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Letters & Op-Ed, November 2 2022

Disappointed with turnout As a relatively new resident to the Pelham area, can I state how very disappointed I am with the woefully low turnout at the recent municipal election.

Disappointed with turnout

As a relatively new resident to the Pelham area, can I state how very disappointed I am with the woefully low turnout at the recent municipal election. Even with three advanced polling days, almost 65 percent of the eligible voter base couldn't be bothered to get out to vote.

I hope that these same 65 percent of the population can live with the guilt of not caring about decision making within their community for the next four years. I thought that the people of Pelham were better than that. Clearly not.

Grant Adam Fonthill

 

Looking forward to Ker on council

We are writing to say that our family is delighted that Kevin Ker has been acclaimed as a Ward 1 councillor. We thoroughly enjoyed reading Don Rickers’ interview with Kevin, who is a longtime Fenwick resident, with family roots that date back over 100 years. We realized Kevin had solid qualifications, but had not known just to what extent, as he was employed with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food as a specialist in pesticide reduction.

In addition to this, he worked at Vineland Research Station as a consultant, monitoring orchards and vineyards. Plus, he has traveled extensively.

All of these life experiences and knowledge pertaining to agriculture and environmental issues will prove to be such valuable assets! Hope we can keep him. Please consider him for your agriculture committee, Mayor Junkin. We need guys such as Kevin Ker to be on board. We are so fortunate to have him.

The Thompson Family Fenwick

 

Lax Short Hills deer hunt rules enforcement unsafe

As a Pelham resident, I have been following the deer hunt in Short Hills Provincial Park for the last ten years. I am an avid user of the park and must state that this hunt has become completely out of control. What started as a few hunters in a very restricted area, monitored by the MNR, has turned into a complete free-for-all and is a huge safety concern.

Currently there is no cap on the number of hunters allowed into the small park. There is no set area that they must hunt in (or if there is, they ignore it.) This past hunt, there were 29 trucks that went in to hunt. Conservatively, if each of those trucks held two hunters (many had more), in a 6.6 hectare park, that is nine hunters with high-powered cross-bows per square kilometer of protected parkland!

Numerous times they have been seen hunting on private residential property bordering the park. The Ministry and Ontario Parks used to monitor the activity and maintain at least a presence. Now there is roughly a quarter of the ministry staff and no conservation officers to enforce violations, with an eight-fold increase in the number of hunters. It is ridiculous and unsafe.

Even the signage and awareness has become an issue. As a Pelham resident, I use the park frequently. I often don’t enter the park at the main entrances and therefore was not aware that a hunt was even occurring. There was no notification sent to residents of the area. On Tuesday, I did happen to notice a sign that said the park was closed. However, it was on the ground, obscured by weeds taller than the sign itself. As far as the signage at the main entrances, most casual hikers and day users of the park would see the words “Haudenosaunee Harvest” and assume that has something to do with farming or Thanksgiving, not envisioning slaughtering deer. We “harvest” grapes. They hunt deer.

On Tuesday, I saw a hiker coming out of the private boy scout camp on Pelham Street. I wondered if he had been hiking in the park during the hunt. I asked him if he knew the park was closed and if he was okay. He told me that he did indeed see a small sign, but just assumed it was for a random trail reconstruction or something and since he was hiking the Bruce Trail, he didn’t think it applied to him. He made it through the park, thankfully, but that could have had a tragic outcome.

How many more years do we, as Niagara residents, have to worry about (and pay for) this hunt? It has become a complete and total disgrace. What was once considered to be a hidden gem is now nothing but an annual blood bath and mishandled safety nightmare.

Donna Gorham Fonthill

 

Don’t weaponize Code of Conduct process

The Code of Conduct concept has been tested in several ways over the last term of municipal councils, from school boards to local councils to Regional Council. The latest issue of a Code of Conduct complaint registered by one councillor against another “to make [Regional Councillor Bob] Gale Sweat a little” demonstrates how the current code and Integrity Commissioner process needs review after almost six years of questionable experience.

