Editorials

Two quite minor items at the Frontenac County Council meeting a couple of weeks ago revealed something about the council being out of touch with each other, and with the real workings of Frontenac County. While township council meetings are not...

Because Frontenac County’s offices are being renovated, an alternative location needed to be found for the ceremonial inaugural meeting of the new council on November 30. County staff proposed, and council accepted without comment, that the...

Grief over the loss of a person is a complicated affair. On the surface, we commemorate the passing of an individual from this world. That loss is, in and of itself, important – whether it be the loss of a family member, a friend, or a prominent...

Mathew street has existed in obscurity for decades. Dwarfed in size and stature by the two other streets in downtown Sharbot Lake, the bustling Elizabeth street, home to two churches, a pharmacy, a post office, grocery store, and the local township...

Two months ago, Central Frontenac Council approved the concept plan and awarded the contract for the same project at the same meeting for the final small part of the Sharbot Lake Road reconstruction project. The plan was about the repaving of a...

The Strong Mayor legislation that has been tabled by Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Steve Clark is quite alarming when looked at through a rural lens. Among other things, it permits the Mayor of a municipality to hire and fire the Chief...

Those of us here in Frontenac's Townships have many blessings to count. I have lived in Southern Frontenac full-time for the past 22 years and before that as a seasonal resident since 1967. The peace, quiet, beauty, and diversity of the forests,...

It is no secret that the Province of Ontario wants people to live in cities and towns instead of on rural lots scattered across the vast province. Part of the advantage of this is that they can drink treated water, which can be managed, as long as...

I've probably been to 25 Canada Day breakfasts at my local fire hall. For most of those years, the icons of the day, red and white and the maple leaf, seemed as sweet and benign as the maple syrup we pour into our coffee cups. In our part of rural...

When you get down to it, South Frontenac politicians don't have that many options when it comes to changing the draft Official Plan document that has been presented to them by a team of consultations and their own development/planning department....

Everything about the provincial election seems to have been done according to a plan that may have been drawn up in Progressive Conservative Party Headquarters. Any potential controversy over the decision to end COVID mandates in the midst of the...

I asked the organiser for one of the election candidates this week, if they thought that the provincial election hadn't really started yet, and they said “You think?” There has only been one candidate meeting, but it was a taped event for COGECO...

As of Monday, there were 7 registered candidates for Member of Provincial Paliament in Lanark Frontenac Kingston. Four of them represent the four parties with members in the legislature: Amanada Pulker-Mok represents the Liberals, Drew Cumpson, the...

Over the pandemic, one of the major points of pride, and relief, in Kingston Frontenac Lennox and Addington has been our extremely low case and death rate from COVID compared to the rest of the world. The numbers for the entire pandemic are still...

Ontario is a couple of weeks away from the start of a short, one month election campaign, but you would think the election is years off judging from media coverage this week. In a scan of the home pages of 5 major news websites this morning (April...

Buried in some of changes in the Ontario COVID response that were announced by Ontario's Chief Medical Officer Kieran Moore, on Monday afternoon (May 11), was a side comment he made that Public Health estimates that over 5.3 million Ontarians, over...

Cheaper Dental & Pharmacare & Unfettered Development In recent weeks, the prospect of a second Doug Ford term in government has been coming into focus, and we need only look back to the first few months of the first Ford term for some hints about...

Kingston Frontenac Public Health (KFLAPH) , Public Health Ontario, and the Public Health Agency of Canada, have all been front and centre for the last two years providing information, advice, and directives to follow as we have collectively dealt...

“They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within” - First We Take Manhattan – From the album “I'm Your Man” by Leonard Cohen “Our political system is broken, there is no sense spending any more time...

“Russia news provides a platform for objective journalism where Canadian msm (Mainstream media) creates fabrications” The headline above is a tweet from local MPP Randy Hillier, who has been absent from his Lanark Frontenac Kingston riding for...

During a COVID-19 briefing last week, Dr. Piotr Oglaza said that he expects the coming 'endemicity' will change the way we all deal with the virus. For a second or two, I did not catch the meaning of the word. I could not remember ever hearing it...

It is very very rare for us out here in the rural backwaters of Eastern Ontario to have any real idea what goes on in the back rooms of Queen's Park. Decisions that are made in those back rooms have an impact on our lives, to be sure, but our...

In order to gain some perspective, I took a look at the editorials we ran in the first two weeks of the year in 2021, and it is clear that some things have changed over the past year, but others haven't. The first week's editorial published on...

We had some big ideas, they never quite got to the point of becoming plans, to mark 2021 as the 50th year of the Frontenac News. But as with everything this year, the weeks just kept rolling along in a COVID vacuum, and it was as much as we could do...

On Saturday Randy Hillier put up an apology on his Twitter account. He acknowledge that he should not have tweeted pictures of people who had died, against their families witshes, and made unsubstaintated claims abou their cause of death, all to to...

