Monthly Archives: December 2009

By Doug Draper

Hard to believe but more  than a month  has gone by since we launched Niagara At Large and we are already receiving plenty of good vibrations from people across our greater Niagara region – from  both sides of our binational border.

Overlooking the mouth of the Niagara River and the shores of Youngstown, N.Y. fromi Niagara-on-the-Lake. Photo by Doug Draper

A good flow of email and calls of ‘Congratulations’, ‘Wow, what a great idea’,’It’s about time’ and ‘We desperately need alternatives to the old media” has already come pouring in from citizens from both sides of the border, and from some of the people representing us in government, and from business leaders and others who are looking for a new, independent source of news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to our region.

Niagara At Large has also been receiving a growing number of requests from individuals and groups to contribute content to this site. They have offered to contribute even though they know that the only compensation this site can offer to all of us, right up and including this writer and publisher, is the promise of building something that might one day give us back the kind of edgy, vital coverage and commentary our communities need and deserve.

Now that we are in to the New Year, Niagara At Large will be ramping up this site with the goal in 2010 of making it the most vital and go-to site for news and commentary in Niagara and you can click on the ‘keep reading’ tab at the end of this sentence to find out more. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

The controversy swirling around the Niagara Health System and the way it manages hospital care across the region won’t be taking a rest during the holiday season – at least not for Niagara Falls MPP Kim Craitor.

NHS CEO Debbie Sevenpifer, flanked by senior staff, answers complaints from Niagara Falls councillors this fall. Photo by Doug Draper

The Liberal MPP says he will be spending at least some of the holiday period preparing a brief on the beleaguered hospital system for Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews.
“I will be arranging a meeting with (the minister) in the month of January,” Craitor told Niagara At Large in a recent interview. “I am putting together a brief for her and I will also be sharing it with the public.”
Craitor’s decision to meet with the minister follows a resolution the city council in Niagara Falls passed late last month, urging the province to “step in and appoint an investigator to investigate and report on the quality of the management and administration of the Niagara Health System.” Continue reading →

 By Doug Draper

Ontario Transportation Jim Bradley says he’s willing to work with Niagara’s regional government in helping a coalition in the State of New York win federal stimulus funding to bring a high-speed rail system to the greater Niagara area.
“We are interested in helping the region with this,” said Bradley, adding in an interview with Niagara At Large that he’s prepared to commit some staff time from his ministry to helping Niagara regional officials in Ontario support the New York bid. Continue reading →

(Click on ‘keep reading’ in this story for a complete list of new doctors in your area.)

By Doug Draper

Niagara’s ‘Physician Recruitment Program’ managed to attract 19 new family doctors this year, slowly but surely closing a gap on a chronic physician shortage that has left many in the region without a family doctor of their own for more than a decade.
“This has been a great year in regards to recruitment,” Josie Faccini, regional recruiter for the program told Niagara At Large recently. “I would like to express my gratitude to all the family physicians who have decided (to) set up a practice in one of (Niagara’s) we communities. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

For the first time in its 124-year history, Ontario’s Niagara Parks Commission is opening its board meetings to the public.

A view of the Falls from Niagara Park's famed Table Rock. Photo by Doug Draper

The decision to swing the meeting doors at its Oaks Hall headquarters in Niagara Falls open to members of the media and public follows the sudden resignation earlier this December of commission chairman Jim Williams and months of controversy over the way it handles it business affairs – particularly a 25-year lease it recently negotiated, without going to an open tender, with the Lewiston, N.Y. owner of the Maid of the Mist Steamship Company. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

Will Niagara’s regional councillors finally decide to put the region on the road to building a transit system for the 21st century?
We may now be only weeks away from finding out?

