Reply to [email protected]
I have been involved in the school issue for several years. Most of us in business were under the impression that the ARC meetings were for parents, mainly.
As it turned out, the ARCs were irrelevant to the result. AMDSB had already decided in general what they were going to do.
Show me one of the ads in the Citizen inviting members of the Blyth public to the meetings. I and others have been trying to find them with no luck so far.
We are doing no padding of the petition. We are following to the letter the guidelines laid down by the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. The only pre-requisites are that the petitioners must be Residents of Ontario, and able to sign their name. We do not allow anyone to sign this petition more than once. That’s the law!
This issue is affecting communities all across Ontario. If we are successful, many closure decisions across Ontario will be reversed. The school closing in East Wawanosh was not subject to complaint or appeal to the Minister for an administrative review. I have not heard any formal complaint coming from that area. Many East Wawanosh people are signing the petition, and we have a volunteer from there collecting signatures. Unfortunately, no one took the steps necessary to file an appeal.
P.A.S.S. is an ad hoc organization of communities across Ontario facing the same problem as Blyth. Greg Sarachman and I are just two of many members of this network.
My name does not appear on the petition form. You remind me of another writer in your blog who keeps getting the facts wrong. You may be referring to the flyer where my name appears as a source of more information about the petition. Greg and I paid for the flyer printing and mailing, so I guess we are entitled to decide whose name goes on the flyer. Greg travels a lot in his work and is not always available. By the way, we also have very significant help from a handful of other people who choose not to go public for personal or business reasons.
I try my best to represent Blyth and I also represent North Huron. All councillors have that dual function and there are times when it is a challenge. Our petition has very widespread support across Blyth with many people coming to sign the petition from East Wawanosh, Central Huron, Huron East, and other places. Every business in Blyth that was asked to host the petition agreed to do so – all ten of them.
You seem to be implying that we are “in this for ourselvesâ€. What we have gotten out of it so far is hundreds of hours of work over the past two years or so, hundreds of dollars of expense, and many disappointments. We appealed to our former MPP Mitchell and the former Minister of Education Dombrowsky, and that turned out to be a waste of time. I lodged a complaint with the Ontario Ombudsman’s office. I got excellent advice and support from there, but the Ministry replied repeating the erroneous statements in the administrative review report. We wrote to every candidate in the latest provincial election. And discussed matters with those who replied. No I did not suddenly jump into the issue this week!
We are doing this because we think it is the right thing to do. No one else has come forward.
Regarding your tax non sequitur:
You should study up on the relationship between municipal spending, assessment, property values, tax rates, and taxes. You will perhaps learn from that the effect of lowered property values does not in itself result in lower taxes. In fact it could result in higher tax rate and/or higher taxes should the municipality decide to maintain the same level of services or add new services.
As for misinformation in the petition: I received a rebuttal last night from a very knowledgeable citizen pointing what he felt are factual errors and false assumptions. I wrote back to him immediately explaining the basis of every one of the statements, and he has agreed with each and every one of my responses.
We stand behind every word in the petition and our strategy is very straightforward and, we think, appropriate.
I acknowledge that I have some strong opinions and that I sometimes (often) state them in a forceful manner, but you are absolutely wrong when you say that I feel that my opinion is the only one. I believe that everyone who disagrees with me has the right to be wrong.