“Weaponizing” was not the intent but it appears to be the practice more often as time goes on. The fact that penalties are decided by a majority of council sets up a bad scenario where anyone speaking up against the majority of council can be subject to a severe penalty due to a Code of Conduct complaint. Maybe this is the kind of thing Merritton City Councillor  Littleton was concerned about. It reminds us of a school board trustee who wanted a review of the superintendent’s performance, or a local councillor who responded to local support for the freedom convoy.

Time to review the Code of Conduct process to help stop the process from being weaponized and make it perform in the interest of the public.

Bruce Timms St. Catharines

 

SHAKE IT UP | Rob Shook

As winter looms, pondering how to cope with illness

Having caught a rather resilient head cold recently, I did the usual reflecting on how I might have caught it, and why it’s taking so long to take a hike. After a few days of being rather narrow-minded in my thinking, a wider perspective took shape, and I began to think more about what illness in general could possibly teach us. After all, this will not be the last respiratory bug that I’ll have to deal with, particularly with winter’s approach. We know all too well the accompanying ailments that tag along as we get older, and I need not go into further detail about that.

I began to think about what indeed I could glean and incorporate into my coping strategies for those future moments when illness arrives. Regardless of the severity of the illness, it’s possible that these observations may be helpful from a coping standpoint, at least to some degree. It goes without saying that there is a direct correlation between difficulty in implementing and the severity of the ailment.

Life has inherent degrees of strife and struggle. Each of us must face periods of being sick, and this inescapable reality is more palatable when embraced sooner rather than later. Nobody sails through this ride without facing periods of physical challenge and decline. It is somewhat comforting to realize that this happens to all, and we are not being singled out in our seasons of suffering.

We humans are far more resilient and biologically adaptable than we sometimes realize. The body has amazing, natural, self-correcting tendencies. Take, for a small example, the wealth of nitric oxide capacity lining the mucous membranes in our nose.

Breathing more through our noses (less through our mouths) and humming apparently boosts nitric oxide production significantly, and dilates the blood vessels in our noses helping us to breath more effectively.

During this cold, for example, I resisted the temptation to run to the OTC aisle of the pharmacy for a quick fix. Like many others, I relied on the natural healing powers of salt, saline nasal rinses, and honey and lemon. This did help decrease my over reliance on the cough and cold section of the local drug store. Guess my point is this. Balancing one’s approach to illness is worth considering. Quick fixes are indeed shortlived and rarely do they provide long-term benefit.

It’s important to never lose sight of the fact that, when we are sick, there are always variables that we can control. The biggest being our attitude. In the case of a cold for example, there is no short-circuiting the fact that it usually take two weeks to begin to feel noticeably better physically after symptoms first appear. Acceptance of what is in the moment, albeit never easy, is healthier in the long run. Illness for the most part, is not a stagnant process. It is constantly changing, hopefully more for the better, and sometimes for the worst. During the process, would it not serve a better purpose if we focused our energies on those capabilities we have at our disposal, rather than ruminating on the loss of capacity we are temporarily dealing with. I fully appreciate that this is easier said than done. Why not take a step in that direction, though, particularly given the intimate power our minds have when it comes to the functioning of our bodies.

Enough cannot be said about the healing power of gratitude. Being truly grateful for the gifts around us, be it loving family, supportive friends, the ability to think, see, speak, and move for example. These are gifts to be treasured and thankful for every day.

The unpredictability of illness also reminds us, at times not so gently, that we are indeed mortal and vulnerable.

Make the most of your time while you are in good health, cause you never know. The use it or lose it principle pays dividends big time. Your body is meant to be physically challenged and worked. Age should never be an overriding reason to avoid doing something that’s physically challenging. Go after it while you can, I say, and keep Father Time at bay for a while longer.

Finally, infirmity, regardless of severity, teaches us the virtue of patience. Patience with ourselves, with those around us, and with our current circumstance. Who among us couldn’t stand to grow when it comes to exercising greater patience. Yours truly has much work to do in this regard. Sometimes I think it’s the hardest lesson to learn. In these days of instant gratification and self indulgence, demonstrating a little patience is indeed something to be respected and encouraged.

