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This Tuesday, April 18th between 9 a.m and 7 p.m., Hudson residents who oppose Bylaw 687 will have the opportunity to sign a register at town hall. Bylaw 687 supposedly authorizes the town to borrow up to $555,000 for renovations and modifications to the Community Centre at minimal cost to the town.

I wish someone would explain how this is supposed to work.

At April’s council meeting residents were told the loan was a necessary first step in getting a grant from the federal government’s Canada 150 infrastructure program. The loan would cover the cost of a new roof, windows, flooring and other renovations. It would also allow the replacement of the current kitchen, which does not conform to workplace health and safety norms or commercial-kitchen standards.

According to what District 2 councillor Barbara Robinson told us, the town had to go ahead with the renovations, then submit the bills to get the grant money. From the way Robinson talked, the town had already gotten pre-approval from Canada 150, much like you and I would get pre-approved for a line of credit before we call the contractor.

To get a better idea of what she was talking about, I spent a couple of hours last Thursday visiting the Community Centre to see for myself what the town is proposing to upgrade.

The roof of the Community Centre itself is fine. It’s a stainless-steel batten roof, good for 50 years or more. The problem is the Legion and curling club roofs. Both are in bad shape. The curling club roof vents leaked onto the ice during that heavy downpour two weeks ago. The Legion is the town’s tenant, having signed over the property for a dollar and a promise of perpetual maintenance when the Community Centre was built in the ‘90s.

In other words, the town, as the Legion’s landlord, has an obligation to repair the Legion’s roofs and kitchen floor.

Like any well-used twentysomething public structure, the Community Centre needs a thorough reno and systems upgrade, with new windows, door locks, electrical overhaul and flooring. As for the Community Centre kitchen, I’ve been told it would fail a provincial health inspection. I’m not an expert but I’ve been told the town knew of this the last time it bought appliances, when Mike Elliott was mayor.

When Robinson told us at the April council meeting the deal would allow the town to go 50-50 with the feds, I believed her. I didn’t question the $134,000 stainless steel batten roof, the new windows and flooring or the updated kitchen. Like most of us, I use the Community Centre. I know how much traffic it gets and the need to bring the systems up to date.

But then the town posted the following on the municipal website that doesn’t jibe with what I understand about how municipal grants work.

“First and foremost, we want to reaffirm that the acceptance of our project in the Canada 150 Community Infrastructure Program (PIC150) is an absolute prerequisite to go forward with the loan bylaw 687-2017 as stated in the motion and in section 5 of the bylaw. If the Town does not receive the grant, the loan bylaw will be cancelled.

“Why now?

“As part of Canada’s 150th anniversary celebrations, Canada Economic Development (CED) has established a program to assist municipalities in rehabilitating and upgrading existing community infrastructures, including expansion. The announcement of this program has come at the right time for the Town of Hudson, given the repairs required at the community centre. The grant is for 50% of the eligible costs, up to $250,000. However, this program, like all programs, sets out certain conditions, including the requirement that all the works be completed by December 31, 2017. This grant is independent from any other provided by the MAMOT and is not conditional on the acceptance of the intervention plan.”

That got me to wondering. Has Canada 150, or any other federal or provincial government body, approved the town’s funding request? Under which program was it applied? When was the request submitted? Is there a letter acknowledging receipt of the town’s request?

Yes or no?

Then, last week, residents discovered a pamphlet in their mailboxes. Although it carried the Town of Hudson logo, it urged residents to sign the register to stop the town from spending “over half a million dollars for unspecified expenses.” Concerned citizens were urged to contact Olympic resident Veronique Fischer, a lawyer who ran against Robinson in the last election.

The pamphlet’s appearance triggered an angry Facebook debate about the morality of using the town’s logo. It also prompted the administration to release a statement denying any connection with the pamphlet and calling the author’s conclusion “misleading and inaccurate.” It directed residents to the town’s website and Facebook page as well as to the Local Journal, the same paper two councillors recently criticized for its inaccuracy.

Fischer hasn’t let up on her attack, questioning whether the town filed a funding request in time for the deadline. Fischer infers the promise of the Canada 150 grant is a deliberate smokescreen to cover the adoption of an omnibus loan bylaw to cover a shopping list of unfunded projects, ranging from new boat docks at Jack Layton Park to that notorious eco-trolley to convey fascinated visitors to the town’s many tourist destinations.