Aside from a spike in cases in the local region over the last ten days, the news has been pretty good about COVID in Kingston Frontenac Lennox and Addington, and in Ontario as a whole. The 4th wave of COVID-19, fuelled by the Delta variant, did not...

One of the unexpected impacts of COVID has been a leap in property values, even in more remote, non-waterfront locations. This has created opportunities for many and wealth for some, but it has also had a dark side, creating a whole class of people...

Like many others, I did not pay much attention to the federal legislation to establish a National Truth and Reconciliation Day, and make it a federal statutory holiday. For most of you reading this in our print, it is a day later than normal,...

We are in the midst of a 4th wave, the delta wave, of COVID-19, and although we worked hard at it and are still working at it, we did not get vaccines into enough arms to prevent it from circulating in our communities. The variant is circulating...

No one wants to say it, but the delta variant has shown some vaccine resistance, and that is why governments and public health officials, alike, are wringing their hands about the people who are choosing to refuse a vaccination. Two months ago this...

Justin Trudeau met with the new Governor General Mary Simon at Rideau Hall on Sunday. He did so in order to request that Governor General, as the representative of Queen Elizabeth, dissolve Parliament to make way for fresh elections. This quaint...

Everyone wants better Internet, and there is an entire industry that is devoted to delivering the Internet, just as there are more and more businesses that cannot operate without reliable Internet service. In cities, it is a competitive market....

The federal government has just announced the launch of a procurement process for the construction of new passenger rail service in the Quebec City to Windsor Corridor, including a new rail line running between Ottawa and Peterborough through Lanark...

In 1996, after an incident at one of our plants in Manitoba, a plan was put in place to have a “Cultural Awareness Program” and I volunteered to be a facilitator. My company and the local Band Council formed a team to develop the program to try...

Our local townships all support Canada Day events in the villages and hamlets each year. It is a day of community spirit. It is the start of summer, a chance to enjoy pancakes and maple syrup, strawberries, and our lakes on a hot day. This is...

The issues that were at play during the initial weeks of the effort to get first doses of vaccine into the arms of as many people in the Kingston Frontenac Lennox and Addington (KFL&A) region as possible, was mostly about supply and figuring out the...

(warning – this article may trigger painful memories for some people) It was not something that Parham residents, Central Frontenac Firefighters, Frontenac Paramedics, or the Frontenac OPP detachment could have foreseen. In the midst of an...

At the most recent KFLAPH press briefing, Dr. Moore said a few things about what we might expect to see in terms of regulations and advice from Public Health for our communities into the fall and winter. A day later, when it came out that Moore is...

By the time this newspaper is printed, I hope to have an appointment to get my second dose of Astrazeneca before the end of May. The pharmacy where I will get it is located a 30 second walk from my office. So it shouldn't be a total loss, as my 97...

A lot of people are frustrated by the fact that we are still worrying about COVID in Canada, when the United States seems to have moved on.  We are in lock-down and they are out partying, and now even the much vaunted United States Centre For...

If anyone was surprised when Christine Elliott, the Ontario Minister of Health, indicated on Monday that the “stay at home” order in Ontario will likely be  extended, they shouldn’t have been.  With case loads, hospitalisation, ICU, and...

We are all used to Randy Hillier lying about COVID, the charter of rights, and how sober his sons were when they arrested at the Arrow Pub in Perth. He found another line to step over when he started retweeting comparisons between COVID restrictions...

I’ve never really considered myself part of any herd except maybe hippies and rock’n’roll musicians but when it comes to being part of the covid herd immunity thing, I’m in. My beloved daughter Meggie will be relieved to know that I got my...

Until only a few weeks ago, political dis-function in the United Stated and the United Kingston has been part of the reason why the overall COVID case and death rates have much higher than ours have been in Canada. But since they are two of the...

Oh, the sacrifices I make so others don’t have to. I consider it my responsibility, as a reporter and editor, to follow certain people on social media, mostly on Twitter. It is usually not that onerous. In fact it brings information and story...

Last Saturday (March 28), the 539th person received a dose of Astrazeneca vaccine at the Sharbot Lake Pharamasave. Sarah Swanson, the pharmacist, has no idea when more vaccine will come to her store. Meanwhile, the pharmacies in Harrowsmith,...

Last Friday morning, I strolled over to the Sharbot Lake Pharmasave to get a shot of AstraZeneca.  There were no crowds. Pharmacy staff were using the day as a soft launch of their vaccine protocols. They were learning how to input data into the...

To say the COVD-19 vaccine rollout has been messy in Canada would be an understatement. Supply problems in January and February have now given way to confusion over who will be able to be vaccinated, where they will be able to get vaccinated, and...

It is clear, one year into the COVID universe, that Canadians, and our region in particular, have fared rather well. As a country, our infection rate is 25% of the rate in the United Stated and our death rate is about 40% of the death rate down...

As both a parent and a teacher, I can attest that everyone who has been subjected to the challenges that the education system has faced since the pandemic first emerged can whole-heartedly and unequivocally tell you that it has been both mentally...