Editorials

Frontenac County Council had poked and prodded at their 2013 budget for a couple of months, and they had managed to get it to the point where county ratepayers would be paying no more than they did last year. The requisition to the townships was...

What can I say about the decision by Janet Gutowski to remain as warden of Frontenac County Council? On one hand she is fully within her legal rights to keep the position. While there has been a ‘gentleman’s’ agreement that the chain of office...

Editorial by Jeff Green From a distance it has been a lot of fun watching the trials and tribulations of the City of Toronto and its outlandish Mayor Rob Ford. In the first instance, there was the outrage of the Toronto Star, whose editors still...

Editorial by Jeff Green From a distance it has been a lot of fun watching the trials and tribulations of the City of Toronto and its outlandish Mayor Rob Ford. In the first instance, there was the outrage of the Toronto Star, whose editors still...

Editorial by Jeff Green One comment sticks in my mind from a meeting I attended last week about the ‘reversal’ of Enbridge oil Pipeline 9, which runs through our region. In the midst of his cautionary presentation about Enbridge, pipelines, and...

Editorial by Jeff Green I have a theory that there is an eight-year "best before" date on governments in Canada. It comes from the fact that, quite apart from all of the machinations about independence and right/left splits that took place while I...

Editorial by Jeff Green As I have looked in a cursory way at the results of the Québec election. it occurs to me that my own life has been measured out by the Québec question, and that the future of Québec in or out of Canada will likely not be...

Editorial by  Jeff Green Let’s see. You have a chance to go lake trout fishing, and maybe fish for arctic grayling as well, at a remote, fly-in location on Great Slave Lake in the middle of the Arctic summer, or you can go to a Frontenac County...

Editorial by Jeff Green I resisted the temptation to write an editorial about the hot weather, because I know nothing more about the heat than anyone else. Then again, if knowing more about a topic than others know is a prerequisite for writing...

Editorial by Jeff Green Everybody is up in arms. Well not everybody, but some people - and those people are really up in arms - about the new clear bag garbage system in Central Frontenac. People have said a lot about the clear bags: they are...

Editorial by Jeff Green When Bud Clayton was elected mayor of North Frontenac I asked him if he was going to step down from the Pine Meadow Nursing Home management committee. He said that as soon as the shovel was in the ground for the rebuild of...

Editorial by Jeff Green A couple of weeks ago, we ran an article called “Deputy Minister sees diminished role for MNR”. The article was based on the transcript of a video statement by David O’Toole, the Deputy Minister of Natural Resources,...

Editorial by Jeff Green When the Occupy movement, as it has come to be known, sprung up in New York as a kind of North American response to the Arab Spring last summer, I, for one, looked at it as an urban phenomenon. Even the slogan about the 1%...

Editorial by Jeff Green About once every 12 to 18 months, Inspector Gerry Salisbury, the Commander of the Lanark County Detachment of the OPP, makes an appearance at a meeting of Central Frontenac Council. Each time, he brings a set of statistics...

The Good Life Editorial by Jeff Green Normally every year we print 50 issues of the Frontenac News and then take two weeks off for Christmas and New Year’s. Every few years, because of the way the weeks line up, we put out a 51st paper before...

Editorial by Jeff Green It seems to me that it is inevitable that planning services in Central and North Frontenac will be done by the Frontenac County Planning Department as of sometime early in 2012. In recent presentations to both townships, the...

It is unusual to hear doctors talk about the limitations of their profession. Dr. Andrew Pipe is well known for his work developing smoking cessation programs, for his role as head of cardiac prevention and rehabilitation at the University of Ottawa...

The problem with civil disobedience is that it is a blatant defiance of the “rules” and in a generally moral, law-abiding society like the one we Canadians enjoy, abiding by the rules is ingrained and defiance is seen as counterproductive...

Editorial by Jeff Green Reading through the coverage of the provincial election that will end its dreary run today, one of the sideshows has been a number of articles in both the Ottawa Citizen and the Globe and Mail about LFL&A incumbent Randy...

Editorial Jeff Green Liberal candidate Bill MacDonald has been preparing for the provincial election campaign that is now underway for at least four years, and he is putting everything he has into it. But in electoral politics the local campaign is...

Editorial by Jeff Green Energy policy will be a major theme in the coming provin-cial election. The Conservative Party has been making the cost of hydro a major thrust of their pre-election banter, but aside from a commitment to cutting the HST from...

Jack Layton: A Tribute This Guy Knew Jack I didn’t know Jack By Jeff Green Anyone who has gone through a cancer death in their own family - and that is almost everyone it seems - took a deep breath when Jack Layton appeared in public a few weeks...

We are now well into the Dog Days of summer. The weather is still hot, and we really don’t want to have to think about the cold weather to come. But deep inside we know summer will end. So even if we don’t act right away we are starting to think...

Several years ago John Campbell bought a 200-acre farm on the Willis Armstrong Road, a little bit north of Hwy. 7 in Central Frontenac. The farm had been run by the Young family until age and modern economics held sway. Like so many properties in...

Bill Day Jr. owns a property that is on a busy through road between Sydenham and Harrowsmith. His property is easy to find from Kingston and the 401. His father ran grass drag snowmobile races on the property for 35 years, and Bill Day is taking...

