In 1902, the Picton High School classics master was looking for a way for his staff to entertain themselves on long winter evenings. In a County whose motto is, “Blessed by Nature, Enriched by Man, Loyally Founded, Loyally Built,” the Tennyson Club was just the ticket for such enrichment. After all, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the British Poet Laureate, who penned "The Charge of the Light Brigade,” had just died 10 years earlier in 1892. And Tennyson himself, while at Trinity College in Cambridge, had joined The Apostles, a literary club.
The Picton Tennyson Club was part of a much larger late 19th and early 20th Century explosion of literary societies in rural Ontario. One of the best-known members of the Tennyson Club in Picton was composer Gena Branscombe. Born in Picton to a United Empire Loyalist family, she graduated from Picton High School before going on to study music in Chicago and composition in Berlin. The Macaulay Club in Chatham got its start in 1882; the Twenty Club of Lindsay in 1892; and the Tuesday Reading Club of Woodstock in 1896. Indeed, self-improvement manifested itself in numerous forms during the period. This was also the era of the Chautauqua movement, named after the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly founded in New York State in 1874 as an educational experiment in out-of-school, vacation learning. It was broadened almost immediately beyond courses for Sunday school teachers to include academic subjects, music, art and physical education. Likewise, it was the era of the Carnegie libraries – so named after Scottish-born American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie – including two striking examples extant locally in Wellington and Picton.
The Tennyson Club in Picton has evolved over 105 years from a purely musical and literary group into an eclectic mix covering a spectrum of interests. Today, life-long residents of the County and newcomers may find themselves side to side in the Tennyson Club, although membership is limited to 30 as they meet six evenings a year from September to May on a rotating basis in members’ homes. The 30 members are divided into six groups of five, with each group responsible for putting on a program for one evening a season. The form of the program is up to the presenters: it can be a debate, discussion, theatre, art, music, games, etc. Programs in recent years have included, “The County – Whither Goest Thou?”; “Drama – Mirror of the Age;” and “The Enterprising Mind.”
So, enjoy the nice summer weather by all means, but remember to keep it in the County while improving your mind and spirits when the cold westerly winds again begin to blow off Lake Ontario. For more information on the Tennyson Club you can call their president, Margaret Moore at (613) 393-5771 or reach her by e-mail at: moorejo@reach.net
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Spreading the ‘Good News:’ International Christian media and Prince Edward County
Burlington, Ont. may have Crossroads Christian Communications’ 100 Huntley Street, but Bloomfield has Wesley Acres at West Lake, a 250-acre island camp affiliated with the Free Methodist Church in Canada, with its own share of evangelical media heavy hitters either passing through as guest speakers or summering in tranquility here.
Chris Mitchell, who was raised a Roman Catholic but is now the Middle East bureau chief in Jerusalem for the largely Protestant evangelical Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), spoke at a tent meeting on “radical Islamist ideology” and the “Battle of the Ages” at the time of last summer’s conflagration in Lebanon. Mitchell also noted there are lots of moderate Muslims who are not jihadists and are working for peace in the Middle East, often at great personal risk if they are seen as Christian collaborators by their co-religionists. Speaking of the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives, Mitchell repeated what Derek Prince, the Pentecostal Bible teacher observed years ago: “You don’t choose Jerusalem, Jerusalem chooses you.”
For those County residents who perhaps don’t follow the genre closely, CBN is the CNN equivalent in Christian broadcast media. Founded by Southern Baptist televangelist Pat Robertson, the Virginia Beach, Va. Christian broadcaster has been on-air since 1961 and is best known for The 700 Club talk show. Meanwhile in Canada, David Mainse, a Pentecostal minister who would go onto create 100 Huntley Street and Crossroads Christian Communications, got his start the following year in 1962 with a 15-minute program following the late night news at CBC affiliate CHOV-TV in Pembroke, Ont.
But Crossroads Christian Communications is by no means the only Canadian organization with a stake in Christian broadcasting these days. There’s different broadcasters with different projects for the same mission, which is why if you take a weekend trip to Wesley Acres on West Lake this summer you may just run into Donald Brooker, executive director of the Canadian office of SAT-7, also in Burlington, which produces indigenous Arabic Christian satellite television out of Nicosia, Cyprus for broadcast in the Middle East and North Africa. Around 20 million Arab Christians live in this region. About 11 million are Orthodox Christians, 5.4 million are Catholic and 3.6 million are Protestants. SAT-7’s international chairman is Rev. Habib Badr, senior pastor of the National Evangelical Church of Beirut. Congregational and Presbyterian American missionaries established the church in 1848.
Protestant evangelical Christians, however, by no means have a monopoly on being religious communicators here in the County. Just down the road from Wesley Acres, West Lake and Bloomfield, you may find Rev. Peter Timmins preaching the Sunday sermon at mass at the Church of St. Gregory the Great in Picton. Timmins, a Montreal-born priest most recently serving in Kingston, has been the administrator of the Roman Catholic parish in Picton for some months now while Rev. Brian Hart is on administrative leave. But it’s not Timmins’ sermons that make him remarkable; homilies after all go with the job description. What makes Timmins somewhat unusual is how as a communicator this retired parish priest, as he describes himself, who is certainly be no means a theologian, is not only the author of several well-received adult and children’s books on the Catholic faith (Nothing for Granted, The Candle and the Flame and A Salmon Story), but was also a passionate early adapter among area Catholic clergy of the potential uses for a website on the Internet. But perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us completely that Timmins is a fairly hip guy; his niece is Margo Timmins, vocalist for the Cowboy Junkies, whose 1988 album The Trinity Session, recorded live in a single day on a single microphone in a church in Toronto, still receives critical notice almost 20 years later. At Rev. Timmins' website (http://www.nothingforgranted.com) you can check out this and that, including some of his homilies in his Living Our Story section.
Chris Mitchell, who was raised a Roman Catholic but is now the Middle East bureau chief in Jerusalem for the largely Protestant evangelical Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), spoke at a tent meeting on “radical Islamist ideology” and the “Battle of the Ages” at the time of last summer’s conflagration in Lebanon. Mitchell also noted there are lots of moderate Muslims who are not jihadists and are working for peace in the Middle East, often at great personal risk if they are seen as Christian collaborators by their co-religionists. Speaking of the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives, Mitchell repeated what Derek Prince, the Pentecostal Bible teacher observed years ago: “You don’t choose Jerusalem, Jerusalem chooses you.”
For those County residents who perhaps don’t follow the genre closely, CBN is the CNN equivalent in Christian broadcast media. Founded by Southern Baptist televangelist Pat Robertson, the Virginia Beach, Va. Christian broadcaster has been on-air since 1961 and is best known for The 700 Club talk show. Meanwhile in Canada, David Mainse, a Pentecostal minister who would go onto create 100 Huntley Street and Crossroads Christian Communications, got his start the following year in 1962 with a 15-minute program following the late night news at CBC affiliate CHOV-TV in Pembroke, Ont.
But Crossroads Christian Communications is by no means the only Canadian organization with a stake in Christian broadcasting these days. There’s different broadcasters with different projects for the same mission, which is why if you take a weekend trip to Wesley Acres on West Lake this summer you may just run into Donald Brooker, executive director of the Canadian office of SAT-7, also in Burlington, which produces indigenous Arabic Christian satellite television out of Nicosia, Cyprus for broadcast in the Middle East and North Africa. Around 20 million Arab Christians live in this region. About 11 million are Orthodox Christians, 5.4 million are Catholic and 3.6 million are Protestants. SAT-7’s international chairman is Rev. Habib Badr, senior pastor of the National Evangelical Church of Beirut. Congregational and Presbyterian American missionaries established the church in 1848.
