Editorials

For a number of years, volunteer board members from Pine Meadow Nursing Home in Northbrook, usually accompanied by local councillors from North Frontenac Township, made an annual trip to Glenburnie to plead for support from Frontenac County Council...

With only a small space for an editorial, I thought something about the lighter side of living with COVID-19 would be apt. There aren’t that many lighter sides to the pandemic, as we all know. We are in the midst of Lock-down 2.0 and the latest...

“You have breast cancer.”  Those are the words that kicked off my summer of 2020.  It all started one morning in June.  The kids had just finished up school and we were all ready to begin enjoying the nice weather.  I freely admit that I...

Last year, in our first issue of the year, long before we had any idea that 2020 would be dominated by a pandemic that would have an impact on our daily lives for 9 months (and counting), we published a call for reader support. It costs about $30 a...

Kingston Frontenac Public Health confirmed on Friday afternoon, that the region is moving into the Orange zone on the Ontario colour coded COVID-19 protection zones as of Monday, December 21. It takes some checking to determine the difference...

Every year we put the call out to local schools about our Christmas drawing contest. We rarely hear anything back, and each year as we are putting out the second to last paper of the year we wonder if we will get any drawings from the schools. This...

March madness had a new meaning this past season for basketball fans and the greater community alike; it marked the start of Covid-19. Yet, when it comes to the natural environment, Canada has not been sinking any baskets lately. Before March,...

The Ford government is changing the way planning decisions are made, providing a way for their own ministry to override an approach that protects the long-term health of local watersheds. The changes are included in “The COVID Recovery Act” in...

My sister has reservations about the new RNA vaccine produced by Pfizer and Moderna that will likely be approved for Canadians very soon. She heard that the vaccine has to be kept in “super cold freezers” and her Facebook friends are concerned...

It is not uncommon for editorials we run to seem logical when they are written, but end up being proven to have been misguided, after a bit of time has passed. Last week, however, that editorial “Yellow zoned out” started to be shaky before it...

Kingston Frontenac Public Health has designated the entire region as a COVID-19 yellow zone as of Monday, November 23rd. On the four COVID-19 zones, as have been designated by the Province of Ontario, yellow is the second least restrictive, after...

For the moment, we remain in a sweet spot as far as COVID-19 is concerned in Frontenac County. Our current case count is 0, and our total case count of 17 cases over the entire pandemic is about 0.2% of the caseload in 9.5% of the Ontario average...

The Frontenac News ran an editorial two weeks ago (Vol. 20, edition 41, October 29) about a consultant’s report on how to improve the delivery of services from a cost and efficiency point of view in Frontenac County. The option of full integration...

Lanark Frontenac Kingston MPP Randy Hillier has been carrying on a campaign against the restrictions that are in place in Ontario as part of a society wide attempt to keep the COVID-19 pandemic from infecting the general population. In Mr. Hillier's...

Early this year, Frontenac County took advantage of provincial grant money to fund a service delivery review for services delivered by the four Frontenac Townships and the upper tier, county level as well. The review was somewhat secretive. Strategy...

There was a point, during the heat of the summer, when new COVID-19 infections were as rare as snowflakes in July, and life under the ‘new normal’ was indeed pretty normal for many of us. The opportunity to gather in backyards, parks and beaches...

I prepared an editorial about the second wave of COVID19 and the challenge it will bring to our communities in the coming months, for this week’s edition. But after witnessing the ceremony at Granite Ridge Education Centre earlier today, I decided...

"Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly,” says Dr. Tedros Adhanom, the Director-General World Health Organization. He is right. I am a grade 8 student at Module Vanier, and have started this school year in a full-blown pandemic. I...

  The Chanukah holiday traditions are pretty well known in the larger community, mainly because the holiday takes place during the pre Christmas season. However, the most important Jewish holidays, the High Holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur,...

The return to school is complicated, and the true character of the experience will vary for every family, every classroom, and every school. Schools are publicly funded, bureaucratic institutions. They are administered by employees of school boards,...

Kingston City Council was relatively calm, resigned, dissappointed, and a tad, ok more than a tad, self righteous on Tuesday Night when, following the lead of Mayor Paterson, they agreed to turn the other cheek and abandon any attempts to reason...

A teacher from Los Angeles by the name of Tom Rademacher summed up the dilemma around schools reopening this September, back on June 7, in a pithy tweet: “Going back to school in the fall is a bad idea. Doing distance learning in the fall is a bad...

MPP Randy Hillier has been active on social media in recent weeks. He has been critical of the Ford government, charging it with using the COVID-19 state of emergency as a pretext for a series of omnibus bills which bypass democratic checks on its...

A couple of weeks ago there was a bit of an apocalyptic feeling in the air. The oak tree that drops acorns, that sound like gunshots, onto my office roof in the fall most years, was shedding dried, half chewed leaves on the ground at the front door...

I grew up near Palmerston, a small Ontario town with a population of 1,800. A monochrome kind of town, so I was pretty sure I didn’t have any prejudices or systemic bias. How could I? We were farm kids, so I didn’t even know about white...

