlier this June. Photo by Doug Draper.

That was the first line of an editorial in The Buffalo News on the pressing need for a companion crossing for the 83-year-old Peace Bridge. It is a message that could have been published on the paper’s editorial pages yesterday. But it wasn’t published yesterday.

The line was published in The Buffalo News nine years ago this summer in an editorial that went on to say that Peace Bridge – however great service is delivers to our binational region and so many others in the two countries it links “is a bottleneck now” and further delay in constructing a companion span next to it “would mean major traffic problems and missed economic growth. …”

“It is important to do this bridge expansion right, but it’s also important to move it along as quickly as possible,” that editorial went on to say.

Nine years later, government agencies on both sides of the Niagara River are still reviewing architectural renditions for a companion span that, if it were approved and funding available tomorrow, would still take years to build.

That is only one of the challenges residents and businesses on both sides of our border face during times that have been tough for our binational region going back to 9/11 when homeland security concerns kicked in and border crossings between us dropped.

“We need to move forward,” says Arlene White, director of the not-for-profit Binational Tourism Alliance representing numerous tourism and other business partners on both sides of international border in our greater Niagara region.  “The sooner we get the twin span the better. If we don’t get on with it, it is a missed opportunity.” Continue reading →

Foreword by Doug Draper

This July 1 through July 4 marks the 24th anniversary of the Friendship Festival, a four-day cross-border festival celebrating almost two centuries of friendship and peace between U.S. and Canadian citizens on both sides of our international Niagara border.

Fort Erie/Buffalo Friendship Festival. File photo courtesty of Brad Murphy

And you can’t get much more ‘hands across the border’ – the name of an event organized last year and to take place again this July 4 on the Peace Bridge – than this Friendship Festival organized jointly by residents in Buffalo, New York and Fort Erie, Ontario, highlighting both Canada Day on July 1 and America’s Independence Day on the Fourth of July.

In the formative years of this festival, I was a reporter for a daily newspaper in Niagara, Ontario and asked one of the Fort Erie organizers what was one of the drivers behind it. The person on the other end of the phone said that in many ways, people in the Buffalo and Fort Erie areas feel that they share more in common with each other than they do with people living in communities around, let’s say, Washington, D.C. or Ottawa, Ontario. That continues to remain the case to this day as residents on both sides work on the challenges we mutually face around generating new jobs, and regenerating our economies, communities, transportation systems and ecosystems for a health and prosperity for families, friends and neighbours in the 21st century.

The Friendship Festival is another opportunity each year for residents on both sides of the Niagara River to bond in a celebration of that special binational relationship. Continue reading →

A War of 1812 Bicentennial Peace Garden was dedicated on June 18 at Niagara University in Niagara, County, New York.

The garden, located between St. Vincent’s and Alumni Halls on the university’s campus, is a partnership between Niagara, the Binational Economic & Tourism Alliance, and the 1812 Legacy Council.

The speakers at the event this June included Niagara Falls, N.Y., Mayor Paul Dyster and Nancy E. McGlen, Ph.D., dean of Niagara’s College of Arts and Sciences. “This event is part of an effort between Ontario and New York state to celebrate the 200 years of peace between the United Sates and Canada,” said Dr. Thomas Chambers, chair of the university’s history department.

“These beautiful places along the borders of the two countries will help to commemorate the years of peace, and promote binational cooperation and recognition of the resources that are available for historical tourism.”

Niagara’s is the second peace garden established. The date was selected to commemorate the 198th anniversary of the United States’ declaration of war against Great Britain. The first Peace Garden coming up to the bicentennial of the War of 1812 was dedicated in the town of Grimsby in Niagara, Ontario this May.

(Click on Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to our greater binational Niagara region.)

By Doug Draper

Ontario Transportation Minister Kathleen Wynne calls it a “a cultural shift.”

Ontario Transportation Minister Kathleen Wynne

Others may call it ‘about time’ after decades of everyone from the late and legendary advocate for sound urban planning Jane Jacobs to other respected voices in the field of planning and transportation in North America, not to mention countless citizen groups across this region and continent, pressing governments over and over again to forge more environmentally friendly and economically sustainable transportation plans.

But at least we gave a transportation minister in Ontario who finally seems to be interested in taking seriously a ‘cultural shift’ away from building ever more roads and highways for ever more trucks to cars, to a transportation system that places more emphasis on rail and buses, biking and walking, and other modes of moving around and through our communities and regions.

