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.”
Saturday, April 28, 2007
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.
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