Will public transit buses like this one in St. Catharines finally be rolling through every municipality in Niagara. Photo by Doug Draper

The region’s council is tentatively scheduled to hold a special meeting in late January or early February to review and vote on recommendations to build and operate a inter-municipal bus system for serving the entire Niagara region – a vision that has been championed by transit advocates, but never realized for the past 40 years of the regional government’s existence.
Now the momentum to turn that vision into a reality finally seems to be swinging in the right direction.

Niagara regional chairman Peter Partington declared in an address to council earlier this fall that he is making the creation of an inter-municipal transit system one of his major priorities as council enters the final year in 2010 of its four-year term. And survey after survey of Niagara residents over the past five to 10 years has shown support growing for a region-wide transit system.
But don’t take a “yes” vote for regional transit for granted. There are still nay Sayers out there and they are all too often the ones who will take the time to contact the 12 mayors and 18 directly elected regional councillors across Niagara before a final decision is made to let their views known.
That is why it is so important that all of you out there who support building a region-wide transit system that will start with buses but could, as we’ve seen in other southern Ontario regions, move to light rail, contact your mayors and regional councillors, and express your support for transit before possibly the most critical vote on this issue in four decades of regional government takes place.
To make it easier for you to contact your mayor and regional representatives by phone or email keep reading at the end of this sentence and scroll down to the end of this commentary.

Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

A campaign by a coalition of New York State municipalities and busineses to steer a high-speed rail system into the greater Niagara region from Albany and Manhattan is winning  virtually unanimous from regional councillors on the Ontario side of the border.

Will these tracks running through Niagara, Ont. one day link with a high-speed rail system in New York?

The project has already received the blessing of a majority on the council following a presentation last week to the regional government’s planning and public works committee by Don Hannon, director of integrated modal services for the New York State Department of Transportation and a representative of the state coalition.

The Niagara, Ont. council’s support sets the stage for its political leaders and staff to get fully behind the High Speed Rail New York Coalition’s efforts to obtain stimulus funding from the U.S. federal government for the rail project. It also provides impetus for them to lobby provincial and federal governments on the Canadian side of the border to improve rail links from New York for passenger and freight through Niagara and the Toronto area.

“I would hope that (Ontario’s transportation minister and St. Catharines MPP Jim Bradley) would lend the staff support that is helpful to this,” said Patrick Robson, the Niagara regional government’s commissioner of integrated community planning during a recent interview with Niagara At Large. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

He was a great lover of newspapers when they deserved to be loved and one of the best friends a journalist could ever have.

Bruce Williamson

His name was Bruce Williamson – known affectionately to his legions of friends and former colleagues in the St. Catharines area as ‘Booty’ – and he was one of the guiding spirits at the St. Catharines Standard in its final decades as an independent newspaper owned by the Burgoyne family. He also had more to do than he possibly ever knew with inspiring young journalists to go out there and dig for the kind of stories that earned the respect of the community and won provincial and sometimes even national newspaper awards, even though he never had a byline in the paper himself. Continue reading →

By Fiona McMurran

The South Niagara Chapter of the Council of Canadians – a nationwide group dedicated to preserving Canada’s independence – marked its first birthday in the region this December with the  opening of an office in Welland.

Council of Canadians national chairperson Maude Barlow flanked by South Niagara Chapter members Shari Sacco (back left), Fiona McMurran (back right), and Jen Coorsh (seated right at the Unbottle It! January 2009 event at Brock University. Photo by Terry Nicholls

The Council of Canadians is this country’s largest citizen watchdog group with its well-known chairperson, Maude Barlow, along with a staff and a volunteer board at the helm, researching and consulting on issues such as water and climate justice, food security and sovereignty, trade deals being made at the provincial and federal levels, and the battle to preserve Medicare, as well as other pressing issues related to Canadian sovereignty.
The various chapters of the Council of Canadians work at the local level, urging friends and neighbors to take action to keep governments accountable, and to work for the changes that they believe serve the common good.

Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

Well here we go again!