Protestant evangelical Christians, however, by no means have a monopoly on being religious communicators here in the County. Just down the road from Wesley Acres, West Lake and Bloomfield, you may find Rev. Peter Timmins preaching the Sunday sermon at mass at the Church of St. Gregory the Great in Picton. Timmins, a Montreal-born priest most recently serving in Kingston, has been the administrator of the Roman Catholic parish in Picton for some months now while Rev. Brian Hart is on administrative leave. But it’s not Timmins’ sermons that make him remarkable; homilies after all go with the job description. What makes Timmins somewhat unusual is how as a communicator this retired parish priest, as he describes himself, who is certainly be no means a theologian, is not only the author of several well-received adult and children’s books on the Catholic faith (Nothing for Granted, The Candle and the Flame and A Salmon Story), but was also a passionate early adapter among area Catholic clergy of the potential uses for a website on the Internet. But perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us completely that Timmins is a fairly hip guy; his niece is Margo Timmins, vocalist for the Cowboy Junkies, whose 1988 album The Trinity Session, recorded live in a single day on a single microphone in a church in Toronto, still receives critical notice almost 20 years later. At Rev. Timmins' website (http://www.nothingforgranted.com) you can check out this and that, including some of his homilies in his Living Our Story section.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Farmgate produce: You may need to live here to get it
Prince Edward County residents are blessed with one of the most pastoral landscapes in Eastern Ontario. Closer to paradise, I sense as I travel several times a week between Wellington and Picton along the Loyalist Parkway with Lake Ontario and West Lake just off to my west. Old red and green barns adjacent to freshly-seeded pasture on both sides of the road. Cows and lambs meandering and milling about. Blue skies and sunshine with a south breeze at 18 km/h blows in off the water today giving us a comfortable 22 C while it is 31 C up the lake farther in Toronto this afternoon. Does it get anymore perfect than this?
Tourism and vineyards may be ascendant here in the popular imagination, but old fashioned cash crop and animal farming haven’t disappeared either. A year ago next week – May 29 to be exact – County council held a special meeting to “show support for our local agricultural community and to help members of council better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” Leona Dombrowsky, minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, attended the meeting and among those offering deputations that evening were John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture (and now a councillor as well); Ken Marisett from the National Farmers Union; Wayne Gyde of the Prince Edward-Hastings-Northumberland Landowners' Association; Andy Margetson, president of the Prince Edward Cattlemen’s Association; and Achim Mohseen-Beyk from the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario.
The usual farming woes were cited with the usual suspects named. The gist of the evening, for simplicity’s sake, might be reduced to claims of too few domestic subsidies from the federal and provincial governments (although they wouldn’t be actually called subsidies) and too many (unfair) subsidies (which would be called subsidies) from foreign governments (think American) for their farmers.
None of this is new down here. "Barley Days," as they came to be known, were a heady time for the County, but ended in October 1890, when the U.S. government enacted the ad valorem McKinley Tariff with a rate of 48.4 per cent for imports to give American farmers more protection. Overnight, the price of County barley fell to rock bottom and Barley Days were over. With the end of barley came the rise of the canning industry. The first canning factory was built in the County as early as 1882, but reached its zenith during the Second World War when the “Garden County” shipped a million and a half cases of tomatoes alone in 1941 – 43 per cent of the total produced in all of Canada that year. Corn, peas, pumpkin, beans, and fruit all found their way to the factory, and canning continued as a major County industry until the 1950s until the frozen food industry spelled the gradual end of canning in Prince Edward.
Now, a year after that special council meeting of May 29, 2006, council will be again discussing agriculture Monday night. This time they’ll be voting on whether to accept a $355,000 grant from the Advancing Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food (ACAAF) program to assist in developing markets for Prince Edward County meat and produce in Toronto, Kingston and Ottawa. The ACAAF program, launched in 2004, replaced the Canadian Adaptation and Rural Development (CARD) Fund established in 1995. The money, applied for by economic development officer Dan Taylor, would be used to hire a salesperson to develop sales and distribution channels and build supply relationships with institutions including colleges and universities, hospitals and prisons. An operations staff person would also be hired to manage the office’s administration and finance functions. Under the plan, the grant would subsidize the cost of an office for three years after which local producers will need to fund the plan on their own.
Taking the money at first blush may seem a no-brainer. After all, it was only a year ago council deemed it necessary to hold that special meeting “to better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” But just as there’s no free lunch, there’s no free money either. Under the plan unveiled last week, the county would have to spend $50,000 in the first year, and $25,000 the following two years as their matching funds contribution, although Taylor says a portion of the County’s matching contribution could come in the form of in-kind services and programs already funded through the Harvestin’ the County initiative.
But it seems the even bigger catch is our local primary producers and family farms are despite their “economic crisis” going pretty much flat out and aren’t at all sure they’d have enough produce to meet the demand that might be generated through the ACAAF funding.
The mood going into Monday night’s council meeting might be described as distinctly ambivalent. “I’ve talked to many local producers,” said Coun. John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture, last week at a corporate services committee meeting, “and they’ve established pretty good markets already, whether going to a market or at the door. They don’t see a lot of surplus product. The question then is: Where will product come? I’m not saying it won’t come but in terms of a business case in setting up this collaborative – before we commit money to it. I think we need to have another meeting with producers and find out how much they are going to commit.”
Seems County farmers are pretty much content to sell any farmgate surplus they might have, well, at the farmgate or roadside. Fact is there’s not even a farmers’ market in Picton. Thompson says “producers say they don’t have any excess product to bring to a farmers’ market. And we can’t produce anymore. So unless some new producers to expand production we are not meeting the demand we have already.”
Most of us know by now that eating locally-grown foods makes for common sense. We’ve read Gary Paul Nabhan 2002 memoir, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods; listened to Dombrowsky here earlier this month trumpeting her 'Buy Ontario' homegrown foods message; and embraced Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement, which started in Italy in 1986 and arrived in Prince Edward County in November 2005 through the convivium, chaired by Petra Cooper of Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Company near Cressy.
The message Prince Edward County farmers may be poised to send out through council is reminiscent of a famous (at least in the Maritimes) commercial jingle for Saint John-based Moosehead Breweries Alpine Lager: “You’ve got to live here to get it.”
Tourism and vineyards may be ascendant here in the popular imagination, but old fashioned cash crop and animal farming haven’t disappeared either. A year ago next week – May 29 to be exact – County council held a special meeting to “show support for our local agricultural community and to help members of council better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” Leona Dombrowsky, minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, attended the meeting and among those offering deputations that evening were John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture (and now a councillor as well); Ken Marisett from the National Farmers Union; Wayne Gyde of the Prince Edward-Hastings-Northumberland Landowners' Association; Andy Margetson, president of the Prince Edward Cattlemen’s Association; and Achim Mohseen-Beyk from the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario.
The usual farming woes were cited with the usual suspects named. The gist of the evening, for simplicity’s sake, might be reduced to claims of too few domestic subsidies from the federal and provincial governments (although they wouldn’t be actually called subsidies) and too many (unfair) subsidies (which would be called subsidies) from foreign governments (think American) for their farmers.
None of this is new down here. "Barley Days," as they came to be known, were a heady time for the County, but ended in October 1890, when the U.S. government enacted the ad valorem McKinley Tariff with a rate of 48.4 per cent for imports to give American farmers more protection. Overnight, the price of County barley fell to rock bottom and Barley Days were over. With the end of barley came the rise of the canning industry. The first canning factory was built in the County as early as 1882, but reached its zenith during the Second World War when the “Garden County” shipped a million and a half cases of tomatoes alone in 1941 – 43 per cent of the total produced in all of Canada that year. Corn, peas, pumpkin, beans, and fruit all found their way to the factory, and canning continued as a major County industry until the 1950s until the frozen food industry spelled the gradual end of canning in Prince Edward.
Now, a year after that special council meeting of May 29, 2006, council will be again discussing agriculture Monday night. This time they’ll be voting on whether to accept a $355,000 grant from the Advancing Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food (ACAAF) program to assist in developing markets for Prince Edward County meat and produce in Toronto, Kingston and Ottawa. The ACAAF program, launched in 2004, replaced the Canadian Adaptation and Rural Development (CARD) Fund established in 1995. The money, applied for by economic development officer Dan Taylor, would be used to hire a salesperson to develop sales and distribution channels and build supply relationships with institutions including colleges and universities, hospitals and prisons. An operations staff person would also be hired to manage the office’s administration and finance functions. Under the plan, the grant would subsidize the cost of an office for three years after which local producers will need to fund the plan on their own.
Taking the money at first blush may seem a no-brainer. After all, it was only a year ago council deemed it necessary to hold that special meeting “to better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” But just as there’s no free lunch, there’s no free money either. Under the plan unveiled last week, the county would have to spend $50,000 in the first year, and $25,000 the following two years as their matching funds contribution, although Taylor says a portion of the County’s matching contribution could come in the form of in-kind services and programs already funded through the Harvestin’ the County initiative.
But it seems the even bigger catch is our local primary producers and family farms are despite their “economic crisis” going pretty much flat out and aren’t at all sure they’d have enough produce to meet the demand that might be generated through the ACAAF funding.