It has been more than sobering for many of us. After a steady, but slow trend towards opening up our lives over a couple of months, during which time COVID-19 cases completely dried up in our region and restaurant patios re-opened, as did most of...

What’s in a name? A great deal. That’s what! It’s the sound which captures your attention when someone calls out to you in a crowd. It’s the thing that distinguishes you from all the others in the crowd. It’s the mark you put on important...

note – Depending on your feelings about zoom and the people you zoom with, the following are interchangeably do's or don'ts   Wear a clown mask Wear nothing Never speak Speak constantly and emphatically and never unmute interrupt incessantly line...

I don't know about the rest of you, but it seems to me that we are just now hitting the most difficult stretch of time that we will likely face in this year of the COVID. It's been over two months since the shutdown. We sheltered in place, watched...

As I write this on Tuesday, we have reached a milestone in our KFL&A region. Public Health's daily update on the spread of COVID-19 says that we have not had a confirmed case of the virus anywhere in the City of Kingston, Frontenac or Lennox and...

The latest message from FOCA repeats the recommendation of all the pundits from premier Ford to the mayor of Perth for cottagers to stay at home and not to go the cottage. Frontenac council issued a similar message. Agreed, social distancing is the...

For the last month, the relationship between seasonal and permanent residents of Frontenac County has become fractious. In mid March, COVID-19 cases had been confirmed in both Toronto and Ottawa but not in the Kingston-Frontenac Lennox and Addington...

(United Church Clergy from Sharbot Lake and Parham United Churches serving the areas and amalgamated churches of Zealand, Oso, Maberly, Parham, Sharbot Lake, Oconto, Tichborne, Wagarville, Long Lake and all places in between) The world’s...

Over the past 3 weeks you have been bombarded with information about COVID-19 and the ongoing global pandemic, I am not going to repeat all that information now. My goal with this letter is to address our Community specifically. First I want to...

Easter is the one holiday in the Christian calendar that aligns with one of the major Jewish festivals, Passover. Every year, Passover and Easter take place within days of each other, so while everyone else is eating chocolate and counting bunnies,...

I am thankful to all of you, the people who live and work in our region, for all you are doing to protect our community, our neighbours, and our loved ones from COVID-19.   The decisive actions and the changes we have all made these last few weeks...

(This article has been altered from the version that was published in the Frontenac News on Thursday, April 2, with new information as it has become available) As of Saturday morning, April 4, there were 48 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Kingston...

It has been an unprecedented in week in the life of the county, the province, and our little corner of it. The scope of it started to come clear to me last Thursday when I was driving down Road 38 to deliver papers to post offices at about 7:15....

Canadian science showed its superior ability with viruses long before COVID19. The National Microbiology Laboratory opened in Winnipeg in 1998, providing a Level 4 (highest) microbiological containment facility. Heinz Feldman, a researcher studying...

If pressed, even Doug Ford would likely admit that it has turned out that running the Ontario government has turned out to be a bit more complicated than he indicated when he was running for premier. Hallway medicine has not been eliminated. The...

On Monday, Randy Hillier decided that it is his obligation, as an independent politician, to speak out by publishing a statement called “Ending the occupation, the Indian Act, and Hypocrisy” In it, he said nothing about the Wet’suwet’en and...

I hope readers will grant me this assumption – the idea of a virtual county roads system in Frontenac County, or anywhere else, is hard to understand. A real road goes somewhere, but a virtual one? In fact, most of us never think about who owns...

Like most of you, my wife and I pay more in municipal taxes for our home than we would like. The municipal tax system is based on property values, and as property values increase so does the amount we pay. It is like a pre-tax on the eventual sale...

I hinted at this in my Christmas editorial. At the Frontenac News we are committed to continuing in the task we have carved out for ourselves over the past 48 years, to support the many small communities in Frontenac County, by covering local issues...

Although unplanned and unexpected, my exile in March turned out to be a refreshing deliverance from a political party and a caucus that had devolved into a “Lord of the Flies” re-enactment, distant from the statement of principles encoded in the...

I guess when you do something for long enough it becomes something of a tradition. And so it is with these end of year messages to readers. I believe this is my 17th. They are written in part to thank our readers, volunteers, staff, and advertisers...

At first, I thought it was some kind of an almost funny joke, naming a minister of prosperity. Why not a ministry of magic instead. We could all use some more magic in our lives, to be sure. Aside from the awkward sound of it, there are technical...

On March 19th of this year, the City of Kingston passed the following motion: “Be it resolved, that the City of Kingston, officially declare a climate emergency for the purposes of naming, framing, and deepening our commitment to protecting our...

Clarification – The advertisement that appeared on page 6 of this week’s Frontenac News, Vol. 19, edition 42, was taken out by Bill Everett of BEE Sanitation, and was not sanctioned or authorised by the Township of Central Frontenac. The...

In a big way, the Ontario government’s decision to close down the legislature and refrain from making any major public announcements for almost 4 months in the runup to the Federal election, amounted to the end of the beginning of Doug Ford’s...