Twenty years ago this month, Victoria County ceased to exist. In its place the City of Kawartha Lakes was born, as vast and rural as the county ever was, dotted with a postcard town and attractive villages.
As our municipal affairs writer, Kirk Winter, soon found when he put together this month’s feature story, the imposed single-tier amalgamation of Victoria County was a watershed moment in local municipal affairs.
Terms like “desperate” have been used to describe the need for more rental housing of all kinds in Kawartha Lakes which currently has a minuscule 1.3 per cent vacancy rate, according to the last figures available from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
Recycling programs across Canada have been a failure. Canada recycles just nine per cent of its plastics, while the rest is dumped in landfill, incinerated, or ends up as litter. In 2000, when Kawartha Lakes first started a city-wide recycling program, all seven types of plastics were recycled.
Now almost none are eligible. Additionally, takeout coffee cups, Styrofoam, and aerosol cans are no longer permissible under the city’s new waste contract with Canada Fibers Ltd.
At the end of July, Mayor Andy Letham warned that people were “going to notice” the service cuts that were coming. Ditching and brushing, grass-cutting and street sweeping, service centres and arenas — all of this and maybe more affected by the pandemic.
This is utter nonsense for citizens to have to accept.
Pandemics force us to take stock of our values in society; they clarify our sense of mortality and reveal how strong or weak our social fabric is.
More sensitized to our common humanity now, we must organize our economy to care for one another better.
Back in mid-March, if you didn’t have strong opinions about what the decision-makers were doing, you were in the minority.
Closing schools after March break was either ridiculous or not stringent enough. The NBA overreacted by shutting down so fast, and the federal government under-reacted by not shutting the border fast enough.