We will probably never seen the end of cars, said Wynne during an interview with Niagara At Large in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. this June 21 where she was about to meet with representatives in the marine transportation industry. But the province, at long last, has to get past putting so much emphasis on building more highways and roads, and move to other, more sustainable environmental alternatives.

“We have thought for generations that we have endless resources and endless space, but we can’t  just keep building roads,” said Wynne during the interview. “That is old thinking. We know now that we don’t have and that our footprint (with all the road and highway building) is having a negative impact on the environment.” Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

They don’t call them “persistent” environmental poisons for nothing!

More than three decades after the manufacture of chemicals like PCBs, Mirex and a trichlorophenol-based herbicide that produced the most toxic form of dioxin as an unwanted byproduct was banned in North America, they continue to menace the waters of the Lower Niagara River and Lake Ontario.

According to the most recent guide booklets released by the New York State and Ontario governments for consuming fish caught in state and provincial waters, there are still fish in the lower Niagara and Lake Ontario the governments are advising people to limit their consumption of or not eat at all due to an accumulation of high levels of toxic chemicals in their flesh.

This remains the case despite many years of cleanup work by governments and industries on both sides that have reduced the flow of hazardous chemicals to the Niagara River by well over 50 per cent.

That’s right, despite all of the cleanup successes the governments can rightfully boast about, a person is advised not to eat a lake trout from the lower Niagara River that is over two feet long due to the presence of worrisome levels of chemicals like PCBs, Mires and Dioxin the meat of the fish. The same is true for many other larger species of fish from the lower river and the downstream waters of Lake Ontario to the St. Lawrence River. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

As I gathered early this June with a few hundred others in the old St. Thomas Anglican Church in St. Catharines, Ontario, I felt like I was saying farewell – once again and possibly for the last time – to the last real daily newspaper residents on the Ontario side of our greater Niagara region had.

Henry Burgoyne, the last publisher of The St. Catharines Standard when it was a newspaper, with his mother, Dorothy Burgoyne Doolittle, offering a farewell party to those of us who enjoyed working for them.

The gathering was, in and of itself, a sad one. It was for Dorothy Burgoyne Doolittle, who passed away this May 31 in her 90th year.

And for those who may not know, Dorothy Burgoyne Doolittle was the last matriarch of the Burgoyne family when that fine family still owned The St. Catharines Standard up to the time it sold the paper in 1996.

I said my first farewell to that paper a couple of years later, in 1998, when along with many other journalists, who had love working there for years, I blasted my way out of the place in disgust after Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour (then a newspaper baron and now a jail bird) ripped the heart and soul out of the newsroom, along with a bunch of sycophants that have bowed to their knees to every corporate boss man that has run the place like a sausage-making factory to this day.

Damn right. I found myself running out of a newsroom I once loved running into, and I have never been back. I won’t even walk or drive my car down Queen Street, past the front doors of the red-brick building still housing what’s left of The Standard, and I feel as sad about that as I did when I heard the recent news that Dorothy Burgoyne Doolittle had died.

The Burgoynes, who virtually founded that newspaper in 1891 and built it for more than a century into a formidable voice for St. Catharines and the surrounding region, exemplified the kind of owners of newspapers that are all but gone. Unlike the corporate chains that own most of the newspapers on this continent today (carpetbaggers, I often call them) the Burgoynes lived in and cared passionately for the community where they owned and operated a newspaper and, even more than that, they loved newspapers – not just as a business but (as corny as it may sound) as a public trust. Continue reading →

A foreward by Doug Draper

As many fellow residents on the Niagara, Ontario side of our border may know by now, the province’s premier, Dalton McGuinty, is marking Canada Day this July 1 with the launching of a harmonized sales tax – more infamously known as the HST – that will favour big business at the expense of middle and lower-income consumers.

McGuinty, who shows every sign of being a firm believer in the ‘trickle down’ mythology of economics foisted on peoples by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, wherein if we give huge tax breaks to corporations they may create a few more jobs, is determined to move forward with the HST as a replacement regressive tax for the GST  despite polls consistently showing that more than 70 per cent of Ontarians are against it.

Both opposition parties, the Conservatives and NDP, have been slamming the government over this tax for months now, but to little avail. There is little sign the government is listening to anyone but some members of the business community who obviously like the shift of taxes away from them and toward the rest of us. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

Ding, dong, any plans for cutting a ‘mid-peninsula highway’ through the heart of Ontario’s Niagara region at long last seems dead.

