Dear Editor,
Sadly, I am forced to conclude that Mr. McTaggart has still not found the time to attend a free Coffee Chat at the easy to find and easy to get to TC Energy office at 390 Sykes Street North, Meaford, Ontario. I attended one last summer and learned the correct answers to the same concerns he raises over and over and over for myself. The Coffee and Information sessions start up again January 11. Hopefully he can find the time to get his questions answered and his incorrect assumptions and unnecessary concerns corrected this year? If nothing else, he might be able to stop worrying about how many fish died 50 years ago and 700 km away from Meaford in Michigan.
A recent newspaper comic strip taught me to do something I’ve been struggling with for four years.
Instead of the two-page plus minimum I always seem to require to characterize Save Georgian Bay’s self serving (thank you, Ms. Roberta Docherty) and extremely localized anti-green energy, anti-environment campaign, cartoonist Wiley Miller did it better than I can. In just six words!
Miller’s comic, Non Sequitur, follows the trials of a single father named Joe. Joe has two young daughters. An angel named Kate who is usually portrayed sitting on the couch reading quietly. And Danae. Who has a habit of looking for devious ways she can get away with acting as an adult would – for her own personal gain. Danae has a toy horse, Lucy, who only appears to her as a real, although talking, horse. Lucy is a modern day Jiminy Cricket. Lucy does her best to act as Danae’s conscience.
In the January 9th comic strip Danae is working on her plan for “noble activism”. She is searching for a “cause” that “needs to be vague but sound specific…something that will alarm people when I tell them their way of life is under attack”. So that Danae can benefit from it.
Lucy, Danae’s conscience, replies, “So… a cause based on imaginary victim-hood?”
Editor Vance – you could have saved a lot of printer’s ink if I had come across “a cause based on imaginary victim-hood?” four years ago.
I would like to congratulate our local Council members who spoke out about two other municipalities’ elected representatives’ conduct. Those representatives who swallowed the Save Georgian Bay malarkey hook, line, and sinker. And couldn’t be bothered to even spend the 15 minutes it would have taken to check with TC Energy, or our mayor, or some of our Meaford Council members, or Meaford staff, or DND – for some real facts – before condemning a vital project that they clearly knew nothing about. Don’t those people have staff working for them? Staff with access to a telephone? Or email?
Why would Councillor Harley Greenfield suggest that Meaford council should reconsider their own position if more Bay area communities express opposition to the Pumped Storage Proposal, when it is clear that the first two to do so opposed it from a position of profound ignorance about the actual project? How does Meaford benefit from doing more of that?
It wasn’t clear to me from your article and I don’t want to be unfair. Does Councillor Brandon Forder only want to be open to hearing from fellow municipal councils as long as they oppose the project? Or would he be prepared to hear from fellow municipal councils if they support it? He might place a call to a town just west of us? Owen Sound? Their mayor said, “This is a great opportunity for us and all in North Grey”. If Mr. Forder is committed to fact-based decisions, Owen Sound is at least in the same telephone area code as Meaford. A lot closer too. Not two and a half hours away by car. Like Parry Sound is.
Township of the Archipelago and Town of the Blue Mountains residents have a lot to worry about if that’s the quality of representation they can depend on. We’re far better off in Meaford with some, but sadly not all, of our Council looking out for us. And our families.
We should all work together to reject causes based on “imaginary victim-hood”.
Bruce Mason, Meaford