Hudsonites may not remember this, but we’ve been here before. When Mike Elliott’s council adopted a $7.2 million loan bylaw to residents for the new firehall and Public Works upgrade, residents were assured the town would be eligible for provincial subsidies. As it later turned out, it wasn’t eligible because the grant approval process had not been initiated before the town began the process of approving a loan bylaw. Hudson taxpayers ate the entire $5M-plus cost of the project, part of the 11 cents per $100 on our tax bills.

I’ll be voting against Bylaw 687 at Tuesday’s register. Not because I oppose spending money to keep up the Community Centre, but because we can’t get a straight answer from this council about whether it has filed  for which grants in timely fashion. Too bad. The Community Centre needs a facelift.

This has been updated to clarify the reason why the town was ineligible for subsidies for the firehall.

 

William Patrick ‘Pat’ Patterson died this past Thursday April 6 in Summerside, PEI after a battle with cancer. I never knew Pat was ailing; he’d been posting on Facebook as lately as last month. Another old friend I wish I had been able to see one last time before he left us. I’m sorry for Cathy and for all of those Pat touched. If you gathered us together, we’d fill the Big Owe and send the overflow crowd over to the Bell Centre. Everyone would have a Pat story to tell.

I met Pat when he was with the MUC police youth protection squad and I was a Gazette police reporter. He was one of those referee-minded anglo cops who made the force a lot better than it is today. That tough facade would drop in an instant to show a deeply compassionate, understanding man with a twinkle in his eye and a joke to water down the cop cynicism. I’m not saying Pat ever laid a hand on anyone in anger, but Station 9 had a very dangerous marble staircase, especially so for the pimps and predators who took advantage of helpless runaways.

Pat and I loved to gossip over beers about the sleazy side of politics. We’d tell each other stories about what our elected officials and celebrities were up to and with whom. When it came to divulging sources, both our mouths were zipped. Secrets don’t stay secret the instant they leave your mouth.

When he retired from the force Pat began his second career as Sun Youth’s reward negotiator. A young person would go missing or turn up dead and one of Sun Youth’s benefactors would offer a reward for information leading to their safe return or information leading to the arrest of the perpetrator. Pat would handle the negotiations. He had the contacts and he was streetwise. It was neither easy nor pleasant.

At some point, Pat decided he’d had enough of Montreal’s dirty, dangerous streets and got involved with Canada’s paralympic ski team. He was tireless in his efforts to raise money and awareness of just how good and dedicated these challenged athletes are. I was a radio bigmouth with slots to fill, so we saw a lot of one another.

I was blown away the day I ran into him in Hudson and learned that Pat, now divorced, had reconnected with his first love Cathy Perowne and that they had bought a house on Oakland. Louise and I took them sailing up to Carillon Island and back. Next I knew, Pat and Cathy had bought a Tanzer 22 to go out sailing in the evening. Somehow, Pat got badly bitten by the racing bug. One windy day, Ron Metcalfe and I were crewing for him. He got a terrific start but he kept putting us in irons because of the 22’s tendency to disobey its helmsman and head up when it heeled. “Keep the goddamn boat under the mast,” we kept yelling. Pat got good enough at racing to want to learn the rules. Once he went down that road, there was no stopping the referee in him. He took IYRU race committee courses and was welcomed aboard race committee boats all over North America.

One year, I left the trip downriver too late. I asked Pat if he’d help me move the boat from Kingston to Iroquois. The weather was putrid, with half a gale dead on our nose and a cold, driving rain. We set out to find a gas station where we could buy diesel. Pat flagged down a Kingston cruiser, showed the cop his police badge and explained the problem. The cop threw our jerrycan in the trunk and me in the back seat, with the wire-mesh grille and no door handles. Pat got into the front seat of that cruiser like he’d never left and the two of them talked cop all the way out to a cheap-diesel place on the 401 and back to the boat.

Pat made trip downriver bearable and showed himself to be the better sailor and navigator.

Pat and Cathy sold the place on Oakland because the stairs were giving his beat-up cop/skier knees sweet merry hell and moved to a bungalow on Ridge. We’d visit them as they were sprucing up the place, never suspecting they’d be leaving. Next we knew, they  had sold the bungalow and moved to Summerside, where they could be closer to Cathy’s grandkids and Pat could get himself a C&C 27 to sail in the ocean. Occasionally, Pat would roll through Hudson in his pickup but I was usually on deadline or chasing news to take time out for a beer. If only.

