Staff and students are concerned that the Trillium Lakelands District School Board may be once again considering the highly unpopular octomesters come September.
While these structures have worked effectively to combat the spread of COVID-19, educationally they have been unsatisfactory for many having to teach or learn in them.
The recent Kawartha Lakes City Council approval for the operation of recreational off-road vehicles (ORVs) on Lindsay’s paved streets and trails has exposed a serious flaw in the administration of this municipality.
The City of Kawartha Lakes was cobbled together by the provincial government in 2001 without the initiative or support of most of the population.
Thanks for your article — a scholarly article — on “A Poverty of Time.” (Benns’ Belief, March edition) I am tempted to quote Welsh poet W. H. Davies.: “What is this life if, full of care/ We have no time to stand and stare.”
How do we ‘sell’ our city to others? How do we persuade people who do not live here to visit, stay a while and spend more money than before?
That was up for discussion at a recent city council meeting as two different consultants advised council on how Kawartha Lakes should approach tourism marketing over the next five years.
Our next car is going to be electric. An EV.
Currently, (pun intended) we’re nursing a petrol-sucking, seven-year-old SUV that has traversed highways and back roads from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to subarctic Yukon. (It’s not petrol-sucking any more than the average gas vehicle; I’m just making the case for going greener.)
One of the great things about Twitter is that you only get 160 characters, including spaces, to describe yourself to the outside world. People use their bio to establish their “brand,” to declare their political worldview, demonstrate their sense of humour or simply to give a list of what they do and what is important to them as a way of introducing themselves to the virtual world.
My bio is pretty simple: “writer for The Lindsay Advocate; singer-songwriter; nfp CFO= number rancher; he/him. U of T alumnus. Dad-ish; husband — all the rest would bore you. Settler.”
“Oh, and by the way … we’re Métis,” my long-lost sister shouted into the phone last New Year’s Eve, talking over the background chatter and clinking of glasses at her house party in Madrid.
That got my attention.
Early the next morning, I hopped onto Ancestry.ca with a curious spirit and fresh cup of coffee, ready to explore my sister’s family tree. And there it was, numbered and everything, with some 400 pages of documentation: Verified Métis Family Line 7023. My birth father’s last name is Cadeau.
More than 30 years ago, when I was a young and green and still-a-very-much-learning-my-craft journalist in Ottawa, I was given some words of wisdom that, ever since, I’ve always strived to adhere to.
“As a reporter, you can never be unbiased,” my good friend and a veteran of both print and broadcast media had warned me. His point was that we’re all human beings, not robots, and therefore have opinions – and that journalists have plenty of them. “But,” he stressed, “as a reporter you can, and must, always be fair.”
There are many things we can learn from other countries, but one lesson involving nearby New York state is particularly timely.
Canada’s national Census Day is May 11, and by now you probably have received your package in the mail, or from a wave of enumerators bringing them door to door.
The United States held theirs last year, and since census data showed they did not have the population to maintain the same representation, the Empire State lost one seat in Congress. The mind-blowing part is that they were only 89 people shy of the threshold required. There’s a pretty good chance that in a state with more than 20 million people, at least 89 people did not return their completed census questionnaire.
In other words, the census matters. Keep Reading
I enjoyed reading Roderick Benns’ “Political Confessions,” (Benns’ Belief, April edition.) I have always been curious about how people arrive at their views in life, and in particular, their political views.
