Oct 10, 2013


Re: Vital Signs

Thank you, Jeff Green, for exposing in your editorial (Grading the Vital Signs Report, October 3, 2013) yet another “flawed document” (Vital Signs) purporting to represent a detailed analysis of the quality of life in Kingston and Frontenac County.  What a travesty that we citizens have to depend on you reporters to understand and uncover the continued incompetence and dysfunction of the Frontenac County government.  Our own local county representatives (mayor and one councillor) don’t even bother to try to inform or educate us but then do they even read or understand their 300-page county agenda packages?  Or are they just bored, or disinterested, or are they still discovering their responsibilities?   Is their own township council not collectively intelligent enough to understand the issues?  Why else would they let Kingston get away with yet another co-funded, misnamed, expensive report that is all about the City, totally irrelevant to County taxpayers and an utter waste of our tax money?  Where also is the leadership of our county senior managers and our seasoned Warden (three turns now over two terms) in all of this?  Is there no RULAC (who? what?) anymore?  Has anybody on Kingston City Council, South Frontenac or Frontenac Islands Township Councils ever been north of Godfrey other than to look at autumn leaves or go hunting?  What exactly are seasonal residents anyway, many of them ask, and what do they have to do with the census?  Are they not just out-of-sight, out-of-mind, disinterested cottagers that happen to live somewhere else most of the time?  What do they have to do with everyday business?

Five years ago an expensive study on Homelessness in Kingston and Frontenac County was expressly shown to be in title only and totally bereft of any notion that people outside of the City and suburbs had problems finding a place to live.  Oh yes, the report may have noted that there were some subsidized housing projects in Sydenham and as far north as Sharbot Lake, but the clear implication was that homelessness per se was not a rural concept.  Everyone is family in the country and everything is blissful there.  Oh, really!!! 

Now county staff have once again blithely persuaded an ignorant, self-absorbed County Council to fund another expensive feel-good study of social wellness in the City of Kingston.  They merely tacked the name Frontenac County to the sub-title of the report to add legitimacy to the funding.  I don't recall seeing any survey questions myself.  Nevertheless, Vital Signs supposedly tells us rubes up here in terra incognita (no man’s land to people in Glenburnie) how high our quality of life is.  As one astute reader noted in his letter to the editor (same edition as above), Frontenac County is an organizational mess led by people with no goals, no objectives and no vision!  Right on, Sir!  Moreover, next year is likely to be a total washout with our new Warden having one foot firmly planted in a long term care facility in another county, his nose in another in the City of Kingston, and facing a lawsuit from his predecessor to boot.  Where will his attention be?  There is no use complaining about the County to MPP Hillier as he has long since abandoned the idea of removing the redundant county tier of government in Ontario.  Nor to MP Reid who is more interested in democratic institutions elsewhere in the world or in asking rhetorical questions about getting tough on crime.  Good luck too with the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing where ministers there are only interested in deflecting questions long enough until they can change portfolios or secure mayoralties in Toronto and Ottawa.  ("Keep the peace out there, people, be nice and get along with each other.  We'll be watching you with interest.")

Break up Frontenac County before it implodes. It is an antiquated north-south behemoth that will continue to be a depressed, underserved backwater organization under the present set-up.  It will fall under its own weight or eat itself to death.  Do it now, Council and Province, before the next election.  That gurgling sound that we all hear is your and our money slowly but surely going down the drain.

Back to my "cage" with the other lab rats.

Ron Maguire

Support local
independant journalism by becoming a patron of the Frontenac News.