 

COTE'S COMMENTS | Larry Coté

Writings on the original tablet

According to some people’s version of history, a couple of millennia ago there was a longhaired, fully bearded man named Moses. At some point he felt a calling to climb a mountain and camp there for a few days. While there he reportedly conferred with a supreme being and the two of them came up with a set of commands for mankind to live by. These ultimately became known as the ten commandments. When he returned from the heights he had these rules etched on a very early version of the tablet. The internet had not yet been invented so word of mouth and stone tablets were used to spread the word.

And so, these many generations later, it might be a time to review how our population has made out by checking a sampling of these ten rules.

Let’s start with the command thou shall not kill. Presumably this directs us to not kill other people deemed to be our neighbours. Hmm, it would be nearly impossible to list here the number of wars through time that were dedicated to killing neighbours arbitrarily renamed enemies. As a matter of interest, many movies have been filmed about war and so we have even made mass killing a form of entertainment. Murder mysteries are another popular subject of the cinema, literature, and daily newscasts. And so what grade do you think an independent arbiter might assign to the population’s compliance with this commandment?

Okay, maybe by chance that was the wrong commandment to choose as an example of people’s adherence to these rules of behaviour. Let’s try another. How about thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, or his slaves, or his animals, or anything of thy neighbour’s? Here again the high divorce rate among many cultures around the globe might mitigate against evidence of a high compliance to this command. And what about husbands? Should they also not be coveted if sexual equality is to be observed? On a positive note, perhaps the reduction of slavery around the world had its nexus in this commandment. Coveting your neighbour’s dog or cat seems to be too far off the radar to be commented upon here.

It would appear so far that an independent judge would not be awarding most of our populations an honours level grade.

Let’s give ourselves and our neighbours one more chance. How about the command thou shalt not steal? Whoops! Why then are our courts and jails so backlogged with trials against and incarcerations of thieves and robbers of all sorts. Shoplifting and petty thievery cases are so abundant so as to be of little interest to the news media let alone police forces.

Well, these three examples are nearly one third of the commandments and our populations have not done very well in complying with these commands. On probability, a close examination of the remaining seven is not likely to reveal our close adherence to any of them.

What might our world be like if, regardless of religious affiliations, we all paid closer attention to this set of behavioural guidelines?

 

PUBLISHER'S CORNER | Dave Burket

The wheels of justice grind slow but grind fine

That’s a quote from Sun Tzu, the famed Chinese military strategist and philosopher, ca. 500 BC. Contributor Brian Green mentioned it when he sent in his article this week about yet another delay in Darren Ottaway’s criminal proceedings in Cochrane, ON. Residents who’ve been here awhile will recall that Ottaway was hired by former Pelham mayor David Augustyn, and his council, to be this Town’s CAO.

Which brings us to the tableau above. It’s election night at mayoral challenger Frank Adamson’s party in Fonthill. Far left, Adamson. Next to Adamson, in the back, John Durley. Next to Durley, Catherine King. Next to King, David Augustyn. Durley and King were members of the Augustyn council that hired Ottaway and incidentally just happened to take the municipality to the financial precipice through their insistence on building a $36 million ($40 million? $42 million?) community centre largely on the backs of Pelham taxpayers. We won’t rehash that debacle, but focus instead on the potential debacle avoided—Pelham, you made the right choice last week. Adamson is as much an insider of the clique that brought us Augustyn as it is possible to be, barring shared DNA. There can be little doubt that an Adamson government would have looked very much like an Augustyn government, which perhaps explains why Augustyn looks more upset than Adamson in the shot above. Mayor Marvin Junkin is not a polished speaker, not a sharp dresser, and rarely seems to employ a comb. Doesn't matter. He's a decent man who was the only one to do the decent thing on that last Augustyn council—resign from it in disgust. The large majority of registered voters who didn't vote seemed content to retain the status quo (mercifully minus the Gang of Four but one). In fact, the final tally last Monday very closely mirrored our December 2021 poll asking whether Junkin should run again. Some 53 percent said yes back then, with the remainder evenly split between no and undecided. Junkin took 58 percent last Monday. Here's to another four years of undoing the damage done over the previous decade...See you next week: Clocks go back on Sunday!