If you remember the dog days of last summer, at least at the political level, you will remember the media going into a frenzy over the Harper government’s decision to nuke the long-form census.

I remember looking up to see if the sky was falling, and it wasn’t.

The information gleaned from that census is now being rolled out and, if you notice anything, you will notice the silence of the former critics of Harper’s move to take the mandatory long form out of play.

It seems to was all much ado about nothing.

There is a lot of minutiae in the census. While there are lots of smaller villages and hamlets in Canada, Zealandia, Saskatchewan wins the prize for the smallest registered town in Canada.

It has all of 80 residents.

Thanks to potash and the oil industry, Saskatchewan is also the come-back kid among all the provinces in Canada, boosting its population some 6.7% since the last census.

But we live in Ontario, don’t we? And Ontario is in trouble. It is losing population, thanks mainly to the bad government of the Liberals and the failure of unions to face the reality of the times.

This does not bode well for the future.

And the future is all we’ve got.

First impressions are the most difficult impressions to shake, so the tourists so vital to our town’s survival will no doubt having a difficult time shaking off the fact that there is now a methadone clinic in Bancroft – and not on a side street, but on the main drag.
Why? And why there?
Well, the first “why” is easy. Bancroft, sad to say, does need a methadone clinic to deal with its addiction to opiates. That’s a fact.
If the numbers weren’t here, there’d be no business plan to support it. I know this, as well, because I sit on an advisory committee with the Bancroft Family Health Team.
Bancroft is not without its addicts.
The “why there” is not so easy to answer. It will look like a pharmacy from the outside, but only just.
It will be a facade, leaving many to wonder how such a small outfit could compete with the IDA across the street or the Shoppers up the road.
The answer will soon be obvious.
The main street of Bancroft is hardly attractive. There are closed shops, and struggling businesses.
And now, instead of beautifying the street, we’ll have a methadone clinic dead centre.
What will the tourists think of that?