Tag Archives: Ontario
The Consequence
Welcome to Flashback Friday, a look back at this space from past years. Today’s post first ran eight years ago today, April 26, 2016. Anyone with half a brain could have seen it coming. That no-one did is probably because there were politicians involved. A couple of years back the Ontario government decided that sick leave […]
Keeping Warm
I remember the patched holes in the celing, one in each room. I didn’t think much about them. It was the house my grandmother lived in, the one where my father was born. I spent a lot of my childhood visiting. Small-town Ontario was a different world for an urban dweller. The holes, I realized, […]
Voting Early
I gave serious thought to voting for myself? After all, when would I get another chance? I realized late last week that I was going to miss the Ontario provincial election. Not just election day, but almost the entire campaign period, including the advance polls. It was alkso too late for me to request a […]
No School Today
Public schools in Ontario are closed for the Christmas break (which they probably call a winter break, I haven’t checked). When they will reopen is a matter of some conjecture. The Premier said on Friday that it was too early to say if schools would reopen in January, given the COVID case count. Too me […]
The Timber Raft
Somehow I had misssedthis one. Maybe because it was painted in 2004, five years after we moved from Pembroke to Ottawa. About 30 years ago the city of Pembroke began commissioning murals for the downtown area. The theory was they might draw tourists. I think they did for the first few years, though I don’t […]
Before The Revolution
In early 2020 the politicians and public health officials botched the initial response to COVID-19. I can forgive that – they obviously had no idea what they were doing and were trying their best. That health officials should have been prepared instead of making things up on the fly would seem to be a reasonable […]
The Transformation
I’d never been in the place before, despite it being across the street from our apartment. Respectable people didn’t frequent Pembroke Ontario’s Windsor Tavern. My biggest memory of the place came from my days as a newspaper reporter on the court beat for The Pembroke Observer. The place was the focus of a domestic assault […]
Troop Deployment
There are soldiers in the streets in Canada. This is not a coup. This is democracy in action. I’ve been in countries where the sight of soldiers was never good news, places where the military was an alternative government, just waiting to seize power. It isn’t like that in Canada. Our transitions from one government […]
The Warning
I thought I had posted this picture a couple of weeks ago, then realized that somehow it got overlooked. We spent a couple of days in Pembroke, Ontario, earlier this month reconnecting with some old friends and making new ones. We lived there 1987-1999, more or less, so the visit brought back a lot of […]
Ontario Votes
We take a break from our Black Forest series today because…. …it is voting day in Ontario. Voters are set to choose which of the three major parties will form the government. I will admit to not being all that excited. If we were still living in the province, I would probably have written extensively […]
random thoughts from lorne 
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