The mood going into Monday night’s council meeting might be described as distinctly ambivalent. “I’ve talked to many local producers,” said Coun. John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture, last week at a corporate services committee meeting, “and they’ve established pretty good markets already, whether going to a market or at the door. They don’t see a lot of surplus product. The question then is: Where will product come? I’m not saying it won’t come but in terms of a business case in setting up this collaborative – before we commit money to it. I think we need to have another meeting with producers and find out how much they are going to commit.”
Seems County farmers are pretty much content to sell any farmgate surplus they might have, well, at the farmgate or roadside. Fact is there’s not even a farmers’ market in Picton. Thompson says “producers say they don’t have any excess product to bring to a farmers’ market. And we can’t produce anymore. So unless some new producers to expand production we are not meeting the demand we have already.”
Most of us know by now that eating locally-grown foods makes for common sense. We’ve read Gary Paul Nabhan 2002 memoir, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods; listened to Dombrowsky here earlier this month trumpeting her 'Buy Ontario' homegrown foods message; and embraced Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement, which started in Italy in 1986 and arrived in Prince Edward County in November 2005 through the convivium, chaired by Petra Cooper of Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Company near Cressy.
The message Prince Edward County farmers may be poised to send out through council is reminiscent of a famous (at least in the Maritimes) commercial jingle for Saint John-based Moosehead Breweries Alpine Lager: “You’ve got to live here to get it.”
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Prince Edward County by the numbers: Slim pickings
Eastern Ontario Rural Policy Development Project is a mouthful to say, but it is also a mouthful worth remembering if for no other reason than the sobering numbers coming out of it. A joint effort of the Eastern Ontario Wardens Caucus, the Community Futures Development Corporations (CFDCs) of Eastern Ontario and the Martintown-based Ontario East Economic Development Commission, the project has released two new reports at the end of March which confirms statistically what those of us living here know anecdotally. Both Prince Edward County in particular and Eastern Ontario as a region are facing a bleak future. And even an influx of retirees and weekenders from the GTA; 500,000 summertime beachgoers at Sandbanks; and a dozen or so relatively new wineries along with about three dozen recent vintage vineyards aren’t going to save the day, although all incoming dollars will be more than welcome.
On March 27, the Eastern Ontario Rural Policy Development Project released its optimistically titled 41-page report A Prosperity Plan for Eastern Ontario. Three days later it released the more prosaic sounding 63-page report A Profile of Eastern Ontario. Both are available in their entirety online; the former at http://www.hastingscounty.com/files/IT/ProsperityPlanEasternOntarioMAR2707.pdf and the latter at http://www.eowc.org/Images/Reports/Profile_Eastern_Ont-Regional_Data-Mar3107.pdf
From the sundry graphs, there’s a mother lode of information to be extracted, albeit discomfiting. While the stats from Statistics Canada are six years old, the relationship of the numbers to geography remains interesting. The average personal income in the County was $27,356 in 2001 -- $7,845 below the provincial average. In neighboring Belleville, the average personal income was $28,890; in Quinte West it was $27,841; and in Northumberland County average personal income was $30,030.
The Intelligencer, Belleville’s Osprey-owned daily newspaper, correctly observed of the region in general what is also true of the County in particular: “Eastern Ontarians tend to be poorer, older and have fewer economic opportunities than the rest of the province. The result is less education, poorer health and higher taxes on the backs of households that can't afford them, say local politicians, bureaucrats and health officials.”
On March 27, the Eastern Ontario Rural Policy Development Project released its optimistically titled 41-page report A Prosperity Plan for Eastern Ontario. Three days later it released the more prosaic sounding 63-page report A Profile of Eastern Ontario. Both are available in their entirety online; the former at http://www.hastingscounty.com/files/IT/ProsperityPlanEasternOntarioMAR2707.pdf and the latter at http://www.eowc.org/Images/Reports/Profile_Eastern_Ont-Regional_Data-Mar3107.pdf
From the sundry graphs, there’s a mother lode of information to be extracted, albeit discomfiting. While the stats from Statistics Canada are six years old, the relationship of the numbers to geography remains interesting. The average personal income in the County was $27,356 in 2001 -- $7,845 below the provincial average. In neighboring Belleville, the average personal income was $28,890; in Quinte West it was $27,841; and in Northumberland County average personal income was $30,030.
The Intelligencer, Belleville’s Osprey-owned daily newspaper, correctly observed of the region in general what is also true of the County in particular: “Eastern Ontarians tend to be poorer, older and have fewer economic opportunities than the rest of the province. The result is less education, poorer health and higher taxes on the backs of households that can't afford them, say local politicians, bureaucrats and health officials.”
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, A Lost BlackBerry and the blackberries of Cold Storage Road
The action was heating up across from the County on the other side of the Bay of Quinte last weekend with a group of Tyendinaga Mohawks using an old school bus to blockade the CN Rail crossing at Deseronto Road, effectively shutting down CN freight and Via passenger traffic in a dispute about a Kingston developer’s plans to build condominiums on a 930-acre area known as the Culbertson Land Tract. The tract is on a parcel of land granted to the Six Nations in 1793 and the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte claim that counter to the developer’s position, they never surrendered any part of it as alleged in 1832. At virtually the same time the Mohawks were maintaining their blockade, some nearby County residents were again complaining about a “Mohawk Territory” sign erected on Highway 49, before the Skyway Bridge and south of Green Point Road, otherwise known as County Road 35. The residents have been raising the issue on and off over the duration of at least the last three County councils – including incumbent Mayor Leo Finnegan and his predecessor James Taylor – as the sign itself has undergone several incarnations. The residents argue, quite correctly in a technical sense, that the sign is located on Prince Edward County “soil,” not on the Mohawk Territory across the water. And if it really is Mohawk Territory on this side of the water, some of the Green Point Road area residents say, given their distaste for recent County council budgets and property tax increases, they’re thinking of applying to have the band council of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte become their local governing authority. The sign location argument might hold more water if it was somehow exceptional, but it isn’t. Fact is, many municipalities do it. Such signs are often not located on a surveyor’s actual geographical demarcation line. We suspect a cursory drive along the highways and byways in the area might well reveal Northumberland County signs encroaching on Hastings County or Peterborough County territory or vice-versa. And regardless of signage near the Skyway Bridge, we’re pretty sure some Green Point Road and other County residents can figure out when they’re on Mohawk Territory or not come time for their next cheap smokes run.
In another sign of the times in the County, a hand-written sign can be currently observed on a hydro pole on Main Street in downtown Picton, directly in front of The Armoury: “REWARD: For Return of Lost BlackBerry in leather case. Here on April 19, 2007. Call Doug at 613-476-4427.” The fact the BlackBerry seems to have gone missing right at The Wellington Times newspaper box location there suggests perhaps the owner stopped to pick up a paper and became immediately engrossed in some story or other.
Aside from Doug, it just wasn’t a very good week for BlackBerry owners, otherwise known also as CrackBerry addicts. As virtually everyone knows by now, an insufficiently tested systems cache handling piece of software at Research In Motion’s Waterloo network operations centre, which processes all e-mail messages to or from every BlackBerry in North America, set off a chain reaction that eventually cut off service to more than five million users overnight last Tuesday. And that was two days before Doug lost his BlackBerry in Picton.
My only brush with blackberries last week was also in Picton, but it was a case of taking a gorgeous 19C sunny early spring morning to head down to the County Farm Centre on Cold Storage Road to check out some pretty tempting, albeit frozen, blackberries at $4.99 per bag.
In another sign of the times in the County, a hand-written sign can be currently observed on a hydro pole on Main Street in downtown Picton, directly in front of The Armoury: “REWARD: For Return of Lost BlackBerry in leather case. Here on April 19, 2007. Call Doug at 613-476-4427.” The fact the BlackBerry seems to have gone missing right at The Wellington Times newspaper box location there suggests perhaps the owner stopped to pick up a paper and became immediately engrossed in some story or other.
Aside from Doug, it just wasn’t a very good week for BlackBerry owners, otherwise known also as CrackBerry addicts. As virtually everyone knows by now, an insufficiently tested systems cache handling piece of software at Research In Motion’s Waterloo network operations centre, which processes all e-mail messages to or from every BlackBerry in North America, set off a chain reaction that eventually cut off service to more than five million users overnight last Tuesday. And that was two days before Doug lost his BlackBerry in Picton.