Tyler Drygas, a senior environmental planner and URS consultant for Ontario's transportation ministry who is second to right in this photo and in the background, outlines transportation strategy for region with area residents. Photo by Doug Draper

At a public information session, hosted by Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation in Welland, Ontario this June 17, Roger Ward, a team leader in the ministry’s transportation planning branch, outlined to area residents in attendance the elements a strategy being developed for moving people and goods within and through Niagara and the Greater Toronto Corridor.

And here is the encouraging part. Not once, through Ward’s 15-minute presentation did he or any of his fellow ministry representatives make any reference to a ‘mid-peninsula highway’.

In fact, on the area of a map of the GTA and Niagara area where, for the better part of a decade, there was a fat line depicting where, generally, this new, multi-lane highway would go, there are now only the three words; “continue monitoring needs.”

What that phrase does, in the parlance of the ministry, is effectively put any plan to construct a new highway cutting from the Hamilton/Burlington area, and south of the Niagara Escarpment, through some of the nicest farming lands and forests and watersheds in the region, to the Queen Elizabeth Way and the U.S. border to Buffalo, is at the rock bottom of any transportation improvements now being considered.

Some may not like it, but for countless thousands of Niagara and Burlington area residents that have, for years, opposed this highway as a threat to the environment and as one more driver for ever more trucks and cars, the fact that this plan has been placed in a coma should come as good news. At an estimated cost of anywhere between $1- and $2 billion, and possibly even more, its virtual death should almost certainly be greeted as good news for the province’s taxpayers. So what is the ministry proposing in its latest ‘Draft Transportation Development Strategy’? Continue reading →

By Fiona McMurran

Remember Graham Chapman charging into the midst of a Monty Python sketch in military uniform, shouting, “Stop it! Stop this immediately! This is getting TOO silly!”

The nonsense surrounding the June 2010 G8 and G20 Summits sure could use Graham Chapman and the Python gang.

This silliness is costing Canadian taxpayers serious money, however, most of it being spent on security.

Security for whom? And why?

Well, the G (standing for “Group”) 20 brings together the leaders, finance ministers and central bankers of the twenty most prosperous (in terms of GNP) nations in the world.

That’s a powerful group. And certainly there may well be people who’d like to see them all, individually or collectively, disappear. So security at Pearson International Airport will be tight. And as for Toronto – well, the downtown will be a no-go area, complete with its own wall. Continue reading →

A Commentary by Doug Draper

In the 1970s Academy Award- winning film ‘Network’, there is a scene where the head of the corporation that runs one of America’s major TV networks calls the news anchor in to the boardroom for a bit of a dressing down.

“You get up on your little screen,” says the corporate head, “and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world now.”

This lesson for the news anchor crossed this commentator’s mind over the past couple of months as we have all watched, on our little screens at home, the disaster unfolding off the U.S. shores of a Gulf of Mexico that is a major habitat for wildlife and one of the most productive sources for seafood on this continent. It came to mind over and over again as it looked like BP, one of the largest petroleum corporations in the world and the perpetrator of what is now recognized by the White House as the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, was (and still is) calling most of the shots on trying to control this monumental mess.

Even this June 15, as U.S. President Barack Obama went on the air from the Oval Office for the first time to address the disaster, his words about BP’s “recklessness” and one of his crowning lines; “Now is the moment for this generation … to embark on a national mission … to seize our destiny” were seductive, but seemed to fall short of any real detail or substance. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

 So is this what you have to do to get Canada’s government to back down on implementing a harmonized sales tax? Threaten to “shut down” the country?

Apparently it is, according to a front-page story in the June 16 edition of The Globe and Mail. Obviously the fact that more than 70 per cent of the Ontario public is against the this tax – known more simply as the HST – doesn’t make an impression on our elected politicians in Toronto and Ottawa. They appear to have every intention of imposing it on the majority of the province’s residents this July 1 anyway.

But if a segment of the population – in this case, Ontario’s aboriginals – threatens to blockade roads and take other actions that could disrupt the G8 and G20 summits set to take place in Huntsville, Ont. and Toronto later this June, then all of a sudden the federal government is ready to negotiate an exemption for this regressive tax for that group. Continue reading →

By Fiona McMurran

The G8 and the G20 Summits are making headlines. But there’s an alternative that’s not received much attention in the media.

It’s called The People’s Summit. And it doesn’t cost a billion dollars. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t cost the taxpayer anything.
Taking place this coming weekend, June 18 through 20, at Ryerson University in downtown Toronto, the overall theme of the 2010 People’s Summit is Building a Movement for a Just World. Civil society’s “counter Summit” brings together community organizers, activists, non-governmental organizations, independent media, artists, workers, ordinary people—to educate, empower, and ignite positive change.