Niagara Regional Police headquarters in St. Catharines

It’s another tough budget year for Niagara Region and it’s another year the region finds itself facing a budget request from the Niagara Regional Police Service that is above a cap it has set in an effort to keep hikes on property taxes down for Niagara residents.
“We don’t have the ability to pay this,” said St. Catharines regional councillor Bruce Timms following a presentation Police Chief Wendy Southall and other representatives of the NRP made to the region’s council at one of its ongoing budget review sessions this past Thursday (Dec. 10) for a 2010 budget increase of 4.5 per cent to almost $121 million in operating costs for the coming year. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

Charles Schumer, a senior U.S. Senator for New York State, has urged his country’s Department of Homeland Security to work with Canadian officials to reverse a significant decline in people crossing the Canada-U.S. border in the Niagara Falls and Buffalo/Fort Erie areas. Continue reading →

By Doug Draper

“What a long strange trip it’s been,” wrote the late San Francisco songwriter Jerry Garcia of Greateful Dead fame.

Doug Draper on the job in the early years before newspapers were gobbled up by corporate chains.

What a long strange trip it has been, indeed!

Garcia and his band mates penned those lyrics nine years before I began my first job in journalism at the St. Catharines Standard in 1979. That was 30 years ago when good newspapers were still a vital force in our communities in so far as we felt we needed to spend some of our day reading through them before deciding who to vote for in the next election or whether to participate in a public meeting over taxes or a proposal for new development down the street. Now we are witnessing too many of those papers die a slow and undignified death thanks, in no small part, to the greed and lack of interest in good journalism of the corporate chains that have taken so many of them over. Continue reading →

 By Doug Draper

As the provincial government and its enablers, including the Niagara Health System (NHS) and Hamilton, Niagara, Haldimand, Brant Local Health Integration Network (LHIN), slowly but surely dismantle hospital services in Niagara’s centre and south end, one mayor and his council are determined to take their services back.

Citizen protesters watched this spring as the emergency room of the Port Colborne General Hospital was converted to an urgent care centre as part of a downsizing plan the Niagara Health System is imposing on smaller hospitals across the region. Photo by Doug Draper

“We want to take control of our own destiny,” says Port Colborne Mayor Vance Badawey of his city’s decision over the past year to establish what it calls a Niagara South Health Care Corporation that is separate from the NHS and is moving forward with its own “blue print” for rebuilding hospital services in Niagara’s southern tier.
And if Badawey’s boldest dream comes true, that blue print includes a successful pitch to the provincial government for a new hospital to service south Niagara. Someone has to take on the responsibility and leadership to see that health care is available and the people here have access to all of the health care they need,” said Badawey in a recent interview with Niagara At Large of the move his council is taking to develop a health care system of its own.

Continue reading →

By Becky Day

Every municipality in the greater Niagara region seems to have its sticking point when it comes to heritage preservation.

Thorold's former city hall, a designated heritage building, remains abandoned and awaiting its fate. Photo by Doug Draper

Thorold, Ontario, the city’s former city hall building has become as contentious as the Port tower condo project now destined to replace so much of the heritage district in the historic old community of Port Dalhousie, located along the southern shores of Lake Ontario in St. Catharines.
Strapped to a roller coaster of political nonsense and inaction, Thorold’s aging city hall building has been held hostage for more than three years, waiting for local politicians to decide their next move.
The heritage structure located at 8 Carleton St. n Thorold – also once home to L.G. Lorriman Public School – rots quietly as it awaits its fate. If the city doesn’t act soon, the designated site will suffer irreparable damage.
All too often, residents across the greater Niagara region have seen the same fate overcome other heritage buildings that fall into neglectful hands. In nearby Buffalo,  for  example, residents and visitors to that city have witnessed the half-collapse of a 19th century livery stable in what is lovingly known to some as the the city’s “cottage district.” Claiming ‘demolition by neglect’ on the part of the livery stable’s longtime owner, residents are working with the city and others to restore this historic treasure. Continue reading →