Blogs Moose Country

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?

With the New Year comes the list of things to look forward to and/or people to watch in 2012.

The Toronto Star, for example, had its list of 12 people to watch in 2012, none of who I had ever heard of, even though I am addicted to the news game and all its twists and turns.

So where were these people in 2011?

Okay, I had heard of one, simply because writing about politics for Sun Media is what pays my rent, and pays for the repairs of my 12-year-old BMW with 250,000 kilometres on the odometer, which, according to one reader of the Bancroft Times, somehow puts me in the 1% versus the 99%.

I wish that was the case.

The politicians picked as one of the up-and-comers for 2012 by the red Star was NDP MPP Jagmeet Singh, who apparently tools around in a red BMW Z4 M Coupe — obviously a 1% if there ever was one.

So I must watch him more closely. An NDPer driving a BMW sports car instead of a Prius or an Outback is obviously an anomaly.

Me? I plan to watch to see out Toronto Mayor Rob Ford rides out the vitriol heaped upon him, and to see if Prime Minister Stephen Harper finally decides to be a conservative.

The Star can keep eleven of its 12.

Three times a week — Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings — I join Rick Lowes of the Moose-FM affiliate in Haliburton to shoot the breeze about the news of the day.

I look upon this as a public service.

Usually, he attempts to take me to task about my slant in a particular editorial I have penned for Sun Media, but lately we have had more than a few discussions about Sun News Network, a national television station that I appear on regularly but was recently unavailable to anyone who had Bell satellite of Bell cable as their television provider.

If you had Shaw, which many in the near north have as a provider, then you had Sun TV the moment it went on the air back in April.

But now our beef with Bell is over.

So, if you want hard news and straight talk with a decidedly conservative bent you can now get it on Bell satellite channel 506, or on channel 531 on Fibe.

If this sounds like a commercial, fair enough.

But if you, like me, are tired of the left-wing slant of the public broadcaster, closely followed by CTV, it is worth taking a look at this alternative.

You’ve been hearing my voice now for over five years, reading me in the Toronto Sun for decades, and now you will be able to see what I look like.

But a word of warning: It ain’t pretty.

The most recent edition of Maclean’s magazine lists the top 20 books of 2011 — 12 of them non-fiction and, naturally, eight of them fiction.

I have read none of them.

In fact, I only recognize a couple of the titles.

Now, this is not to say that I do not read books, because I do. They help drain my brain.

During the course of a normal week, I write four national editorials for the Sun Media chain, plus a national column. I write and record five television commentaries for the Sun News Network, plus two weekend commentaries for Moose-FM, plus a commentary for the Outdoor Journal Radio, which airs Saturday morning on Toronto’s The Fan 590.

So I write a lot. And, because I write a lot, my brain needs a lot of draining.

So what have I read this year? Well, four of Michael Connelly’s crime novels, Conrad Black’s anthology of his road to prison, four Tom Clancy novels, columnist Allan Fotheringham’s life story, one John Chisham, a Joseph Wambaugh, plus all three of the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Plus hundreds of newspapers, including the Bancroft Times, of course, scores of magazines, and incalculable number of web pages.

But not one book on the Maclean’s list.

I must be an illiterate.