Sponsored by a host of citizen groups, such as the Council of Canadians, and environmental, social justice, labour and peace organizations, the People’s Summit is an alternative to the ’self-appointed, undemocratic assembly of the world’s wealthiest countries.’

The three-day program features some 100 workshops, film screenings, panels, strategy sessions, art, performance, and lectures, organized into five thematic streams: Global Justice; the Environment and Climate Change; Human Rights and Civil Liberties; Economic Justice; and Building the Movement. Continue reading →

A Commentary by Doug Draper

This time, I don’t know why Niagara, Ontario’s regional government placed ads in local newspapers, notifying the public of yet another meeting on the tired old subject of inter-municipal transit.

Buses recently line up at the Welland transit station for passengers. Why don't we have buses lining up for more of us in this region? Photo by Doug Draper

It has placed these ads time and time before, and for whatever price the ads have csot us, where has it got us?

After a decade of meetings and surveys and scope groups on the question of whether Niagara at long last needs a transit system that serves all of this region, why should members of the public even bother turning out to another one of these meetings?

These meetings are turning bogus!

Think that sounds a little harsh? Well just consider the following.

One regional council after another in Niagara, Ontario has been told, over and over again for more than a decade now, that a majority of residents want more a robust transit system here, for all of the region’s residents. Yet there has never been enough of a majority on the regional council with enough guts to act on launching us one.

Looking for a ‘profile of courage’ when it comes to our regional councillors when it comes to delivering us the same kind of regional transit systems that regions like Durham, Waterloo and a majority of others across Ontario have? There hardly is one. Continue reading →

(Every year for most of the last century, Crystal Beach in Fort Erie was a summer fun place for residents in Niagara, Ontario, Buffalo and beyond. It is gone with the wind now, but this column may help bring a bit of the fun back. Too bad it is gone.)

By William Hogg

“Hey, it’s the twenty-fourth of May, Crystal Beach opens today!”

The comet rollercoaster, now a feature at a park in upstate New York, looming behind lineups of people way back when at Crystal Beach.

That was the top news. It was shouted in every schoolyard on both sides of the Niagara. And within a day or two, every Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer around began to pluck up nerve to skip school. Five of us grade six boys (plopped into a class of thirty grade seven girls) finally did it. Pocketing our stashes of nickels and dimes and hopping our bicycles, we raced up the Dominion Road – to adventure and fun – to Crystal Beach. As did the truant officers rattling along behind in their green Nashes, old gray Willy’s-Eights and chrome-plated Buicks.

All other cars, headed in the same direction, bumper to bumper, skimmed by inches from our small boys’ narrow shoulders, all made skinnier by the Great Depression and wartime rationing.

At the park gate we spread out: to the Fun House to be spooked, all ‘softies’ off to the Merry-Go-Round, a ride on the Miniature Train, a whirl on Flying Scooters, and up and away in the Ferris Wheel for a breathtaking view and to get height-acclimatized for – the Cyclone which made you a he-man or made you throw up, whichever came first. And then on to gorging on hotdogs, sugared waffles, candy-apples, air-filled candyfloss, pulled taffy, buttered popcorn. And finally, an ice-cold Loganberry cooled the seething brow on a hot sticky day. Continue reading →

From  Lynda Goodridge and the Fort Erie Arts Council

Take one bright summer day and add a lovely waterfront setting.  Mix in the creativity of talented artists and musicians and you have the perfect ingredients for a fun-filled family event as the 6^th Annual Crystal Beach Arts & Folk Festival takes place on Sunday, June 27^th, from 11 am to 5 pm.

File photo from an earlier Crystal Beach show.

            With beautiful Waterfront Park in Crystal Beach, Ontario as the backdrop, this favourite summer event promises even more this year for those attending.  The Fort Erie Arts Council has expanded its focus to include artisans, in addition to visual artists of all types.  New this year, as well, will be a full day of music provided by popular local and regional musicians, including Elton Lammie, the Aurijinal Junes, Rita Visser, Richard Hunt and the duo, Brad Hiliker & Michele Guy.

            The Festival showcases artists from southwestern Ontario and Western New York whose works range from watercolours, acrylics and photography to sculpture, glass art and much more.  The variety of styles and mediums ensures that there will be something for every taste at this exciting venue. Continue reading →

By John Bacher

It is unfortunate that the Project Niagara proposal is a great scheme, in the wrong place.

