By Pepper Parr

November 11^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

As the day edges towards a close, the Remembrance ceremonies behind us, we might be pausing and asking ourselves – is there war on the horizon?

Legion member reciting In Flanders Field – ” We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie …”

What will we be able to say about Uktaine this time next year?  Will our democratic values have been met?  Or will a despotic government have changed the borders of a country that wants to be part of the Western world and the NATO alliance that has served us so well?

What will the Americans do with the Constitution that was treated so brutally damaged on  January 6, 2021, by a mob of supporters of then-U.S. President Donald Trump in an attempted self-coup d’état, two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election?

And how will we cope with Donald Trump’s election to a second term as President of the United States?

Veterans sanding at Veteran Square singing the national anthem on November 11, 2024

We are blessed in this country, and today, we remember those who gave so much to ensure that we are free people.

Today we did not forget.

By Alan Harrington

November 11th,2024

BURLINGTON, ON

Remembrance Day, an event that has meaning for me.  I remember my grandfather – a gunner at Vimy Ridge.

The French Government grants, freely and for all time, to the Government of Canada the free us of a parcel of 100 hectares located on Vimy Ridge.

Vimy Ridge memorial had long been on my list of places to experience. I recently joined a tour of places where where Canadians fought battles.

Our tour commenced – “right where it all began”, when a giant 10 tonne mine exploded on July 1 1916 @ 7:20 am announcing “Day One of the Battle of the Somme”.

All that remains now is a gigantic crater under what used to be a German bunker until the Allies blew it up. I walked down into the pit which is now quiet and still. Trees, grass and vegetation have grown over it – this is the spot where Brits and Canadians began to fight back in a war – that had raged for a couple of years.

That explosion was the signal for what ensued next – at the other side of the field at the Beaumont Hamel Memorial.

Here a large caribou statue stands exactly where the brave Newfoundland Regiment scrambled into battle. The then colony of Newfoundland supplied about 1,000 soldiers men who were lumberjacks and sailors before the put on uniforms.

That giant explosion was the cue for those Newfoundlanders to scramble into battle directly into machine gun fire.

he Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial stands as an important symbol of remembrance and a lasting tribute to all Newfoundlanders who served during the First World War. At the heart of the memorial stands a great bronze caribou (the emblem of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment). Its defiant gaze forever fixed towards its former foe, the caribou stands watch over rolling fields that still lay claim to many men with no known final resting place.

The Memorial still has the original trenches in place – now grown over by grass; hallowed ground – the sadness still lingers in the air.

These 760 men didn’t make it past their own series of trenches.  68 answered the roll call the next day.

A terrible sadness, and a tremendous shock for a small colony – all lost – wiped out – in the first half hour of the war.

When I walked among their graves – I didn’t know that two weeks later, one of those unknown buried soldiers would be repatriated to the memorial near the harbour in St Johns, Newfoundland.  I was the only Canadian on the tour.

The next day we continued to the Vimy Ridge memorial.

It is so striking –  this tall bright marble monument above a high plain. White against the grey sky.

Somehow the sculptor captured the huge landscape space with a stone that rises high above all the terror that had been below.

It felt good to make that connection with my grandfather – and 170,000 of his comrades who fought there a century ago.

To see this most magnificent war monument in person fills a Canadian with pride.

We continued to Flanders Fields at the site where McRae wrote his famous poem.

I had known about this since grade school – never thinking I would visit the site as an adult. But there I was. As the lone Canadian I was asked to read his poem aloud to the group.

As I read it – I tried (as they always do at our Burlington ceremony) – to express the emotion of the words.

After many other sites and monuments – the tour concluded at the Menin Gate in Ypres Belgium.

Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing,

Our organized tour was offered an opportunity to place a wreath at the official ceremony at the Arch that evening.

A ceremony has been held almost every night since the end of the Great War; the host nation that night happened to be Canada. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would have the honour of placing the wreath on the gate with the sound of bagpipes in the background.

I later visited Juno Beach and many cemeteries of fallen Canadian soldiers from both wars and felt amazed at the scale of the operation.  and massive scale of hard work, loss and horror.

All along the tour (between good local food and drink), we learned of the reasons for the war – and how it progressed and how it ended.

None of it was “glorious” it was the sacrifice, the suffering and the loss that we remember.

Attending the Burlington Remembrance Day ceremony again this year will carry even deeper meaning for me.

We will remember them.

Harrington will be at the Central Library Monday evening – 7:00 pm – doing a Burlington Historical Society presentation on his tour.

By Staff

November 10th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

On November 11, Metrolinx is honoured to provide complimentary transit services to veterans, reservists and active members of the Canadian Armed Forces (and one companion), as well as family members of deceased veterans across the GO and UP Express transit network.   

When travelling that day, kindly wear or carry something identifiable, such as a medal, beret, blazer, uniform or Veteran’s Service Card.  