My only brush with blackberries last week was also in Picton, but it was a case of taking a gorgeous 19C sunny early spring morning to head down to the County Farm Centre on Cold Storage Road to check out some pretty tempting, albeit frozen, blackberries at $4.99 per bag.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Want Counterintuitive? Hitchhiking is alive and well in the County in 2007
OK, I admit it. Seeing Theresa Durning last Saturday at the County Cultural Rally in Picton made me feel guilty about being somewhat lackadaisical (or is that just plain lazy) about not updating The County Counterintuitive since March 8. When I started the blog, Theresa told me to keep it fresh by updating it at least once a week. Now, other than meeting her in person just once in passing last June (introduced by my old Loyalist friend and classmate Sue Capon, editor of The County Weekly News) my only dealings with Theresa (who also goes by “Tee the FJB” – ask her if you want to know the story behind that) were the odd e-mail exchange and copy editing and laying out her No Strings On Me column on Page 7 of The Wellington Times for a few months last year. So I thought briefly about doing what all good copy editors do – besides edit copy. Remain anonymous. Theresa’s mug is well-known in the County (No Strings On Me is also the name of her blog as well as her column and can be found at http://inthebag-tee.blogspot.com/), mine isn’t. But seeing her hustle around the Prince Edward County Community Centre in her apron while taking pictures (she’s also proprietor-in-chief of In the Bag Media) made me feel slothfully sheepish enough to go up to her in person and once again re-introduce myself. And offer my latest mea culpa about blog tardiness.
And speaking of the County Cultural Rally, hearing County Boy Bill Ostrander sing a song his daughter wrote about his 4 a.m. snow plowing of County roads in the winter was worth the ten bucks I spent to get in the door (the price never did increase to $15 after March 15.) Good music and ten bucks. That’s the good news. Less reassuring news about Culture in the County and where it fits into the municipality’s budgetary priorities can be found at Theresa’s day-after-the-event blog entry for April 1, Stringing Culture along…. Unfortunately, it’s not an April Fool’s joke.
For something really counterintuitive, remember hitchhiking? A lost travel adventure art that disappeared somewhere circa 1973 (with the odd exception such as Globe and Mail writer John Stackhouse’s insightful Notes from the Road cross-Canada series in the Summer of 2000.) Of course, fear reigns supreme now and no one is going to pick you up in the Conservative County. Right? Wrong. I’m here to tell you hitchhiking is alive and well here in the County and if you want to meet some interesting County characters and hear some down-home stories, just stick your thumb out. I’ve done it many a time on the Wellington-Bloomfield-Picton route. Sunday morning a man picked me up in Wellington and drove me to Picton, all the while telling me stories about what he considers to be the two worst winters in the County in his experience – 1946 and 1977. In ’46, he was in school and the snow was so deep, he said, you could touch overhead telephone lines (not that it was advisable to do so) walking on top of snowbanks. But ’77 was even worse, he said, with the County briefly loosing a snow plow in Lake Ontario near Wellington; the military having to bring their big blowers out from CFS Mountain View to clear some areas; a couple of kids with their dad’s car hitting a snowbank on the way home from school in a blizzard and being stranded for several days in Bloomfield. In both 1946 and 1977, my driver said, the County was cut off from the mainland for five days straight. Then passing through Bloomfield, he told me about an-all-but abandoned house on the outskirts of the village toward Picton. Well, not quite abandoned. While there are no longer human inhabitants, the elderly woman who owns it, with some help from relatives, he said, returns most every afternoon from her present home nearby in the village to feed her birds, which still live there on Highway 33.
Another time a couple of weeks ago, I was picked up by a grandmother and her grandson while I was hitchhiking. Her family home has been in Bloomfield for 130 years. But she's also travelled far and wide before her path took her back to the County. While she’s well-known for many things, including being the spouse of a well-known-in-his-own-right Hallowell politician, less well known perhaps is the true fact that she gave Hollywood screen legend Clark Gable his last x-ray in Los Angeles in 1960. As I said, true fact.
And speaking of the County Cultural Rally, hearing County Boy Bill Ostrander sing a song his daughter wrote about his 4 a.m. snow plowing of County roads in the winter was worth the ten bucks I spent to get in the door (the price never did increase to $15 after March 15.) Good music and ten bucks. That’s the good news. Less reassuring news about Culture in the County and where it fits into the municipality’s budgetary priorities can be found at Theresa’s day-after-the-event blog entry for April 1, Stringing Culture along…. Unfortunately, it’s not an April Fool’s joke.
For something really counterintuitive, remember hitchhiking? A lost travel adventure art that disappeared somewhere circa 1973 (with the odd exception such as Globe and Mail writer John Stackhouse’s insightful Notes from the Road cross-Canada series in the Summer of 2000.) Of course, fear reigns supreme now and no one is going to pick you up in the Conservative County. Right? Wrong. I’m here to tell you hitchhiking is alive and well here in the County and if you want to meet some interesting County characters and hear some down-home stories, just stick your thumb out. I’ve done it many a time on the Wellington-Bloomfield-Picton route. Sunday morning a man picked me up in Wellington and drove me to Picton, all the while telling me stories about what he considers to be the two worst winters in the County in his experience – 1946 and 1977. In ’46, he was in school and the snow was so deep, he said, you could touch overhead telephone lines (not that it was advisable to do so) walking on top of snowbanks. But ’77 was even worse, he said, with the County briefly loosing a snow plow in Lake Ontario near Wellington; the military having to bring their big blowers out from CFS Mountain View to clear some areas; a couple of kids with their dad’s car hitting a snowbank on the way home from school in a blizzard and being stranded for several days in Bloomfield. In both 1946 and 1977, my driver said, the County was cut off from the mainland for five days straight. Then passing through Bloomfield, he told me about an-all-but abandoned house on the outskirts of the village toward Picton. Well, not quite abandoned. While there are no longer human inhabitants, the elderly woman who owns it, with some help from relatives, he said, returns most every afternoon from her present home nearby in the village to feed her birds, which still live there on Highway 33.
Another time a couple of weeks ago, I was picked up by a grandmother and her grandson while I was hitchhiking. Her family home has been in Bloomfield for 130 years. But she's also travelled far and wide before her path took her back to the County. While she’s well-known for many things, including being the spouse of a well-known-in-his-own-right Hallowell politician, less well known perhaps is the true fact that she gave Hollywood screen legend Clark Gable his last x-ray in Los Angeles in 1960. As I said, true fact.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
En attendant Godot? No, but spring would be welcome
Down here in the County, we're getting ready for Maple in the County (we tend to affix "in the County" to everything we market here in the County) March 24 and 25. Lots of folks are on board for the event presented by the Waring House Restaurant, Inn, Conference Centre and Cookery School at Warings Corner, including Cliff Foster, and his son, Dean, who’s Fosterholm Farms down near Sandbanks taps 7,000 maple trees. Cliff’s father started making maple syrup in 1924 at the 75-acre Home Farm near Sandbanks. Later, he bought Outlet Farm and now Cliff and Dean runs Fosterholm Farms. You can find them on County Road 11, near the junction with County Road 18, between East Lake and West Lake, just northeast of Sandbanks Provincial Park.
So while Lent doesn’t end until sundown on Holy Thursday, April 5, it’s a pretty safe bet that fasting won’t be part of some folks 40-day season of soul-searching and repentance – at least not on Maple in the County weekend. Seems the sign most folks down here are looking for is some visible tangible sign of spring. Maple sap running would qualify nicely. It’s been dang cold here since Lent started on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 21. Come to think of it, it’s been cold now since the middle of January, almost two months ago. February and the last half of January were colder-than-normal. The first half of March is still undecided, but to date this month is also running colder-than-normal. Winter arrived very late but when it did arrive it stayed, although Environment Canada is now whetting our appetitive for spring by promising 5 and 6 C temperatures a few days hence. I could have sworn the groundhog did not see his shadow Feb. 2, meaning winter should have ended in four weeks by March 2. Lying groundhog.
Our next “in the County” event after the big Maple weekend comes only a week later when “Culture in the County,” also known as the “County Cultural Rally” takes place for one day only March 31 at the Prince Edward County Community Centre in Picton. Organizers are asking, “What’s County Culture to you?”