Looking northeast across a stretch of the old canal in Welland where the author of this post argues would be a better site than Niagara-on-the-Lake for a summer music festival.

Having a Niagara summer music festival, with the backing of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, is a good way to promote green, environmentally friendly tourism. To achieve such an end, it is wrong to build it on lands owned by Canada’s  National Parks service. 

The proposed  site should be developed into a constructed wetland to have Niagara on the Lake’s outdated sewage lagoons work better. This goal would be complimented by the reforestation of the former Department of National Defense rifle range, a move that would enhance the protection of Lake Ontario’s shoreline from predicted more fierce storms from climate change. The entire area  should become Tecumseh National Park. It could be up and running in its vision of ecological restoration based on the zeal for protecting forests of this prophetic native Canadian statesman, in time for the War of 1812 bicentennial. Continue reading →

 By Donna Brok

The third annual Orchard Parkway Garden Walk in Niagara Falls, New York, presented by the Orchard Parkway Block Club, is being held Saturday, July 10, rain or shine. It is a self-guided, walking tour, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

One of many properties featured on Niagara Falls, New York garden walk.

The Walk is free to the public, and the organizers only ask that you bring a canned good to donate to the local food bank. Boxes will be conveniently placed at the white welcome tent for your donation.

The Walk began in 2008 with three friends discussing possibilities for promoting beautification efforts within the City of Niagara Falls, New York, and currently, this Walk is one of the eighteen Garden Walks listed on the five week long National Buffalo Garden Festival. For information on the National Buffalo Garden Festival go to their website at, www.nationalgardenfestival.com/.

With the help and hard work of the Orchard Parkway Block Club, there are now approximately 40 gardens open for public viewing on Orchard Parkway and Chilton Avenue. Garden enthusiasts of all ages are welcome, and there is a small giveaway for the kids. See photos of the unique and delightful gardens on prior Walks at the Orchard Parkway Block Club website, found at www.orchardparkway.com/. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

There we go again. The 12 mayors and other 20 or so we directly elect to serve on Niagara, Ontario’s regional council gathered behind closed doors again this June 10 for more than six hours – MORE THAN SIX HOURS – to discuss where a new regional police headquarters should go.

And Niagara At Large has one question for them and for you.

At a cost of some $70 million to taxpayers across the Ontario side of this region, when are a majority of these councillors going to vote to let us in on the discussion of where a new police headquarters should go? When, if ever? Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

Yes for sure, most of the news we are getting through our newspapers, through
television and other sources is damn awful.

There is the Gulf oil disaster, the continued economic mess in Europe and the rest of the world, and the list goes on and
on.

But 53 years on, there is still the Allentown Art Festival in our greater Niagara region of Buffalo – oh yes, there is!

One of the oldest and greatest art and craft festivals within a short drives away is once again unfolding this weekend  along several blocks of Buffalo’s Delaware Avenue this Saturday, June 12 and this Sunday, June 13.

More than half a century ago, this art festival was founded in one of the most historic neighbourhoods – Allentown – in one of the greatest old city’s of America, and that is Buffalo. If you don’t mind doing a little walking and are still looking for something to do this weekend, you might want to take the Allentown Art Festival in. Enjoy it and  the beautiful architecture and neighbourhoods this city has to offer. It is truly one of the nicest spring and summer events of the year.

Niagara At Large leaves you with their website for further information at www.allentownartfestival.com.

(Click on Niagara At Large.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to our binatinal Niagara region.)

By Doug Draper

The environmental and economic disaster unfolding right now in the Gulf of Mexico is one more stark reminder of how vital water – good clean water – is to living any kind of a life that has any quality to it on this planet.

The life-sustaining waters of our Great Lakes from above. Image featured in the film Waterlife.

Closer to home, there are the Great Lakes, collectively home to the largest supply of fresh water in a world where in too many places in this same world, people are literally dying for the lack of it. And we may not be killing it all at once like the oil industry is in the Gulf with a mile-down-deep oil gusher, but we Canadians and Americans have been doing our bit over the past couple of hundred years to stress the health of these vital lake waters seriously.

This Friday June 11, I am proud to say that Global TV in Canada (and I hope our American neighbours have it available on their cable services) that Niagara native Kevin McMahon, and someone who just happens to be a dear old journalism colleague and friend of mine is celebrating the debut on television of ‘Waterlife’, his film documentary focusing on the many challenges our Great Lakes continue to face as a life-sustaining source of water and economic driver for tens-of-millions of citizens in Canada and the United States.

