Dear Santa,
It has been a while since I have written to you. For nearly a decade I managed to get a letter to you each year, but the past few years I haven’t thought to write. But since you’ll be stopping by on Saturday, December 6, as part of the Kinsmen Club’s annual Santa Claus parade, I thought I would prepare a letter for you.
The last time I wrote to you we were living in a very different world. Since my last letter we have endured three years of the Covid pandemic, and our economy hasn’t seemed to have recovered well in the two years since the pandemic ended. And today many are struggling in an economy where our provincial minimum wage is $17.60 per hour, while the calculated living wage, the wage required to pay the bills just to survive, is $24.60 per hour. In the past five years we have seen rents skyrocket, and the cost of groceries keeps rising, and as a result use of services like food banks are at an all-time high.
So my first wish for you, Santa, is that our federal and provincial governments figure out a way to ensure that if someone works a full time job, or the equivalent of a full time job, that they earn enough to live, enough to pay the rent, put food on the table, but also to have some extra cash on hand for new winter boots, or even to take the kids to a movie once in a while.
Speaking of financial pressure, and this might be a tough one, Santa, but Meaford’s water and wastewater rates have become crippling for many. It is no secret that Meaford has among the highest water rates of any municipality in the area, and those water bills are hurting many in our community.
As someone who reads all of the reports, and sits through every council meeting, I am well aware of the realities of operating a small town water system. Where larger communities serve a large number of customers, spreading the cost, our water system serves just a few thousand customers, and as a result, our cost to deliver clean water and to treat wastewater is significantly higher than in municipalities where a water system might serve 50,000, 100,000, or more. There still must be a way to provide some sort of relief, if only for a year or two, because many of the folks I have talked to are truly struggling with their expensive water bills.
As I have mentioned each time I have written to you, we can never have enough funding for infrastructure needs, Santa, particularly for roads and bridges, but our local ratepayer pockets can only stretch so far. So in a municipality with 11,000 residents, more than 400 kilometres of roads, and some 80 bridge structures to maintain, it would be nice if the provincial government provided more funding opportunities for rural municipalities to tackle some of those large and costly projects. The province has downloaded so much onto municipalities in recent decades, it would be nice if they could at least offer more funding opportunities for rural municipalities whose budgets are stretched as much as they can be.
Another item on my wish list this year, Santa, is my hope that we see lots of candidates put their names forward for next year’s municipal election. We will elect our next council on October 26, 2026, and it would be great if we could have plenty of candidates to choose from. I suspect that we will see a number of candidates who oppose the proposed pumped storage plant running for council next year, and that is great, but as I wrote in our print newspaper back in August, I hope that the candidates who run won’t be single issue candidates, because as important as the pumped storage issue is, and as important as it is to protect our community as best as possible, a municipal council has to deal with a plethora of issues, each as important as the next, so we need candidates who can take on all that the job of a municipal councillor brings, and not to focus on just one issue, as important as it might be.
I think that’s all for this year, Santa – I’d prefer to not push my luck by asking for too much, I’ve been disappointed too many times before.
I do however have one more wish – something that I requested the last time I wrote to you a few years ago: that everyone in this fine community has a safe, happy, and wonderful holiday season, and that we collectively give more than we receive. And that we take some time to appreciate even the smallest things, as a quick look around this blue ball of ours will tell you, many parts of the world have some serious issues to deal with that make my wish list seem a little trivial and unimportant.
Regards,
Stephen Vance, Editor, The Meaford Independent
To our readers: The Kinsmen Club’s Santa Claus parade will be held on Saturday, December 6, beginning at 5:15 p.m.
While you are downtown for the parade, be sure to head over to Market Square to take in this year’s Christmas on the Bay event.
