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The Citizen, 2015-12-10, Page 4PAGE 4. THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2015. Editorials Opinions Publisher: Keith Roulston Editor: Shawn Loughlin • Reporter: Denny Scott Advertising Sales: Lori Patterson & Brenda Nyveld The Citizen P.O. Box 429, BLYTH, Ont. N0M 1H0 Ph. 519-523-4792 Fax 519-523-9140 P.O. Box 152, BRUSSELS, Ont. N0G 1H0 Phone 519-887-9114 E-mail info@northhuron.on.ca Website www.northhuron.on.ca Looking Back Through the Years CCNA Member Member of the Ontario Press Council The Citizen is published 50 times a year in Brussels, Ontario by North Huron Publishing Company Inc. Subscriptions are payable in advance at a rate of $36.00/year ($34.29 + $1.71 G.S.T.) in Canada; $160.00/year in U.S.A. and $205/year in other foreign countries. Advertising is accepted on the condition that in the event of a typographical error, only that portion of the advertisement will be credited. Advertising Deadlines: Mon. 2 p.m. - Brussels; Mon. 4 p.m. - Blyth. PUBLICATIONS MAIL AGREEMENT NO. 40050141 RETURN UNDELIVERABLE CANADIAN ADDRESSES TO CIRCULATION DEPT. PO BOX 152 BRUSSELS ON N0G 1H0 email: info@northhuron.on.ca December 12, 1979 In another great Brussels Santa Claus parade, the Brussels Business Association, the group behind the annual Christmas tradition, came in second in the float judging, finishing just behind the Brussels Leo Club. Approximately $1,000 in cut and prepared meat was stolen from the Thompson and Stephenson Abattoir in Brussels. Fred Stephenson, a partner in the business, said that he had found the location’s side door pried open with a tire iron. Thieves then proceeded to steal various cuts of beef, pork and chicken that all amounted to approximately $1,000. A rifle, sometimes used to shoot cattle, was also taken in the heist. There were still plenty of questions and few answers after a meeting of about 30 people concerning the future of the Walton Library and the Walton Community Centre. Various different options for a potential combination building that would contain both the community centre and the library were presented, but few decisions were made. Farm columnist Bob Trotter spoke about the media’s influence over how agriculture is perceived by the masses at a meeting of the Huron County Federation of Agriculture. He said the media was doing a “lousy” job in covering agriculture and that it needed to do better. However, Trotter said that wasn’t going to happen by itself, so he encouraged farmers to call their local media outlets and urge them to cover more agricultural news. December 12, 1990 About 60 young people from Brussels, Walton, Ethel and Bluevale were busy on the streets of their communities carolling and collecting food for their local food banks. Nearly 30 large boxes of food were collected thanks to the drive, in addition to 25 bags of mittens, clothes and toys that all made their way to the Huron County Christmas Bureau. At the Huron County Board of Education’s inaugural meeting, Joan Van den Broeck was acclaimed to a second term as chair. Van den Broeck was nominated for the position by Past Chair John Jewitt, trustee of the Blyth and Hullett areas. December 12, 2001 With the fate of the Brussels Clinic on the agenda, Huron East Council informed the Ministry of Health that the municipality would not subsidize the clinic. Ben Van Diepenbeek, reeve of Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh, was acclaimed to the position of Huron County Warden. In a picture in The Citizen, Van Diepenbeek received the ceremonial key to the county from Norm Fairles, the outgoing warden. Heather Blake of Moncrieff Road was presented with an angel and a special certificate after she saved the life of Angela Berard at the Vanastra Pool. Berard suffered a heart stoppage while in the pool, swimming with her children, and Blake and the rest of the pool’s staff had to provide nearly 10 minutes of CPR until the ambulance arrived from Seaforth. The Huron Provincial Progressive Conservatives held their annual general meeting in Blyth and MPP Helen Johns welcomed Minister of the Environment Elizabeth Witmer to the village to speak to those in attendance that night. December 11, 2014 With a new council now in place at the inaugural meeting of the new Huron East Council, Mayor Bernie MacLellan said that one of the first orders of business should be revisiting the Community Vibrancy Fund that had been offered by St. Columban Wind Energy one year earlier. Council had turned down the fund, which would have paid the municipality $115,000 per year for 20 years for a total of $2.3 million, to much fanfare courtesy of Huron East Against Turbines (HEAT). He said he hoped council would re-open the discussion in the new year, although he had yet to receive word from St. Columban Wind Energy as to whether or not the company would be open to revisiting the issue or not. Art Bolton made his place in the Ontario Agriculture Hall of Fame official with the unveiling of a special commemorative sketch placed in the Huron County Museum. Bolton was enshrined in the hall among many other local agricultural heroes, including his father Russell, who had been inducted a few years earlier. A Hullett Central Public School student held a very special birthday party where he asked for all the presents he would have normally wanted, but when they all rolled in from his friends and family members, he turned around and donated them to the Huron County Christmas Bureau. Cohen Lammerant, acting on a suggestion from his mother, decided it was a great idea and made Christmas a little more special for a number of families in the Huron County community. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage. We are not responsible for unsolicited newsscripts or photographs. Contents of The Citizen are © Copyright So much for being proactive Governments are often blamed when the economy slumps but revelations in Auditor-General Bonnie Lysyk’s annual report last week show that governments that try too hard to reshape the economy can make costly mistakes that actually make the situation worse. The auditor-general found that Ontario’s homeowners and businesses had paid $37 billion over the market price for electricity over the past seven years, often because the Liberal governments of Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne were trying to encourage a new style of economy. McGuinty had a vision of making Ontario a centre of a new green energy technology. To encourage companies like Samsung to locate manufacturing facilities here, he offered prices for electricity from wind energy that were more than twice what is paid in the U.S., and more than triple the price being paid there for solar-generated power. These deals added $9.2 billion to the cost of renewable energy. In another case, a coal-powered generation station was shut down in Thunder Bay but was converted to burning biomass, in the hope, Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli said, of creating a biomass industry in the region’s forestry sector. Others warned the conversion was not cost effective but the government went ahead and the power generated by the plant now costs 25 times more than power from other Ontario biomass generating stations. The overall result, according to Lysyk, is that the price of electricity in Ontario went up 70 per cent from 2006 to 2014, and is bound to continue to increase because the cost of the government’s expensive contracts will increase until 2032. All this makes it harder for Ontario businesses and industries to compete internationally, of course. In the long run, Ontario might have been better off with a government that did nothing than one that tried to do too much. — KR Strange allies In the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks that killed 130 people last month, France’s extreme right wing National Front party made huge gains in Sunday’s regional elections, taking six of 13 regions. Who could have thought that the best friend of extremists at home could be extremists abroad. The National Front has always argued against immigration and has been helped by high unemployment at the same time as Syrian refugees have been streaming into Europe. The Nov. 13 attacks by terrorists aligned with the extremist Islamic State (IS) organization made the National Front’s agenda popular enough to attract nearly 30 per cent of the votes cast. There’s a self-perpetuating cycle of extremism in action. The hateful extremism of IS, a fringe Muslim organization that sees everyone but their own small sect (including other Muslims) as infidels who must be killed, triggers support for those Europeans who would expel Muslim immigrants if they could. The extreme actions of these Europeans (and North Americans) then causes hardship for Muslims, a tiny fraction of whom may turn to IS in reaction and become terrorists. Their deadly acts then spur more support for groups like the National Front and around we go again. Playing on the fear of there being a dangerous “other” among us is a handy trick for politicians everywhere. Donald Trump called for a registry of Muslims living in the U.S. “We’re going to do things we’ve never done before,” he said in one statement where he talked of the possibility of closing some mosques. That was before last week’s attack that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California. Since then several Republican leadership candidates have used the attack as further justification for halting the U.S. plan to accept 10,000 refugees from Syria, even though neither of the shooters was Syrian. In our own recent federal election the Conservatives stoked fear of Muslims in their attempts to ban women wearing the niqab from taking the oath of citizenship. Thankfully, the elections in France were only the first round of the complicated process there. Hopefully the moderate, sensible majority will prevail when this coming Sunday’s run-off elections are held. We in the west must not allow ourselves to be used by IS to help recruit more potential terrorists. – KR & Letters Policy The Citizen welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must be signed and should include a daytime telephone number for the purpose of verification only. Letters that are not signed will not be printed. Submissions may be edited for length, clarity and content, using fair comment as our guideline. The Citizen reserves the right to refuse any letter on the basis of unfair bias, prejudice or inaccurate information. As well, letters can only be printed as space allows. Please keep your letters brief and concise.