’Waterlife’  is scheduled to air on Global Television this Friday, June 11 from 9:00PM – 11:00PM. Check www.globaltv.com/schedule or your server of cable programs for the channel.

From here on in, Niagara At Large is going to include a fine promo of this film produced by Primitive Entertainment, Kevin McMahon’s Toronto-based film company, on ‘Waterlife’, the film. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

The brutal, sadistic mutilation and wounding of rabbits, chickens and other animals late this May at Happy Rolph’s Bird Sanctuary – a park featuring a mix of wild ducks and domesticated animals in St. Catharines, Ontario – has been met with understandable outrage from the public.

Some of the animals at Happy Rolph's, where a violent act of animal abuse recently occurred. Photo by Doug Draper

This park, where children can come to view a variety of animals and birds, including goats, cows, rabbits and hordes of ducks and geese in a verdant setting along the shores of Lake Ontario, has been delivering happy memories to those who have visited it for more than three decades now.

But late this March, Happy Rolph’s became the scene of a brutal and sadistic attack by two or more individuals who entered it after hours and killed and wounded some of the animals, and left the decapitated head of one of the park’s rabbits displayed on a stake for horrified visitors to discover the following day. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

When it comes to spending tens-of-millions of our regional taxdollars in Niagara, Ontario on where a new police headquarters should go,  most of the decision-making will apparently continue to take place behind closed doors.

The current Niagara Police Headquarters in St. Catharines, Ontario. Apparently it isn't good enough.

That is the way it has been for well over two years now – through one long session behind closed doors after another, running so long into the night sometimes that even the community TV station there to cover the meeting (the good people from Cogeco) finally pack up their gear and went home.

So much for democracy when it comes to almost anything to do with our regional police.

Seems that when it comes to the Niagara Regional Police Service – one that the taxpayers of Niagara, Ontario pay more than $110 million annually on operating costs alone – accountability and transparency get the short end of the stick. And unfortunately, and here is something to keep in mind as the municipal elections approach this fall – too many of the directly elected councillors and mayors now sitting on the regional council let the NRP get away with doing its thing behind closed doors.

In that spirit, the regional council will be going behind closed doors again this Thursday, June 10 to debate the critical matter of where a new central headquarters site should go for our police at a cost to us that will surpass $60 million. Reportedly, at least four sites are under consideration but we, the taxpayers, don’t know where they are because no one on council will tell us. Continue reading →

By Linda McKellar

The Niagara Health System – the body the province has left in charge of operating most of the hospital services in our region – has become a business.

The current trend in business is to concentrate production into mega factories and shut down peripheral, less profitable sites to amalgamate manpower and resources in central locations. This does not necessarily mean improved quality but does increase profits.

Fort Erie residents picket a bank in their community this June over banks joining province to privatize health care.

People in the small towns are left without jobs and the associated services, and the towns suffer and die. An example is the “mega farm” where animals are stuffed into cages, never allowed to move or see the sun, injected full of chemicals to make them fat and mature quickly to produce food of questionable quality, and put the small mom and pop farmers out of business.

Is this quality and progress? For businessmen it is! This paradigm in business is a wonderful pattern for  financial gain and increased production. The problem with applying this to health care is that people need to be close to the services and people are not products!

This past May 27 CTV news stated that Ontario Minister of Health Deb Matthews just received recommendations from the TD bank on how to cut costs in health care. Since when do banks run hospitals instead of medical professionals who are, by the way, currently being actively silenced? What more proof do we need about who is running our hospitals?

Since most pleas to logic and compassion have fallen on deaf ears, perhaps it is time for communities across the province (and this is occurring all over Ontario) to focus on those supplying the high-interest loans to build these P3 hospitals (P3 meaning hospitals that are now being built in partnership with private corporations) in big urban centres. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

So Toronto and Ottawa want to put up big security fences and show off to the world all of the high-end police gear they got – the glass shields, armoured horses, gas canisters and all the other riot stuff – for the G8 and G20 summits this late June. All at a cost to Canadian taxpayers of close to $1 billion.

A recent spring scene around Buffalo' New York's scenic Delaware Park area. Photo by Doug Draper

It’s an unprecedented amount of money spent in any other country hosting a meeting of the G8 or G20, but apparently Toronto and Ottawa don’t care. Well maybe we shouldn’t care either if we ever bother trying to ply our ways through the clogged highways again for a trip to Toronto.

If Toronto wants to be that inhosptable to all but the elites, then maybe it is time for the rest of us to say  to hell with Toronto, if we haven’t already.