Last we saw Pat was a couple of years ago. We were sailing off Kingston in the leadup to CORK, one of eastern North America’s most important sailing regattas. A rigid inflatable roared up alongside. It was Pat and his driver, checking the racecourses. We exchanged news and made the usual promises to stay in touch before Pat returned to the job at hand.

I never told you this, Pat, but you’re the older brother I never had, the wise, knowing friend, the sharer of secrets, the commiserator and comforter. Keep an eye on us mortals, my friend. God knows we need someone to enforce the rules and keep the peace.

 

 

Today, Friday, at mid-afternoon, Hudson’s blue collar crew was scrambling to block off part of Cameron after discovering part of the shoulder had collapsed into the culvert that drains the pond opposite what used to be Pine Lake.

Closer inspection revealed a two-foot hole in the the concrete culvert.

As of 3 p.m. the crew had reduced Cameron to a single lane, forcing traffic to alternate. A traffic light has been set up.

The culvert collapse is the latest development in the four-year saga that began shortly after this administration took power. Sometime over the 2013 winter, water began flowing under the Pine Lake dam. By this time that spring, the Viviry had undercut the dam, causing it to slump and threatening to wash both it and Cameron downstream.

The town dumped a few truckloads of stone to stabilize the dam (and placate an angry Pine Lake resident) while the three-year debate got moving to determine what should be done. Two surveys and an advisory committee recommendations later, the town is no closer to a solution than it was when the dam break was discovered.

Last week, the mayor told a local paper the environment ministry no longer considers Pine Lake a lake. It’s now a wetland, with a whole new set of rules regarding what can be done.

Ironically, Pine Lake is back to being a lake after several days of rain and a fast melt in the Viviry watershed. As of this afternoon, water is pouring over the dam for the first time in months as well as underneath it. The possibility that the dam could be washed out was what brought public works to check on it regularly.

The Pine Lake dam fiasco has become a hallmark of the Prévost administration’s inability to get things done. A consultant’s study concluded that the dam could not stay the way it was and needed remediation, replacement or removal, with costs ranging from $200,000 to $600,000. Another expert’s report concluded the town needs a retention basin to buffer the growing annual volume of water heading into Hudson from upstream. Pine Lake residents threatened lawsuits. A citizens’ advisory committee proposed several scenarios. One of the least expensive was the proposal above. Why wasn’t it acted upon? Ask the mayor and council.

This is where we came in, folks. The current council spent four years and something like $100,000 to arrive at today’s sorry mess. If anyone on council has re-election aspirations, they’ll have to explain this abysmal failure to prioritize.

There’s nothing like a strong spring flood on the Ottawa to clean things up and expose weaknesses. This year’s melt is stronger than it’s been in a while, with every river, creek and stream between here and Lake Timiskaming draining meltwater from the Laurentian Shield to the Ottawa’s intersection with the St. Lawrence. The Ottawa’s flood will continue until every watershed has drained its snowpack, usually by mid-June. According to experts like Norm St. Aubin, we can expect several crests depending on the depth of the snow and the intensity of spring rains. I’m not referring to here and now.

Wikipedia: The Ottawa River drains into the Lake of Two Mountains and the St. Lawrence River at Montreal. The river is 1,271 kilometres (790 mi) long; it drains an area of 146,300 square kilometres (56,500 sq mi), 65 percent in Quebec and the rest in Ontario, with a mean discharge of 1,950 cubic metres per second (69,000 cu ft/s).[2]

The average annual mean waterflow measured at Carillon dam, near the Lake of Two Mountains, is 1,939 cubic metres per second (68,500 cu ft/s), with average annual extremes of 749 to 5,351 cubic metres per second (26,500 to 189,000 cu ft/s). Record historic levels since 1964 are a low of 529 cubic metres per second (18,700 cu ft/s) in 2005 and a high of 8,190 cubic metres per second (289,000 cu ft/s) in 1976. 

Before the Carillon Dam was completed in the early ’60s, this area flooded up to where Halcro and Wharf roads join. Since then, Hydro Quebec has recorded five years in which the flood crested above the 25-year mark and one year (1976) when it stopped inches short of the 100-year mark. When Tom Mulcair was Jean Charest’s environment minister, he enacted legislation which made it illegal for municipalities to allow construction of any permanent structure within the 25-year line and no permanently inhabited structure within the 100-year mark. Since then, the province has walked it back to allow areas between the 25-year and 100-year lines to be backfilled once a developer is able to satisfy the ministry’s wetland-flipping requirement.