This year, Metrolinx was also proud to announce that veterans, reservists and active members of the CAF can travel for free year-round on GO Transit, beginning March 1, 2025.

Metrolinx is working to enable this fare type on PRESTO cards, and also make this available for UP Express in the future. More details will be provided on enabling this fare type in early 2025.

By Staff

November 9^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

What appears to be the last piece of land in the “football” has a developer who wants to put up 27 storeys.

The “football” describes the lands between Old Lakeshore Road and Lakeshore Road with Pearl on the west and where the two Lakeshore meet on the east end.

Lakeside Developments Limited is proposing a 27 storey mixed-use building with 195 residential units and at-grade retail along Lakeshore Road.

The development proposes 1- and 2-bedroom units. A 5-level below grade parking structure is proposed. An application for an Official Plan Amendment and Zoning By-law Amendment will be required to permit the proposed development.

A Pre-Application public consultation will take place virtually on November 25, 2024 – 7 – 9:00 p.m.

Developers seem to like the virtual approach – which means they don’t actually meet with people – it all takes place online.

The “football” a site that had huge potential as a focus point for community events was lost to developers when they began buying up what was originally more than 18 seperate properties.

The football-shaped location was once a collection of more than 18 properties. Now it is a collection of high-rise towers that won’t have a single unit of affordable housing.

In October of 2012, Former Toronto Mayor David Cronbie attended a Waterfront Advisory Committee and urged the city to pull together a citizens group to look at all the possibilities the site offered.

Then Mayor Rick Goldring never did find a way to take Crombie up on the idea. Prior to the pandemic, Emmas Back Porch was the go-to location for a decent meal on a balcony that overlooked the lake.  It was a different Burlington in those days.

The city the developers have given us. It could have been so much better.

Related news story:

It was a coulda opportunity – but the opportunity got away from the city.

By Rivers

November 9th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

There will be many postmortems on the 2024 US presidential election.  And time will tell if Mr. Trump is as bad as so many have predicted.  Those predictions are not without substance, given his behaviour following the 2020 election and his rhetoric during the campaign.

American citizens lining up to vote.

It would be easy to blame the media for his win, including social media, as an opinion writer did in a recent New York Times article.  And some will also try to blame Kamala Harris or Joe Biden for this or that – but the outcome was decisive and we all will have to live with it.  To be clear, the responsibility for that outcome, given that Trump won everything including the popular vote, lies entirely at the feet of the American voting public.

But I don’t think it’ll be the end of the world, though there will be significant challenges for us here in Canada.  Trump is doubling down on his denial of global warming for ideological reasons, promising to slash the development of renewable energy and electric vehicles, notwithstanding the presence of Elon Musk in his inner Cabinet.

The reality is that America is still the second largest GHG producing nation on the planet and has contributed to something like a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions that are currently warming the planet.  America, more than any other nation on earth, has caused global warming and climate change – it has a responsibility to lead us all to a lower carbon footprint.

Climate change has resulted in forest fires that have been close to impossible to control.

Rainfall that exceeded past experience is expected to be a new reality for the continent.

We know that it will be virtually impossible to reverse climate change, but its destructive development could be retarded somewhat, or accelerated, by what we do today.  Mr. Trump’s ‘drill baby drill’ says it all when it comes to the question of what he plans to do.   Weather events over the next four years will only get worse if the science community continues to be right.  But so many of us act like lobsters sitting on the stove in that big water pot we call mother earth, continuing to ignore the danger, even as we slowly turn a Trump orange hue.

And that denialism south of the border will place the Liberals and other green parties into a tough place here in Canada.   Right wing-ism has caught on here as well, and that will likely mean an end to carbon pricing and to proposed regulations curbing emissions in the oil and gas industry, even if the Tory climate denial folks don’t assume government, which the polls way they almost certainly will.

Keeping control of a critical market will be a challenge.

Trade irritation will almost certainly become more intense between our two nations even if Trump is prevented by his own party from enacting his 10% global import tariff policy.  That poor BQ private members bill enshrining dairy supply management in law, having been rejected by Canada’s Senate, is likely to die a fatal death on the order paper.   And that will leave the door open for the US dairy producers to crawl further into our dairy counters.

NATO, as we know it, may not disappear but it probably should.  It is clear that Europe and Canada, have not taken this partnership seriously or they would have responded to Russian genocide as they did to Iraqi and Serbian aggression back when.   Europe needs to grow up and take responsibility for its own defence rather than relying on the US military with its checkered past and its distracted and spineless leadership.

Trump, in his last term, at least supplied Ukraine with some anti-tank weapons, unlike Obama who just gave Putin the green light.  And Biden, much like Trudeau, just wrung his hands from the sidelines, watching as Ukrainians were brutalized, bombed and slaughtered by the thousands.  Biden held back providing the weapons needed until it was almost too late in every case, making their hoped for counter offensive impossible.  He also prevented his NATO allies from doing more – all the while mumbling something about avoiding escalation.