If Toronto wants to be a fenced-off, police state this June, there are nicer places to go and they include staying right here in Niagara and, if you want a bigger city atmosphere, by all means give a bow to our neighbouring city of Buffalo. Continue reading →

By Pamela Minns

I am continually amazed at the innovative ways which Heritage Canada Foundation finds to assist in the preservation of Canada’s built heritage.

The Canadian Heritage Foundation is working to restore this century old church in British Columbia. Can we do the same for more of our historic old buildings in Niagara?

Over a period of time, they have made several appeals to the Federal government calling for measures to encourage the rehabilitation and re-use of Canada’s older buildings, stating that we need measures which assist and reward those who show leadership in using existing buildings. In Canada over the last 30 years, 20 per cent of our pre-1920 heritage buildings have been demolished, a condition normally associated with war or natural disaster. All of this adds to landfill and environmental problems.

The Heritage Canada Foundation has called on the Federal government to recognize its important role as the trustee of legacy buildings and to put in place better protection for heritage buildings under its care and those transferred to the private sector. In the United States federal agencies have been required to fill their accommodation needs in heritage buildings first.

The Foundation also publishes an excellent magazine entitled “Heritage” and one of the features is a list called “Top Ten Endangered Places List”. They have just announced a new website : www.savingplaces.ca Their communique stated : ” Developed in collaboration with PTV Productions, the website is a companion to Saving Places, a new Canadian TV series featuring the restoration of significant historic sites, two of which were previously included on HCF’ s Top Ten Endangered Places List. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

I can’t help but think that Osama bin Laden is off in a cave somewhere in the boundary regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, sitting in front of a screen flashing those live images of oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. And he’s laughing with glee!

Dead bird floating in oily goo

Yes indeed, can’t you just imagine that psycho sitting there with a grin almost as wide as the one that must have been smeared across his face on 9/11 while all of that oily goo keeps washing up along the shores of Louisiana and Mississippi, killing off the wildlife, shutting down one of the continent’s richest fisheries, and otherwise ravaging the economies of those regions.

‘Wow,’ he may very well be thinking as the crude slimes up those wide, white  and wonderful beaches of Pensacola and, if the oil keeps spewing from that hole, could conceivably creep around the Florida panhandle and wreak havoc as far up the eastern coastline as Prince Edward Island. ‘I wish I’d done that.’

But bin Laden and his zealous band of wackos didn’t do that. We didn’t need a couple of his kooks flying a plane into the oil platform that went aflame off the coast of Louisiana and and started this whole thing this past April. We did it to ourselves! Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

If you need one more reason to write off this Liberal government in Ontario, this may be it.

Remember Eleanor Slithered? I’m sure our American readers wouldn’t. But they may take some disquieting comfort (or may be just as depressed) in knowing that there are governments on the Canadian side of the border that are just as willing to reward scumbags from past administrations with lucrative pension packages.

 Obviously one Ontario government that has no bones about doing it is that of Premier Dalton McGuinty and one of his senior cabinet ministers, St. Catharines MPP Jim Bradley who, in his particular case, has always tried to come off as if he gives a fig about common people while obviously not carrying about kissing up to the privileged like Clitheroe with generous rewards at the expense of common people.

Getting back to who Clitheroe is or was, she ran the former Ontario Hydro (a publicly owned corporation) until 2002 until the former Conservative government of outgoing and incoming premiers Harris and Ernie Eves, with the current Conservative leader Tim Hudak right there in cabinet, almost had no choice but to fire here out the door over reports of hefty perks she was receiving, by way of travel, etc., on top of her $2.2 million salary.

The McGuinty Liberals, including Niagara’s Bradley, were just as righteous back then in calling for Clitheroe’s head. But now we find out, according to a top-of-front-page story in the June 4 edition of The Toronto Star, that McGuinty, Bradley and the others have been continuing to feed Clitheroe a monthly pension of $25,637.08 the former Conservative of Harris/Eves/Hudak went along with, and one the McGuinty/Bradley gang has continued to feed her. Continue reading →

By Dylan Powell

Last week, people from around the world reacted with outrage and disgust at an undercover video which detailed sadistic abuse of animals at a family farm in Plain City, Ohio.

Better times at an animal sanctuary similar to Happy Rolph's.

The Farm owner Gary Conklin, swiftly fired farm worker Billy Joe Gregg Jr, offering him up to the media as a sacrifice for what happens on farms across the globe on a daily basis. At Billy Joe Gregg Jr’s hearing he asked that he be released for numerous financial reasons, but also because he wanted to look after his animals. The irony of those words exposed the grand lie that permeates our societies relationship with animals; how can we love one and not another?