Well, to me part of the answer to that question is remembering our cultural mosaic includes folks – that would be us and our neighbours – who according to the most recent Statistics Canada figures from 2000, experience culture (right after they eat and put food on their tables) on a median total income of $20,790, compared to the provincial median figure of $24,816. And where “government transfers” equal 15.9 per cent of income compared to 9.8 per cent as a provincial average.
As former U.S. President Bill Clinton put it in his first inaugural address Jan. 21, 1993: “We recognize a simple but powerful truth – we need each other. And we must care for one another … tempered by the knowledge that, but for fate, we – the fortunate and the unfortunate – might have been each other.”
So while Lent doesn’t end until sundown on Holy Thursday, April 5, it’s a pretty safe bet that fasting won’t be part of some folks 40-day season of soul-searching and repentance – at least not on Maple in the County weekend. Seems the sign most folks down here are looking for is some visible tangible sign of spring. Maple sap running would qualify nicely. It’s been dang cold here since Lent started on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 21. Come to think of it, it’s been cold now since the middle of January, almost two months ago. February and the last half of January were colder-than-normal. The first half of March is still undecided, but to date this month is also running colder-than-normal. Winter arrived very late but when it did arrive it stayed, although Environment Canada is now whetting our appetitive for spring by promising 5 and 6 C temperatures a few days hence. I could have sworn the groundhog did not see his shadow Feb. 2, meaning winter should have ended in four weeks by March 2. Lying groundhog.
Our next “in the County” event after the big Maple weekend comes only a week later when “Culture in the County,” also known as the “County Cultural Rally” takes place for one day only March 31 at the Prince Edward County Community Centre in Picton. Organizers are asking, “What’s County Culture to you?”
Well, to me part of the answer to that question is remembering our cultural mosaic includes folks – that would be us and our neighbours – who according to the most recent Statistics Canada figures from 2000, experience culture (right after they eat and put food on their tables) on a median total income of $20,790, compared to the provincial median figure of $24,816. And where “government transfers” equal 15.9 per cent of income compared to 9.8 per cent as a provincial average.
As former U.S. President Bill Clinton put it in his first inaugural address Jan. 21, 1993: “We recognize a simple but powerful truth – we need each other. And we must care for one another … tempered by the knowledge that, but for fate, we – the fortunate and the unfortunate – might have been each other.”
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Conrad Guziewicz and Sandbank Homes Inc.
Not Conrad Black. He's busy these days getting ready with his co-defendants and lawyer Eddie Greenspan for his fraud trial scheduled to open March 14 in federal district court in Chicago. No, down here in the County these days when you mention Conrad you may well thinking of another Conrad -- and a very popular, if somewhat mysterious one, at least to some local folks. That would be none other than Conrad Guziewicz. Conrad who? That's right, Conrad Guziewicz, the man, who along with Picton-based Sandbank Homes Inc., has just donated $200,000 worth of land in Wellington to Duff Sprague's new Prince Edward County Family Health Team to allow Dr. Helen Cluett and Dr. Blair Scrivens to build a new clinic. The docs are now located in somewhat cramped office space at Wellington on the Lake, which bills itselt as an active adult lifestyle community with almost 300 homes built since 1998. If you want to know more about Sandbank Homes Inc. or Sandbank Developments Group, you can visit them at 35 Bridge St. in Picton or give them a jingle toll-free at (800) 353-7823 or (613) 471-2001 if you're in the local calling area.
As for learning m0re about Wellington benefactor Conrad Guziewicz, you might want to check out the vice-president of sales at ZipLip, Inc. in San Jose, California, who has more than 20 years of high-tech and information technology experience in selling to Fortune 500 customers under his belt.
Previously he served as director of sales at Foundry Networks in Santa Clara, California, where he formed the global go-to-market strategy that grew sales from under $1 million to more than $40 million in 12 months, resulting in Foundry Networks having the third-largest IPO in NASDAQ history. Among the deals he did at Foundry was one with NetRover Inc. of Sarnia, Ont., an Internet provider with some customers here in the County, although operating primarily in southwestern Ontario.
Prior to Foundry, Guziewicz was vice-president of worldwide sales at GigaLabs Inc. of Sunnyvale, California. He also served as director of sales and channels at Santa Clara-based UB Networks, where he managed a $100 million business unit. A wholly-owned unit of Tandem Computers Inc. in Cupertino, California, Tandem sold UB Networks to Newbridge Networks of Kanata, Ontario.
ZipLip, founded in 1999, makes email archiving software, integrating compliance, discovery, storage offloading and knowledge management on a single system. Additional capabilities include secure email and secure file management. Customers include Walgreens, ADP, Hancock Bank, Morgan Keegan, Regions Bank and Bank of New York.
As for learning m0re about Wellington benefactor Conrad Guziewicz, you might want to check out the vice-president of sales at ZipLip, Inc. in San Jose, California, who has more than 20 years of high-tech and information technology experience in selling to Fortune 500 customers under his belt.
Previously he served as director of sales at Foundry Networks in Santa Clara, California, where he formed the global go-to-market strategy that grew sales from under $1 million to more than $40 million in 12 months, resulting in Foundry Networks having the third-largest IPO in NASDAQ history. Among the deals he did at Foundry was one with NetRover Inc. of Sarnia, Ont., an Internet provider with some customers here in the County, although operating primarily in southwestern Ontario.
Prior to Foundry, Guziewicz was vice-president of worldwide sales at GigaLabs Inc. of Sunnyvale, California. He also served as director of sales and channels at Santa Clara-based UB Networks, where he managed a $100 million business unit. A wholly-owned unit of Tandem Computers Inc. in Cupertino, California, Tandem sold UB Networks to Newbridge Networks of Kanata, Ontario.
ZipLip, founded in 1999, makes email archiving software, integrating compliance, discovery, storage offloading and knowledge management on a single system. Additional capabilities include secure email and secure file management. Customers include Walgreens, ADP, Hancock Bank, Morgan Keegan, Regions Bank and Bank of New York.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Down here here in the County, we're not real fond of chain stores
Down here here in the County, we're not real fond of chain stores
By JOHN BARKER
I live in Wellington. Sobeys Inc. out of Stellarton, Nova Scotia may have pretty much taken financial control of the IGA's in Ontario in 1998 either through franchised or corporate stores (IGA locations in Atlantic Canada were purchased separately at the same time by Loblaws to keep the federal competition watchdog happy. In the United States, the Independent Grocers Alliance (IGA) dates back to its founding in Chicago in 1926 by J. Frank Grimes, an accountant for wholesale grocers) but a trip to Pierson's IGA on Main Street here is still a trip to an old-time grocer. Cline Pierson's employees bake the butter tarts fresh daily and the homemade wooden "closed" sign over a checkout lane is just a reminder to ring the cowbell in front of it for the cashier to come so you can pay for your groceries.
True, down the road in Picton, our "county town" where the seat of governance (well, the seat of something anyway) is Shire Hall, they do have a McDonald's on the main drag. But the most popular department store is still the Giant Tiger (the all-Canadian family discount store started in Ottawa in May 1961.) It's a chain store but at least it is human-scale and size and one of ours. Even better, it, like the IGA, is franchised as Picton Giant Tiger Inc.
Fact, is we're not exactly embracing Wal-Mart and the other big boxes down here in the County.
So are we selective down here in the County about our abhorrence of chain stores, especially the variety exported from South of the Border? Truth be told the present arrangement gives us the best of both worlds. A pristine County and the chance to venture up Highway 62 and across the Bay Bridge into Belleville and out to Bell Boulevard to do some serious big box shopping, and escape back to Rossmore by nightfall.
So can much good be said for chain stores (other than let's shop them but not in my back yard?) Virginia Postrel thinks so and wrote "In Praise of Chain Stores" (see below) in The Atlantic Monthly in December.
And while we may actually have working farms here on Ontario's only Island county (formerly an isthmus, before the construction of the Murray Canal in 1889) we can still be greener than Stephen Harper when want to be. Just look at Les MacDonald and Gwen Hoover's house up near Northport, the pride and joy of both David Suzuki and the Ontario Straw Bale Building Coalition -- and a testament to the imaginative ingenuity of these two retired federal cultural bureaucrats from Ottawa. The County is truly a big tent now.
But as Toronto Star columnist Richard Gwyn wrote recently (see below as well), pieties over climate change from a country that stands to benefit by and large from it are just that -- pieties, unless we're ready to take a hard look at hard solutions to help much of the rest of the world which decidedly will not benefit from global warming. What kind of solutions? How about $4-per-litre gas at the pumps and taking another look at"our present immigration policy" through which "each decade we turn some 2.5 million people who now are mostly low-energy users into high-energy users, and so into high greenhouse gas emitters," Gwyn writes.