The immigration issue in the US which, probably more than anything else, won the election for Trump is also an issue here.  Trudeau has recently reassessed his ‘wild west’ post COVID immigration policy, but it’s probably too late to convince those wannabe home owners that he’s finally got the message.   Politicians used to think that holding back immigration was an ethnic vote loser.  But the US election demonstrated the exact opposite, as Trump scored big even with ethnic Latin voters.

There will be other issues in the course of Trump’s four year reign of power.  And there is the concern that he will extend his term.  He’ll be 82 at the end if he survives the term.  But he’s beaten the odds before – including assassination attempts and COVID.  In the meantime Trump holds all the cards – the Supreme Court and Congress will be expected to rubber stamp his every wish.  And he now has immunity for anything he does while in office.

That perhaps is the natural evolution of democracies, a sort of capitalist model by comparison, where the free market naturally evolves into a monopoly with one or two companies dominating in the end.  One only has to look at Hungary where democracy has slowly eroded into a kind of autocracy, where media freedom has been constrained and where divergent views are censored and suppressed.

For Americans, this may well be beginning of the end of checks and balances for governing bodies and perhaps the end of separation of church and state.  For an America founded on the premise of equality and freedom, that would be the sum of the biggest fears of the framers of US constitution.

Ray Rivers, a Gazette Contributing Editor, writes regularly applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking.  Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington.  He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject.   Ray has a post graduate degree in economics that he earned at the University of Ottawa.  Tweet @rayzrivers

By Pepper Parr

November 8^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

Land of the Free and Home of the Brave – with open arms for all.

When we were growing up – did we not see America as the land of the free?

The country that  entered the Second World War and defeated the Nazi government and let the European countries rebuild their home, school, factories and their economies – getting to the point where they became prosperous.

In many newspapers this morning there were reports that President Elect Donald Trump was going to spare no expense “to implement his signature policy of deporting the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Imagine the fear that must be racing through the minds of those 11 million people.  They are certainly aware of how harsh and cruel this vulgar felon can be.

Trump has said he will use the armed forces if he has to – arresting them and placing them in deportation camps.

Families who entered America without papers – found jobs, bought homes, raised families may now find themselves being rounded up and deported – while any children they had would be left in the Country because they were born in America.

Mounties helping people enter Canada. In 2013 we took in anyone who wanted to cross our border. What will we do in 2025.

One of the results expected is that thousands will head to the Canadian border and attempting to enter Canada.

The Canadian government is already thinking through how it will deal with those people when the attempt to cross the border.

We don’t have the capacity to take these people in.

The number of people Canada plans to accept as immigrants has already been cut by 20%.

NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, created at the end of the Second World War has a clause in its agreement that states – an armed attack on one NATO member is seen as an attack on all the ember of NATO.

Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania have much to fear – they watch at what is happening in Ukraine.

The Baltic States, Sweden and Denmark are NATO members; they are all very close to the Russian borders.

Ukraine is not yet a NATO member. It was invaded by Russia more than a year ago expecting an easy win.  The Ukrainians have shown great courage and strength in preventing a takeover of the country by the Russians.

Donald Trump does not take office until January 20^th.  Between now and then President Biden has approved the sending of $9 BILLION in armaments to the Ukraine.

All this less than a week after the American election.

Those Canadians who think this is an American problem – may find themselves re-thinking what took place.  This is a world wide problem and we are the mouse in the same room as the elephant.

By Staff

November 7^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

Attend a film screening of “Peace by Chocolate” at Joseph Brant Museum.

The story of a  Syrian refugee who struggles to settle into his new Canadian small-town life, caught between his dream to become a doctor and preserving his family’s chocolate-making legacy.

Official Opening of the retail outlet in Halifax NS.

Tickets are $15/adult, $12/children (12 and under) and include admission to Joseph Brant Museum, popcorn, and light refreshments.Click HERE to purchase tickets.

Peace by Chocolate merchandise will be available in the Gift Shop for purchase. Click here for the trailer

By Staff

November 7^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

The opportunity to listen in on what the Mayor will be saying to people who call in to her Virtual Town Hall is open to anyone.

This was it for a lot of the rural households up until about the 1980’s. Each household on what was then called a party line had a distinct ring telling them the call was for the. It also meant the neighbours knew and they could listen in.

Just dial 1-800-320-7723 and you will be on what we used to call the party line – those who were raised in the rural part of the city will know what a party line is – it isn’t just about politics.

Ward 2 Councillor Marianne Meed Ward works the phone the way few Councillors do; manages to overspend on her postage budget, filled her voice mail box the first week she was at city hall and has now been found to have over spent on the amount of time she speaks. There is just no end to this woman.

The Virtual phone-in runs from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm

City communications people told us:

Information about the Telephone Town Hall can be found here: https://www.getinvolvedburlington.ca/2025budget/news_feed/2025-budget-telephone-town-hall

We couldn’t find the information on the Get involved web site.