Yesterday I walked Sandy Beach. I stood where Nicanco proposes to build townhouses. It’s squishy soft underfoot, with the Viviry feeding dozens of freshets through the wetlands Nicanco now has permission to backfill.

Nicanco may have obeyed the letter of the law but I’m curious to see if it will be able to satisfy the more exacting, implacable rules of nature. Will the storm sewers in the proposed 100-door townhouse development be above high water? (I’m assuming every one of these structures will be built on concrete slab without a basement, finished or otherwise.) Will Pine Beach occasionally resemble Pincourt’s rue Duhamel, with makeshift walkways, diesel pumps and sandbagged manholes? Will the sanitary sewers be able to continue pumping sewage into the collectors?

This doesn’t necessarily mean the project can’t be built, but Hudson’s taxpayers need to be reassured they won’t be on the hook every time the Ottawa River demonstrates it doesn’t care where the bureaucrats draw their little red lines.

Hudson-inond-serv-scan-map-partial-paths-2016

Hudson’s disastrous snow-clearing experiment with low bidder Transport André Leroux is headed to court. Council adopted a resolution notifying Leroux it is in breach of contract and the town reserves the right to take further action.

The contract pays Leroux $399,500 plus taxes in four instalments of $103,348.15. This winter, Leroux used close to $200,000 in salt, which the town buys separately from Cargill and let Leroux decide where and when it’s spread. Leroux also charged the town over $87,000 for sand.
A Fairhaven resident produced photos of her chewed-up front yard and demanded that the town take action only to be told the contract is headed for court, putting citizen complaints on hold.

The town has hired infrastructure analytics firm Maxxam to help conduct an examination of the town’s roads, sidewalks, aqueducts and other infrastructure to draft an intervention plan required by the province as a basis for grant applications. As I reported earlier this year, (First buy a ticket, WordPress) the town learned to its dismay there was no point applying for grants and subsidies under various federal and provincial subsidies until the intervention plan had been carried out. Total cost: $19,700.

Whether it’s Leroux’s doing or not, the town will rebuild Ridge Road without having to wait for the intervention plan. Public works will rent the equipment, the town will acquire the gravel and asphalt and get at it. Estimated cost: $23,000.

A developer seeking a zoning change in response to the shifting real-estate market received a confusing message from this council Monday night. Less than three months after approving them, council voted to withdraw the zoning bylaws which would have allowed 24 semi-detached homes instead of 12 single-family dwellings on Mayfair, near the entrance to the Hudson’s Valleys development off Harwood Blvd.

The town had the option of putting the bylaws to a referendum after a register drew more slightly signatures that were required. The town had adopted Bylaws 679 and 680 on Dec. 5 to allow smaller homes on smaller lots.

On Feb. 24, 91 residents of contiguous zones signed a register to force the bylaws to a referendum or their withdrawal. Following the register, mayor Ed Prévost told the Off-Island Gazette many residents were out of town for the winter and were thus unable to give their views on the zoning question but if he favoured a referendum, he was outvoted by a council majority. On Monday, he noted that 91 voted against, 83 for. “No further comment,” he added. Did council tally the numbers and conclude a referendum was moot? 

The meeting was well attended, with the audience including a gratifying* number of young residents as well as returning snowbirds and the usual council regulars (*adjective courtesy of Jim McDermott). Mayor Ed Prévost opened the meeting with congratulations for the St. Patrick’s Parade organizers (“probably the best, certainly the longest”) and a reference to “misguided” opposition to Hudson Heartbeet, the new name for the Hudson Food Co-operative. “To put everybody’s minds at rest” the co-operative will be making a presentation May 1 to explain what they’re about. It has been suggested the town, by donating the use of agricultural land and promising water to a part of the west end not supplied by the municipal water system, is subsidizing competition to local food-basket producers and Farmer’s Market regulars.

The mayor also served notice to non-residents that while they would be free to ask questions, “it’s logical that they should be last in line. […] This is a Hudson town council meeting for the residents of Hudson, not for any other town.”