Given that we love our fossil-fuelled ATVs down here in the County (although we can't legally drive them many places yet, we'd perhaps look at the immigration option first. I seem to recall some of our good neighbours up in the Ameliasburgh ward during last fall's municipal election campaign spoke about the merits of sealing the border to Picton.
The Atlantic Monthly December 2006
Pursuits & Retreats
Culture And Commerce
In Praise of Chain Stores
They aren’t destroying local flavor—they’re providing variety and comfort
by Virginia Postrel
Every well-traveled cosmopolite knows that America is mind-numbingly monotonous—the most boring country to tour, because everywhere looks like everywhere else,” as the columnist Thomas Friedman once told Charlie Rose. Boston has the same stores as Denver, which has the same stores as Charlotte or Seattle or Chicago. We live in a “Stepford world,” says Rachel Dresbeck, the author of Insiders’ Guide to Portland, Oregon. Even Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, she complains, is “dominated by the Gap, Anthropologie, Starbucks, and all the other usual suspects. Why go anywhere? Every place looks the same.” This complaint is more than the old worry, dating back to the 1920s, that the big guys are putting Mom and Pop out of business. Today’s critics focus less on what isn’t there—Mom and Pop—than on what is. Faneuil Hall actually has plenty of locally owned businesses, from the Geoclassics store selling minerals and jewelry, to Pizzeria Regina (“since 1926”). But you do find the same chains everywhere.
The suburbs are the worst. Take Chandler, Arizona, just south of Phoenix. At Chandler Fashion Center, the area’s big shopping mall, you’ll find P. F. Chang’s, California Pizza Kitchen, Chipotle Mexican Grill, and the Cheesecake Factory. Drive along Chandler’s straight, flat boulevards, and you’ll see Bed Bath & Beyond and Linens-n-Things; Barnes & Noble and Borders; PetSmart and Petco; Circuit City and Best Buy; Lowe’s and Home Depot; CVS and Walgreens. Chandler has the Apple Store and Pottery Barn, the Gap and Ann Taylor, Banana Republic and DSW, and, of course, Target and Wal-Mart, Starbucks and McDonald’s. For people allergic to brands, Chandler must be hell—even without the 110-degree days.
One of the fastest-growing cities in the country, Chandler is definitely the kind of place urbanists have in mind as they intone, “When every place looks the same, there is no such thing as place anymore.” Like so many towns in America, it has lost much of its historic character as a farming community. The annual Ostrich Festival still honors one traditional product, but these days Chandler raises more subdivisions and strip malls than ostrich plumes or cotton, another former staple. Yet it still refutes the common assertion that national chains are a blight on the landscape, that they’ve turned American towns into an indistinguishable “geography of nowhere.”
The first thing you notice in Chandler is that, as a broad empirical claim, the cliché that “everywhere looks like everywhere else” is obvious nonsense. Chandler’s land and air and foliage are peculiar to the desert Southwest. The people dress differently. Even the cookie-cutter housing developments, with their xeriscaping and washed-out desert palette, remind you where you are. Forget New England clapboard, Carolina columns, or yellow Texas brick. In the intense sun of Chandler, the red-tile roofs common in California turn a pale, pale pink.
Stores don’t give places their character. Terrain and weather and culture do. Familiar retailers may take some of the discovery out of travel—to the consternation of journalists looking for obvious local color—but by holding some of the commercial background constant, chains make it easier to discern the real differences that define a place: the way, for instance, that people in Chandler come out to enjoy the summer twilight, when the sky glows purple and the dry air cools.
Besides, the idea that America was once filled with wildly varied business establishments is largely a myth. Big cities could, and still can, support more retail niches than small towns. And in a less competitive national market, there was certainly more variation in business efficiency—in prices, service, and merchandise quality. But the range of retailing ideas in any given town was rarely that great. One deli or diner or lunch counter or cafeteria was pretty much like every other one. A hardware store was a hardware store, a pharmacy a pharmacy. Before it became a ubiquitous part of urban life, Starbucks was, in most American cities, a radically new idea.
Chains do more than bargain down prices from suppliers or divide fixed costs across a lot of units. They rapidly spread economic discovery—the scarce and costly knowledge of what retail concepts and operational innovations actually work. That knowledge can be gained only through the expensive and time-consuming process of trial and error. Expecting each town to independently invent every new business is a prescription for real monotony, at least for the locals. Chains make a large range of choices available in more places. They increase local variety, even as they reduce the differences from place to place. People who mostly stay put get to have experiences once available only to frequent travelers, and this loss of exclusivity is one reason why frequent travelers are the ones who complain. When Borders was a unique Ann Arbor institution, people in places like Chandler—or, for that matter, Philadelphia and Los Angeles—didn’t have much in the way of bookstores. Back in 1986, when California Pizza Kitchen was an innovative local restaurant about to open its second location, food writers at the L.A. Daily News declared it “the kind of place every neighborhood should have.” So what’s wrong if the country has 158 neighborhood CPKs instead of one or two?
The process of multiplication is particularly important for fast-growing towns like Chandler, where rollouts of established stores allow retail variety to expand as fast as the growing population can support new businesses. I heard the same refrain in Chandler that I’ve heard in similar boomburgs elsewhere, and for similar reasons. “It’s got all the advantages of a small town, in terms of being friendly, but it’s got all the things of a big town,” says Scott Stephens, who moved from Manhattan Beach, California, in 1998 to work for Motorola. Chains let people in a city of 250,000 enjoy retail amenities once available only in a huge metropolitan center. At the same time, familiar establishments make it easier for people to make a home in a new place. When Nissan recently moved its headquarters from Southern California to Tennessee, an unusually high percentage of its Los Angeles–area employees accepted the transfer. “The fact that Starbucks are everywhere helps make moving a lot easier these days,” a rueful Greg Whitney, vice president of business development for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, told the Los Angeles Times reporter John O’Dell. Orth Hedrick, a Nissan product manager, decided he could stay with the job he loved when he turned off the interstate near Nashville and realized, “You could really be Anywhere, U.S.A. There’s a great big regional shopping mall, and most of the stores and restaurants are the same ones we see in California. Yet a few miles away you’re in downtown, and there’s lots of local color, too.”
Contrary to the rhetoric of bored cosmopolites, most cities don’t exist primarily to please tourists. The children toddling through the Chandler mall hugging their soft Build-A-Bear animals are no less delighted because kids can also build a bear in Memphis or St. Louis. For them, this isn’t tourism; it’s life—the experiences that create the memories from which the meaning of a place arises over time. Among Chandler’s most charming sights are the business-casual dads joining their wives and kids for lunch in the mall food court. The food isn’t the point, let alone whether it’s from Subway or Dairy Queen. The restaurants merely provide the props and setting for the family time. When those kids grow up, they’ll remember the food court as happily as an older generation recalls the diners and motels of Route 66—not because of the businesses’ innate appeal but because of the memories they evoke.
The contempt for chains represents a brand-obsessed view of place, as if store names were all that mattered to a city’s character. For many critics, the name on the store really is all that matters. The planning consultant Robert Gibbs works with cities that want to revive their downtowns, and he also helps developers find space for retailers. To his frustration, he finds that many cities actually turn away national chains, preferring a moribund downtown that seems authentically local. But, he says, the same local activists who oppose chains “want specialty retail that sells exactly what the chains sell—the same price, the same fit, the same qualities, the same sizes, the same brands, even.” You can show people pictures of a Pottery Barn with nothing but the name changed, he says, and they’ll love the store. So downtown stores stay empty, or sell low-value tourist items like candles and kites, while the chains open on the edge of town. In the name of urbanism, officials and activists in cities like Ann Arbor and Fort Collins, Colorado, are driving business to the suburbs. “If people like shopping at the Banana Republic or the Gap, if that’s your market—or Payless Shoes—why not?” says an exasperated Gibbs. “Why not sell the goods and services people want?”
Let's get real on climate
Richard Gwyn
My column on global warming a week ago triggered an exceptionally large number of comments from readers. The column tried to address what seems to be a paradox in Canadians' response to the climate change issue.
On the one hand, Canadians are deeply concerned about global warming. On the other, as I wrote, "global warming will actually benefit Canadians, on balance."
