HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2017-11-09, Page 1INSIDE
THIS WEEK:
SPORTS - Pg. 8
Brussels Curling Club
begins 2017/2018 season
FARM - Pg. 9
Local farm introduces
robot technology
FITNESS - Pg. 12
Blyth woman places
third in fitness comp.
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4Citizen
Volume 33 No. 44
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Serving the communities of Blyth and Brussels and northern Huron County Thursday, November 9, 2017
Facing off in Brussels
The Huron Centenaires took their show on the road on
Saturday, playing a regular league game against the
Milverton 4Wheel Drives at the Brussels, Morris and Grey
Community Centre. The game was the main event of
Hockey Day in Brussels, which was a day -long event at the arena
during which most local minor hockey teams took to the ice.
Unfortunately for the hometown crowds, the Cents weren't able to
win the game, losing to Milverton 8-5. (Quinn Talbot photo)
RT04 continues DestinationliLYTH project
By Denny Scott
The Citizen
The second of three meetings
designed to guide future
development in Blyth played host to
a group of agreeable stakeholders
laying out potential plans for the
village's future.
The event, which was held at the
Blyth and District Community
Centre on Nov. 2, built on a meeting
held in October to help brainstorm
how individual future plans could
better align themselves and become
more than the sum of their parts.
The meeting was run by Overlap
Associates and more than 30
stakeholders from Blyth and the
surrounding communities were in
attendance.
The event started with a recap of
the previous meeting, including
codified documentation of the
strengths, weaknesses and oppor-
tunities from the previous meeting.
Napier Simpson, Chief
Administrative Officer of Regional
Tourism Organization 4 (RTO4), the
group that hosted the event,
explained that the end goal of the
meeting was to determine "what
Blyth wants to be when it grows up",
in a development sense.
Simpson said there was no interest
in "changing a grapefruit to an
orange" but instead in "polishing the
apple" that is Blyth.
"We want to envision what does
Blyth aspire to?" he asked the
assembled stakeholders. "What do
we want for Blyth? We want to pull
together the group to determine the
future."
Simpson said the point of the
particular exercise of the day was to
pull together a group of stakeholders
and further discuss the village.
After reviewing a report including
the information from the previous
meeting, attendees were asked how
they reacted to the information
therein, including which ideas they
found most exciting, troubling and
what could be built upon.
Local farmer Luke Schilder
highlighted the importance of
including the farming community in
projects.
Schilder said that Blyth "wasn't
special", comparing it to other
destinations and said that, instead of
looking at what to do next with the
village, the group should focus on
building on what he feels is one of
its most important qualities: its
"world-class farming community."
Others focused on the stories that
Blyth tells, both through the
renowned Blyth Festival and
through the village's rich history.
The group was then tasked, as
individuals, to build a list of six to 10
things each person felt Blyth should
aspire to in order to become a
tourism destination. Those
individual suggestions were shared
with smaller groups which then,
through comparison, chose which
ones to share with all the
stakeholders at the event.
The three "clearest" ideas were
shared by each group and then
connected, but not through obvious
means.
For example, ideas in similar
forums such as online engagement
and clear digital marketing wouldn't
be connected, however two ideas
like "residential capacity" and
"youth retention" would be.
The idea behind the exercise was
to generate a list of Blyth's unique
selling points, organizers said, and
the means by which they could be
brought to target audiences.
The group then discussed what
brings visitors to Blyth, with
Simpson saying that, the rule of
thumb for tourism is that every one
hour of driving to a location requires
three to four hours of activity.
Blyth Festival Artistic Director
Continued on page 3
Garratt
announces
Festival
season
By Shawn Loughlin
The Citizen
For his fourth season at the helm
of the Blyth Festival, Artistic
Director Gil Garratt is turning to
relationships new and old to tell the
community's stories.
The 2018 Blyth Festival season
will begin earlier than many
previous seasons with a two-week
remount of last year's successful
collective production of The Pigeon
King.
The Pigeon King tells the story of
Arlan Galbraith who defrauded local
farmers out of millions and was then
sent to jail. Garratt himself played
Galbraith in a performance that was
hailed as one of his best.
The Pigeon King will begin
preview performances on May 30,
meaning that Garratt's goal of
expanding Festival productions into
the shoulder seasons is taking
another step forward.
Garratt, General Manager Rachael
King and the Festival team took a
step towards expansion last season,
producing The Pigeon King well
into late September in an attempt to
attract those attending the
International Plowing Match in
Walton to the show. It was a move
that paid off, Garratt says, with
hundreds of match -goers attending
the show.
Garratt has then turned to
playwright Mark Crawford for the
world premiere of The New
Canadian Curling Club, which will
officially open the repertory season.
Crawford has enjoyed success at
the Festival in recent years with the
production of Stag and Doe and The
Birds and the Bees and will now tell
the story of a group of Syrian
refugees settling in a small, rural
Ontario town.
The comedy will tell the story of a
rural Ontario town "big enough to
have a Tim Hortons and a hospital"
that also finds itself home to a
number of Syrian refugees. As part
of the refugee resettlement program,
a local volunteers to teach the new
residents the time-honoured
Canadian tradition of curling.
However, the night before they're
set to begin, she slips on the ice and
breaks her hip, leaving the program
without a leader.
Garratt says it's then that the
arena's Zamboni driver decides to
take the program over. While a
former curling star in his own right,
he's not very accepting of the town's
new residents.
Garratt says it's a hilarious story
Continued on page 19