Finally, Prévost offered an explanation why the current administration had reinstated a policy paying its managers overtime. (The policy was adopted during Louise Villandré’s time as town manager and clerk, rescinded by the previous council following Villandré’s resignation, then quietly reinstated by this council in March of last year.) “Not only was the original policy not adhered to but was somewhat not conforming and that was the reason we went back to what we have now,” Prévost said. Asked to explain further, director-general Jean-Pierre Roy said the overtime ban as written did not comply with the Conseil des normes du travail and is being redrafted. “I can guarantee you that in that time, I did not authorize any overtime.”

Ramblers Association co-founder Terry Browitt wanted to know the status of the trail network in the Viviry Valley Conservation Area, the 32-hectare wetland the town acquired from the Whitlock Golf and Country Club as a result of the Whitlock West subdivision.

“It seems a shame that we have this opportunity with this beautiful piece of land the town owns down by the Viviry River ,” Browitt said. Other trails in town are being maintained and improved but the trail named in honour of the late councillor Bob Parkinson exists in name only in summer.
District 5 councillor Deborah Woodhead offered the same excuse as the previous administration. “The land the Parkinson Trail will go through is a wet area and the ministry of the environment has to be part of any structural or paths or bridge or anything we do on the Parkinson Trail.”

“It’s been three or four years now, Browitt noted.

Woodhead said she was aware of it. “We put it in the budget for 2016 and now for 2017…we’ll get to it before the end of our term, hopefully.”

Later, Jamie Nicholls noted that he had produced a preliminary report on the Parkinson trail network for Sentiers Vaudreuil-Soulanges while working as a landscape architect and biologist and has a good idea of the challenges of pushing a trail through a wetland. The town has had a copy since 2009. “If you have any questions about the directions to take, I’d be willing to talk with you about this.”

The trail is has been used as a winter snowshoing and back-country ski trail since 2005 but has led to disputes with landowners encroaching on town land negotiated as a trail right of way as part of the Hudson’s Valleys development.
Mount Pleasant resident Austin Rikley-Krindle asked why he’s having no luck finding the 2017 Plan trienniel d’investissement (PTI) on the town website or obtaining a copy through an access-to-information request. The PTI was handed out at the budget meeting but thus far it’s not available online (I’ll post it here). Rikley-Krindle also seeks the town’s total well capacity and plans to meet future demand. Town clerk Cassandra Comin Bergonzi and director-general Jean-Pierre Roy assured Rikley-Krindle he would be getting both.

Quarry Point resident Helen Kurgansky suggested that the town adopt the the practice of adding a descriptive paragraph to each resolution so residents can decipher the code on the order paper. The mayor seemed to think it was a good idea.

Several residents expressed concern at the $555,000 cost of renovating the Community Centre for the second time in five years. District 4 councillor Barbara Robinson explained that the entire cost is half that and will be borne by the federal Canada 150 infrastructure program. The town has to borrow the amount to pay for the improvements before it can be reimbursed, she explained. The kitchen doesn’t conform to workplace health and safety standards, the roof needs replacing and other work is required.

The town is still looking for a treasurer following Serge Raymond’s abrupt departure last fall, director-general Roy said in response to a question. It’s not easy to find someone this time of year, he explained. He admitted there is a schedule of reportings due, beginning with the Comparative Statements of Revenues and Expenditures due April 30. This is an early warning to residents of potential budget problems.

Footnote: The fire department has acquired a used 1995 Spartan aerial ladder for $94,990. This saves the town the cost of almost $1,000 an hour for mutual-aid assistance calling in ladders from adjacent municipalities.

Mayor Ed Prévost revealed Monday his administration and Sandy Beach developer Hans Muhlegg have been working on a proposal both sides are hoping will move the project forward.

Details will be made public, Prévost assured the meeting. Nicanco’s representatives had no comment.

The news came at the end of a 10-minute snarlfest between members of council and save-the-beach activist Richard Grinnell.

Grinnell, back from several months out of country, asked council whether it would honour its undertaking to hold a referendum on whether the town should try to buy all or part of the 60-acre wetland from the developer.

“Last fall, I came before the council and asked how many signatures it would require before you held a referendum to see about purchasing part of the Sandy Beach property,” Grinnell told council. “I was told 500. So I’m happy to report that I have 1,273, of which 543  are residents of Hudson. We desire to have a referendum held to see about purchasing part of the Sandy Beach property. Where do we go? I’ve done my part.”