My solution to this paradox was that Canadians are becoming tired of the intense individualism of recent years and are looking for some, "grand, ennobling cause" to enlist in.
Most respondents agreed with the analysis. A minority were extremely annoyed at my proposition that Canadians will actually benefit – note the qualifier, "on balance" – from a warmer world.
The case is pretty open and shut. The warmer the world, the less ice and snow we will have. As one of the world's coldest countries, the last thing we need is more ice and snow.
Respondents searched hard for exceptions. That, for example, new kinds of pests will invade our countryside. True. But once our climate rises to about that of today's Philadelphia, say, we'll have learned how to cope with the pests now plaguing Philadelphians.
Or that while warming will lengthen our growing season, the corresponding increase in dryness will contract it. True. But we possess the world's greatest amount of fresh water proportionate to our population; our entirely self-inflicted problem is that we so abysmally mismanage our water resources.
My objective wasn't to minimize the problem of global warming. It's real, and it's going to do devastating damage, especially to Africa and parts of Asia, and elsewhere. I recognize that saying that Canadians will actually benefit from global warming risks encouraging naysayers to sit on their hands.
My objective, instead, was to attempt to raise the level of debate a bit. How necessary this is was shown by last week's environmental debate in the Commons.
It was truly awful. Conservatives and Liberals competed in their efforts to blame each other for the fact that Canada's record on the key matter of controlling greenhouse gas emissions is, so far, just about the worst in the world. In fact, both are to blame, the Liberals actually more so since they did so little for so long.
Real debate about global warming won't be easy. Consider that one of the most significant contributions Canada could make to the problem would be to cut back sharply on immigration.
The effect of our present immigration policy is that each decade we turn some 2.5 million people who now are mostly low-energy users into high-energy users, and so into high greenhouse gas emitters.
Should we change this? Could we do it politically? Most important, why has this key potential element of any serious policy to reduce global warming never been debated publicly?
The politicians – including, less so, the Green party – continue to pretend global warming can be solved without pain.
It can't be. It's the creation of a high-consumption lifestyle going back nearly two centuries.
Moreover, this phenomenon is now undergoing a transformation, not so much in intensity – although that's still happening – as in extent.
Global warming, in other words, is now becoming truly global as India, China and other countries achieve more and more of the same kind of high-consumption, high-polluting, lifestyle that we've revelled in for so long.
Any serious policy to address the challenge will have to include a steep increase in the price of gasoline. At $4 a litre at the pump, for the sake of argument, not only would gas consumption dramatically decline but peoples' lifestyles would change – no more two-car families, a flight from the suburbs rather than to them as now, a radical switch from private cars to public transportation.
And our tar sands plants – which, anyway, are the equivalent of selling off topsoil – are going to become industrial dinosaurs.
Contrarily, if responses of this kind aren't needed, then global warming can't be the kind of apocalyptic problem that it is being presented to us as.
It is apocalyptic, most certainly potentially. Our responses so far, though, have been timid, conventional, banal, and self-deceiving.
By JOHN BARKER
I live in Wellington. Sobeys Inc. out of Stellarton, Nova Scotia may have pretty much taken financial control of the IGA's in Ontario in 1998 either through franchised or corporate stores (IGA locations in Atlantic Canada were purchased separately at the same time by Loblaws to keep the federal competition watchdog happy. In the United States, the Independent Grocers Alliance (IGA) dates back to its founding in Chicago in 1926 by J. Frank Grimes, an accountant for wholesale grocers) but a trip to Pierson's IGA on Main Street here is still a trip to an old-time grocer. Cline Pierson's employees bake the butter tarts fresh daily and the homemade wooden "closed" sign over a checkout lane is just a reminder to ring the cowbell in front of it for the cashier to come so you can pay for your groceries.
True, down the road in Picton, our "county town" where the seat of governance (well, the seat of something anyway) is Shire Hall, they do have a McDonald's on the main drag. But the most popular department store is still the Giant Tiger (the all-Canadian family discount store started in Ottawa in May 1961.) It's a chain store but at least it is human-scale and size and one of ours. Even better, it, like the IGA, is franchised as Picton Giant Tiger Inc.
Fact, is we're not exactly embracing Wal-Mart and the other big boxes down here in the County.
So are we selective down here in the County about our abhorrence of chain stores, especially the variety exported from South of the Border? Truth be told the present arrangement gives us the best of both worlds. A pristine County and the chance to venture up Highway 62 and across the Bay Bridge into Belleville and out to Bell Boulevard to do some serious big box shopping, and escape back to Rossmore by nightfall.
So can much good be said for chain stores (other than let's shop them but not in my back yard?) Virginia Postrel thinks so and wrote "In Praise of Chain Stores" (see below) in The Atlantic Monthly in December.
And while we may actually have working farms here on Ontario's only Island county (formerly an isthmus, before the construction of the Murray Canal in 1889) we can still be greener than Stephen Harper when want to be. Just look at Les MacDonald and Gwen Hoover's house up near Northport, the pride and joy of both David Suzuki and the Ontario Straw Bale Building Coalition -- and a testament to the imaginative ingenuity of these two retired federal cultural bureaucrats from Ottawa. The County is truly a big tent now.
But as Toronto Star columnist Richard Gwyn wrote recently (see below as well), pieties over climate change from a country that stands to benefit by and large from it are just that -- pieties, unless we're ready to take a hard look at hard solutions to help much of the rest of the world which decidedly will not benefit from global warming. What kind of solutions? How about $4-per-litre gas at the pumps and taking another look at"our present immigration policy" through which "each decade we turn some 2.5 million people who now are mostly low-energy users into high-energy users, and so into high greenhouse gas emitters," Gwyn writes.
Given that we love our fossil-fuelled ATVs down here in the County (although we can't legally drive them many places yet, we'd perhaps look at the immigration option first. I seem to recall some of our good neighbours up in the Ameliasburgh ward during last fall's municipal election campaign spoke about the merits of sealing the border to Picton.
The Atlantic Monthly December 2006Pursuits & Retreats
Culture And Commerce
In Praise of Chain Stores
They aren’t destroying local flavor—they’re providing variety and comfort
by Virginia Postrel
Every well-traveled cosmopolite knows that America is mind-numbingly monotonous—the most boring country to tour, because everywhere looks like everywhere else,” as the columnist Thomas Friedman once told Charlie Rose. Boston has the same stores as Denver, which has the same stores as Charlotte or Seattle or Chicago. We live in a “Stepford world,” says Rachel Dresbeck, the author of Insiders’ Guide to Portland, Oregon. Even Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, she complains, is “dominated by the Gap, Anthropologie, Starbucks, and all the other usual suspects. Why go anywhere? Every place looks the same.” This complaint is more than the old worry, dating back to the 1920s, that the big guys are putting Mom and Pop out of business. Today’s critics focus less on what isn’t there—Mom and Pop—than on what is. Faneuil Hall actually has plenty of locally owned businesses, from the Geoclassics store selling minerals and jewelry, to Pizzeria Regina (“since 1926”). But you do find the same chains everywhere.
The suburbs are the worst. Take Chandler, Arizona, just south of Phoenix. At Chandler Fashion Center, the area’s big shopping mall, you’ll find P. F. Chang’s, California Pizza Kitchen, Chipotle Mexican Grill, and the Cheesecake Factory. Drive along Chandler’s straight, flat boulevards, and you’ll see Bed Bath & Beyond and Linens-n-Things; Barnes & Noble and Borders; PetSmart and Petco; Circuit City and Best Buy; Lowe’s and Home Depot; CVS and Walgreens. Chandler has the Apple Store and Pottery Barn, the Gap and Ann Taylor, Banana Republic and DSW, and, of course, Target and Wal-Mart, Starbucks and McDonald’s. For people allergic to brands, Chandler must be hell—even without the 110-degree days.
One of the fastest-growing cities in the country, Chandler is definitely the kind of place urbanists have in mind as they intone, “When every place looks the same, there is no such thing as place anymore.” Like so many towns in America, it has lost much of its historic character as a farming community. The annual Ostrich Festival still honors one traditional product, but these days Chandler raises more subdivisions and strip malls than ostrich plumes or cotton, another former staple. Yet it still refutes the common assertion that national chains are a blight on the landscape, that they’ve turned American towns into an indistinguishable “geography of nowhere.”
