A News Commentary by Doug Draper in Niagara, Ontario
Posted February 1st, 2016 on Niagara At Large
“We are trying to build a better community for our children,” said St. Catharines Mayor Walter Sendzik on behalf of his council as he began his 2016 State of the City address before a large luncheon gathering at Club Roma this past January 29th.
St. Catharines, Ontario Mayor Walter Sendzik delivers his ‘State of the City’ address with his grandfather’s lunch pail sitting in the foreground. Photo by Doug Draper
With those words, Sendzik walked over to a table near his podium and picked up a lunch pail that once belonged to his grandfather who emigrated to Canada during a time when events in his native Poland made life there very difficult and dangerous.
Sendzik said his grandfather, like all too many other immigrants, weathered his share of indignities which, in his case, included being called a “Pollock.” But he stood outside the gates of a factory in St. Catharines until they finally hired him and he carried that lunch pail back and forth for all the many years worked there.
That lunch pail, added Sendzik, sits in a place in his office as a reminder of what his and other immigrant families endure as they work to build a better life for their children.
Communities like St. Catharines have been built, in no small part, by people who came to them after “escaping tyranny elsewhere,” said Sendzik, and “in this community, we should not tolerate it when someone says (to an immigrant or refugee); ‘You are a terrorist. Go home.’”
“I am not going to tolerate it when someone says; “You are a terrorist. Go back home.’” the St. Catharines mayor repeated. “We are a welcoming community.”
Some 20 or 30 minutes, as his State of the City address, hosted by the Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce, was drawing to a close, Sendzik mentioned to the audience that a recently arrived family of refugees was seated at one of the tables as his guests and, although he said they could barely speak English, they would understand a welcome round of applause, which the audience stood and delivered.
Not once during any of this did the mayor make any direct reference to the obvious elephant in the room involving St. Catharines regional councillor Andy Petrowski and the ugly affair involving Donald Trump-like comments he made this past December 2015 on a local radio phone-in program.
On the program, Petrowski remarked that the new Canadian government’s plans, already underway, to welcome many thousands of Syrian refugees over a relatively short period of time could risk the possibility of terrorists getting in. It was a remark that had many individuals and groups, including some other members of Niagara Regional Council, recently elected St. Catharines MP Eric Bittle, and the Niagara Folk Arts Multicultural Centre and Niagara Police Association (representing rank and file police in the region), calling for his resignation from the Region’s Police Board – a resignation that came in January.
In between his story about his grandfather’s lunch pail and what it represents to him, and his request for welcoming applause for the refugee family, Sendzik used his address to talk about some of the recent positive developments for the city, including the announcement that an IKEA outlet will soon be moving in, the Port Weller Dry Docks coming back to life with jobs as it transitions into making renewable wind energy equipment, and the city being featured in major papers like The Toronto Star and Globe and Mail as a venue for its symphony orchestra and other performing arts.
The mayor also talking about how much more potential St. Catharines has to prosper given its location between a now booming Buffalo, New York and a City of Hamilton that is coming back to life, and as part of a region hosting two bustling post-secondary schools (Niagara College and Brock University) and that serves as an the intersection of 400 series highways (the 406 and QEW) and the Welland Canal.
“You have to look well past the horizon,” said Sendzik, to the possibility that the city can evolve into “one of the best places in North America” to live and work.
Sendzik said he also wants to see St. Catharines grow as a “compassionate city” that provides more opportunities to its “most vulnerable people,” including those who are homeless or are now jobless or living below the poverty level.
“If we all come at it from a sense that we are all in this together, we can build a more compassionate community,” he said.
A day before Sendzik delivered his State of the City address, I called his staff to ask if he was going to be reading from a prepared text, which is routinely the case with these speeches and in which case I would save myself a case of aching fingers after scribbling the whole thing out.
I was told that it was likely the mayor would not be leaning all that much on a prepared text to deliver his words and I was ultimately glad that he didn’t since this was one of the most refreshing addresses of its kind that I’ve covered over my 37 years in journalism.
The key messages around tolerance and compassion and building a more prosperous future for younger people were good to hear too– especially in a Niagara that has experienced its share of bad news in recent years around jobless numbers, aging hospitals, parochial spats over moving to one seamless, more accessible and affordable public transit system and other issues that matter to peoples’ lives in this region.
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