Editorial by Jeff Green The Committee of Adjustment in North Frontenac seems to think their own planning consultant is at fault because the Province of Ontario has decided that development on the limited number of new cottage lots that can be found...

Editorial by Jeff Green A month ago, Claudette Richardson, the Chair of the Library Board, a volunteer position, was asked if the board is currently considering closing any branches. “Not to my knowledge”, she said. So even though Ms. Richardson...

Editorial by Jeff Green At the outset of the federal election campaign that just ended, I made a call to a local NDP riding association member whom I hadn't talked to in quite a while. I was setting up all-candidates’ meetings at the time. We...

Editorial by Jeff Green Prime Minister Harper said last week that, “Public money should not be used to support political parties that the public does not support” as he proposed to scrap the program that pays $2 annually to political parties for...

Former Prime Minister Kim Campbell once said that an election campaign is a bad time to discuss policy. She said that during an election campaign that did not end well for her or for her party. None of the major parties seems to think this election...

1st Edition Editorial, It could be up to us, (March 1971 #1) Community columnists: The Heart of the Paper, by Jeff Green Dear, Dear Martha A Cornerstone For Pine Meadow. (July 21, 1992  #718) Important dates in the history of “The North...

Photo: Drawing by Angela Badour, then  grade 10 student at SLHS, who was a winner for the 500th edition drawing contest in 1988. The first edition of the Frontenac News was nothing more than a short essay, printed on the second page of a single...

Editorial by Jeff Green In 1971 there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Internet at all, and no cell phones. Most telephones in this part of the world were on party lines. It was a long distance call between Sharbot Lake and Arden, or Harrowsmith and...

OK, you’ve been holed up in the house since Christmas, watching the meter drop on the oil tank or feeding the wood stove and watching the woodpile dwindle, or watching the electricity meter spin and spin at high speed - or doing all three – and...

Is there a prescription painkiller addiction problem in our rural community? The use or illegal abuse of opiate prescription drugs, specifically pain drugs like Percocet, Oxycontin and Hydro Morphone has become a real problem in our community. These...

Editorial by Jeff Green In considering the results of the municipal election in the four townships that we cover regularly (three in Frontenac County and Addington Highlands), the initial impact in all the townships should be minimal. There were a...

Editorial by Jeff Green On Tuesday, the Kingston Frontenac Lennox & Addington Public Health Unit announced they are holding a photo-op in Kingston to launch a new campaign against contraband tobacco. They will initiate the campaign by making a...

(Editors Note: (i) denotes incumbent) With one week to go before nominations close on September 10, there are now races for council seats in most districts covered by the Frontenac News. On Addington Highlands, there are three candidates for two...

Editorial by Jeff Green Most people in Ontario had never heard of Stewardship Ontario until a couple of weeks ago, when the news about a dreaded new eco-tax began to surface. The tax, which is really a fee, was supposed to be applied to all...

Editorial by Jeff Green Pour me another cup of coffee As I sit back every week and consider what to write for the week's paper, one of the best ways to put the task off is to brew up a pot of morning coffee. Another way is to surf the web while that...

Editorial by Jeff Green There are not many things that people dislike more than paying taxes. We like money, and we don't like to have that money taken away from us. And when we want to buy something, we don't relish the idea that the $100 price tag...

Editorial by Jeff Green We are in the midst of a gardening season such as we have not seen in years. The hot weather in early spring has put gardens two weeks ahead of normal years. Every year we plant such early season stalwarts as spinach and...

Editorial by Jeff Green Just over two years ago, on April 24, 2008, to be exact, the Frontenac News published an article about a cigarette store. The store was selling bags of 200 tax- and duty-free cigarettes for a fraction of the commercial price....

Editorial by Jeff Green Note on budget reporting – Local councils will be finalizing their 2010 budgets over the next month. Covering budget debates presents a challenge because the different townships have different ways of calculating their...

Editorial by Jeff Green As the winter Olympics start this weekend, the Canadian media machines will turn their attention to two weeks of flag waving as Canada tries to take its place as the greatest sporting nation that money can buy. Much of the...

Editorial by Jeff Green It's now been several years since federal gas tax money started flowing to Frontenac County. That money is a rebate from gas tax that we all pay whenever we fill up, and municipalities wanted some of it to deal with what they...

Editorial by Jeff Green It seemed like it was only a matter of time before Frontenac County Emergency Services Manager Paul Charbonneau and the Council of North Frontenac Township would end up at loggerheads over the location of a new ambulance base...

Editorial by Jeff Green MP Scott Reid and MPP Randy Hillier have done something that no one else seems to have been able to do – they have created unanimity on Lanark Highlands Council over, of all things, water. They did so by sending out a...

Editorial by Jeff Green There is something to be said about services that are locally run and locally managed, particularly when they are well run. Removing the management of a service from the people who deliver it, particularly in rural areas...

Editorial by Jeff Green As of Remembrance Day in 2008, 97 Canadians had been killed in the Afghanistan conflict. One year later, the total is 133, making this the deadliest year for Canadian troops during a conflict that is now eight years old....