The first thing you notice in Chandler is that, as a broad empirical claim, the cliché that “everywhere looks like everywhere else” is obvious nonsense. Chandler’s land and air and foliage are peculiar to the desert Southwest. The people dress differently. Even the cookie-cutter housing developments, with their xeriscaping and washed-out desert palette, remind you where you are. Forget New England clapboard, Carolina columns, or yellow Texas brick. In the intense sun of Chandler, the red-tile roofs common in California turn a pale, pale pink.
Stores don’t give places their character. Terrain and weather and culture do. Familiar retailers may take some of the discovery out of travel—to the consternation of journalists looking for obvious local color—but by holding some of the commercial background constant, chains make it easier to discern the real differences that define a place: the way, for instance, that people in Chandler come out to enjoy the summer twilight, when the sky glows purple and the dry air cools.
Besides, the idea that America was once filled with wildly varied business establishments is largely a myth. Big cities could, and still can, support more retail niches than small towns. And in a less competitive national market, there was certainly more variation in business efficiency—in prices, service, and merchandise quality. But the range of retailing ideas in any given town was rarely that great. One deli or diner or lunch counter or cafeteria was pretty much like every other one. A hardware store was a hardware store, a pharmacy a pharmacy. Before it became a ubiquitous part of urban life, Starbucks was, in most American cities, a radically new idea.
Chains do more than bargain down prices from suppliers or divide fixed costs across a lot of units. They rapidly spread economic discovery—the scarce and costly knowledge of what retail concepts and operational innovations actually work. That knowledge can be gained only through the expensive and time-consuming process of trial and error. Expecting each town to independently invent every new business is a prescription for real monotony, at least for the locals. Chains make a large range of choices available in more places. They increase local variety, even as they reduce the differences from place to place. People who mostly stay put get to have experiences once available only to frequent travelers, and this loss of exclusivity is one reason why frequent travelers are the ones who complain. When Borders was a unique Ann Arbor institution, people in places like Chandler—or, for that matter, Philadelphia and Los Angeles—didn’t have much in the way of bookstores. Back in 1986, when California Pizza Kitchen was an innovative local restaurant about to open its second location, food writers at the L.A. Daily News declared it “the kind of place every neighborhood should have.” So what’s wrong if the country has 158 neighborhood CPKs instead of one or two?
The process of multiplication is particularly important for fast-growing towns like Chandler, where rollouts of established stores allow retail variety to expand as fast as the growing population can support new businesses. I heard the same refrain in Chandler that I’ve heard in similar boomburgs elsewhere, and for similar reasons. “It’s got all the advantages of a small town, in terms of being friendly, but it’s got all the things of a big town,” says Scott Stephens, who moved from Manhattan Beach, California, in 1998 to work for Motorola. Chains let people in a city of 250,000 enjoy retail amenities once available only in a huge metropolitan center. At the same time, familiar establishments make it easier for people to make a home in a new place. When Nissan recently moved its headquarters from Southern California to Tennessee, an unusually high percentage of its Los Angeles–area employees accepted the transfer. “The fact that Starbucks are everywhere helps make moving a lot easier these days,” a rueful Greg Whitney, vice president of business development for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, told the Los Angeles Times reporter John O’Dell. Orth Hedrick, a Nissan product manager, decided he could stay with the job he loved when he turned off the interstate near Nashville and realized, “You could really be Anywhere, U.S.A. There’s a great big regional shopping mall, and most of the stores and restaurants are the same ones we see in California. Yet a few miles away you’re in downtown, and there’s lots of local color, too.”
Contrary to the rhetoric of bored cosmopolites, most cities don’t exist primarily to please tourists. The children toddling through the Chandler mall hugging their soft Build-A-Bear animals are no less delighted because kids can also build a bear in Memphis or St. Louis. For them, this isn’t tourism; it’s life—the experiences that create the memories from which the meaning of a place arises over time. Among Chandler’s most charming sights are the business-casual dads joining their wives and kids for lunch in the mall food court. The food isn’t the point, let alone whether it’s from Subway or Dairy Queen. The restaurants merely provide the props and setting for the family time. When those kids grow up, they’ll remember the food court as happily as an older generation recalls the diners and motels of Route 66—not because of the businesses’ innate appeal but because of the memories they evoke.
The contempt for chains represents a brand-obsessed view of place, as if store names were all that mattered to a city’s character. For many critics, the name on the store really is all that matters. The planning consultant Robert Gibbs works with cities that want to revive their downtowns, and he also helps developers find space for retailers. To his frustration, he finds that many cities actually turn away national chains, preferring a moribund downtown that seems authentically local. But, he says, the same local activists who oppose chains “want specialty retail that sells exactly what the chains sell—the same price, the same fit, the same qualities, the same sizes, the same brands, even.” You can show people pictures of a Pottery Barn with nothing but the name changed, he says, and they’ll love the store. So downtown stores stay empty, or sell low-value tourist items like candles and kites, while the chains open on the edge of town. In the name of urbanism, officials and activists in cities like Ann Arbor and Fort Collins, Colorado, are driving business to the suburbs. “If people like shopping at the Banana Republic or the Gap, if that’s your market—or Payless Shoes—why not?” says an exasperated Gibbs. “Why not sell the goods and services people want?”
Let's get real on climateRichard Gwyn
My column on global warming a week ago triggered an exceptionally large number of comments from readers. The column tried to address what seems to be a paradox in Canadians' response to the climate change issue.
On the one hand, Canadians are deeply concerned about global warming. On the other, as I wrote, "global warming will actually benefit Canadians, on balance."
My solution to this paradox was that Canadians are becoming tired of the intense individualism of recent years and are looking for some, "grand, ennobling cause" to enlist in.
Most respondents agreed with the analysis. A minority were extremely annoyed at my proposition that Canadians will actually benefit – note the qualifier, "on balance" – from a warmer world.
The case is pretty open and shut. The warmer the world, the less ice and snow we will have. As one of the world's coldest countries, the last thing we need is more ice and snow.
Respondents searched hard for exceptions. That, for example, new kinds of pests will invade our countryside. True. But once our climate rises to about that of today's Philadelphia, say, we'll have learned how to cope with the pests now plaguing Philadelphians.
Or that while warming will lengthen our growing season, the corresponding increase in dryness will contract it. True. But we possess the world's greatest amount of fresh water proportionate to our population; our entirely self-inflicted problem is that we so abysmally mismanage our water resources.
My objective wasn't to minimize the problem of global warming. It's real, and it's going to do devastating damage, especially to Africa and parts of Asia, and elsewhere. I recognize that saying that Canadians will actually benefit from global warming risks encouraging naysayers to sit on their hands.
My objective, instead, was to attempt to raise the level of debate a bit. How necessary this is was shown by last week's environmental debate in the Commons.
It was truly awful. Conservatives and Liberals competed in their efforts to blame each other for the fact that Canada's record on the key matter of controlling greenhouse gas emissions is, so far, just about the worst in the world. In fact, both are to blame, the Liberals actually more so since they did so little for so long.
Real debate about global warming won't be easy. Consider that one of the most significant contributions Canada could make to the problem would be to cut back sharply on immigration.
The effect of our present immigration policy is that each decade we turn some 2.5 million people who now are mostly low-energy users into high-energy users, and so into high greenhouse gas emitters.
Should we change this? Could we do it politically? Most important, why has this key potential element of any serious policy to reduce global warming never been debated publicly?
The politicians – including, less so, the Green party – continue to pretend global warming can be solved without pain.
It can't be. It's the creation of a high-consumption lifestyle going back nearly two centuries.
Moreover, this phenomenon is now undergoing a transformation, not so much in intensity – although that's still happening – as in extent.
Global warming, in other words, is now becoming truly global as India, China and other countries achieve more and more of the same kind of high-consumption, high-polluting, lifestyle that we've revelled in for so long.
Any serious policy to address the challenge will have to include a steep increase in the price of gasoline. At $4 a litre at the pump, for the sake of argument, not only would gas consumption dramatically decline but peoples' lifestyles would change – no more two-car families, a flight from the suburbs rather than to them as now, a radical switch from private cars to public transportation.
And our tar sands plants – which, anyway, are the equivalent of selling off topsoil – are going to become industrial dinosaurs.
Contrarily, if responses of this kind aren't needed, then global warming can't be the kind of apocalyptic problem that it is being presented to us as.
It is apocalyptic, most certainly potentially. Our responses so far, though, have been timid, conventional, banal, and self-deceiving.
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