For those who live in the Niagara Region, this morning brought with it news of another horrific case of animal cruelty. Police believe that two suspects broke into a local petting zoo, Happy Rolph’s, and left a wake of carnage: four dead animals, one rabbit decapitated with its head mounted on a stake, numerous other animals shot at with BB and Pellet Guns and also a missing baby goat.

Animal cruelty cases are definitely nothing new to the Niagara Region, anyone remember Bailey the Maine Coon Cat? Or even more recently the neglect and misuse of animals by the T.E.A.R.S organization? There is a void in this region that needs to be filled when it comes to proper education. Notably, when I say education, I do NOT mean entertainment. Happy Rolph’s Petting Zoo, which operates in conjunction but separate from the Bird Sanctuary, is in and of itself NOT an educational tool for children on how to properly respect animals. Continue reading →

Niagara At Large is posting the following exchange in the Ontario legislature this June 1 between Conservative Leader Tim Hudak and the province’s health minister Deb Matthews.

this sign, produced by Fort Erie residents, sends out a stark message that the community's hospital was downsized to something less than a hospital when its emergency room was closed in 2009.

In the exchange, Hudak pushed the minister to re-open the ER department in Fort Erie, declaring that if her Liberal government doesn’t, a future Conservative government will.

Hudak also urged the government to stop sitting on a report prepared by the province’s ombudsman, Andre Marin, on the possible mismanagement of hospital services in Niagara by the region’s Local Health Integration Network – all of this while member’s of the Yellow Shirt Brigade, a citizens group from Niagara’s southern tier fighting for the restoration of hospital services, looked on from the legislature’s gallery.

Read far more about the mess that has been made of hospital services in Niagara, Ontario by visiting Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com

ORAL QUESTIONS – June 1, 2010

Mr. Tim Hudak: A question to the Acting Premier-I want to first welcome the Yellow Shirt Brigade to the Legislature here today, tireless advocates for health care in Fort Erie and Port Colborne.

Sadly, the Yellow Shirt Brigade has witnessed the closure of the 24-hour ER in Fort Erie under Dalton McGuinty. Then Dalton McGuinty hid behind the veils of his LHIN to justify this cut in health care.

To add insult to injury, André Marin, the Ombudsman, did an investigation of LHIN decision-making in Hamilton and Niagara, and you’ve buried that in this circus of a show that you put the Ombudsman through these last number of months.

I ask the Acting Premier: Will you do the right thing? Will you reopen the 24-hour ER in Fort Erie? If you don’t, a PC government will. Continue reading →

By John Bacher

Currently there is a lull before the storm of the planned Ontario Municipal Board hearing on the Fort Erie Canadian Motorway Speed

Fort Erie residents enjoy nature walks around wetlands near lands planned for mammoth motor racing facility.

way.

This scheme, facilitated by the amendments to the Fort Erie and Niagara Region Official Plans which are under appeal, would designate some 817 acres of land that are now protected as “Good General Agricultural Land”, into a “Special Policy” area.

The delay in the OMB hearing is because the Town of Fort Erie and the Niagara Region are seeking to develop new zoning categories to replace the agricultural designation which now prohibits motorways. At the same time, proponents of the motorway are likely engaged in arm-twisting with the province over the fate of a predominately Pin Oak Swamp Forest. This is an area the developer seeks to cross with a bridge that would allow motorcars to race over the forest below. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

Can’t help but think of the late Margherita Howe of Niagara-on-the-Lake – who chaired a citizens group called Operation Clean in the late 1970s and 1980s to fight for cleaner water in the Niagara River – as I urge you to join the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority to join it this June 3 for a review of the remedial actions taken to protect this great watershed.

Photo of Niagara Falls courtesy of Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority.

This Thursday, June 3, the Conservation Authority and Niagara Parks Commission is inviting the public to join it, beginning at 6:30 p.m., at the Butterfly Conservatory Classroom along the Niagara Parkway in Niagara Falls, Ont. for a presentation of the work that has been done to protect this watershed and that of the adjoining Welland River.

This work began with the cooperation of Canada’s federal government, the province, the Conservation Authority and other agencies, along with volunteers from area citizen groups, more than two decades ago when Canada signed a “declaration of intent” with the United States to reduce the flow of damaging contaminants to the shared waters of the Niagara River. That declaration was signed after almost a decade of lobbying by citizens like Howe and others on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border. Continue reading →