Other than Grinnell’s first petition in December, Prévost said he wasn’t aware of Grinnell’s continuing efforts to sign up residents.

“I told you my policy is ongoing petitioning,” Grinnell fired back. “The director said I needed 500 and I now have more than 500.”

District 5 councillor Deborah Woodhead volunteered that she had put out the number, “not for a referendum, but to open the subject….Because there’s no issue, the town’s not going to hold referendum on an issue that doesn’t concern the town, there’s no reason to have a referendum, the last time there was a referendum it was about a bylaw change that went through. The land is not for sale, Mr. Muhlegg’s vision is that he’d like to build the land.”

Grinnell said he understood Muhlegg’s position and hopes Muhlegg understands his. “Over 500 residents of Hudson have signed the petition knowing that it means there were tax dollars to be spent and there’s a negotiation to be had. And I think there’s a deep concern there, that people would like to preserve that, and they’re willing to spend the money. The only way to find out is to have a referendum.”

Woodhead countered by noting that nobody has offered to donate their own money. “No one has come forward and said ‘Here’s $500. Let’s get the ball rolling so we can buy this land. Not one person in Hudson has come forward with any proposal.”

Grinnell persisted. “I’m saying that there is a desire in this town for this property to be purchased. In order to do that you have to sit down with Mr. Muhlegg and discuss with him…”

“There was one occasion when we’ve done that,” Woodhead interrupted.

“I wasn’t involved in that discussion but somebody else, I don’t know how they got permission but they were allowed to present him with an offer that was unacceptable.”

“Nobody was representing the town,” Prévost interjected.

“I was told that they were…it was in the paper,” Grinnell said.

“You shouldn’t go on hearsay all the time, you know,” the mayor snapped back.

“If that’s what’s in the paper, that’s what we have to go on.”

Woodhead chimed in: “You know that the paper is full of untruths. Full of untruths, every day.” (The room gasped.) “There are errors in the paper, and misquotes and that’s just the truth, the fact of journalism.”

Grinnell was on a roll. “I just want to know what to do with this. I want to know what to tell over 500 people in Hudson who are passionate about it? That nothing will happen, that the town doesn’t care? What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Deposit it, someone on council said.

“I will deposit it but we have to move forward,” Grinnell replied. “I have done my part. I have the signatures. People have signed it. They have said ‘this is the desire that I have.’ That’s a lot of people, over 500 signatures, and they have expressed this desire knowing that it will cost them money. Where do we go?”

Woodhead tried to change the focus. “Mr. Muhlegg has done everything the town has requested of him for the past 15 years while he tried to get his project to…uh some kind of fruition and completion. Everything and more.”

Grinnell wouldn’t be kissed off. “I understand that. I have no argument with Mr. Muhlegg. I like him and I enjoy sitting with him and talking with him and I’d like to buy his property. Whether he’s done everything right is not the point. The point is that…”

“If you and the citizens of Hudson would like to buy his property you have to negotiate with him,” Woodhead interrupted. “You and those 500 other people.”

District 2 councillor Ron Goldenberg waded into the fight. “Excuse me. While you were away, we discussed this several times over the last few months and just to fill you in, in case nobody else did, we questioned the veracity of your question.”

Goldenberg accused Grinnell of deliberately misleading people, scaring them by suggesting they would lose beach access.“It was non-legal, because first of all you didn’t mention that the town would have basically the same access to the beach area itself, which was terribly misleading and secondly, you didn’t mention anything about what the purchase price was or what Mr. Muhlegg had even asked for it. The question should say ‘would you like the town to buy the beach?’Yeah, of course I would like the town to buy the beach!”

“That’s what the question said,” Grinnell replied. “That was the direct question and people signed it, knowingly.”

“For council, it is not a legal question,” Goldenberg continued. “It’s biased, not valid. So how can we hold a referendum on that? It doesn’t make any sense. I understand everybody’s passionate about it. We know that, we understand that and that’s what we’re working on.”

Grinnell repeated his question about what he should do with his petition.

“We did not ask you to put this signature thing together. You presented them to us. We said well, get some signatures and then we’ll talk. We’re talking.”

By this point Grinnell was losing his temper. “No you’re not. You’re dictating.” He quoted a newspaper article citing Goldenberg as saying he had nothing to do with it.

“How can you tell me what I said when you weren’t even here?” Goldenberg barked.

“You’re getting way off base,” Grinnell snapped back. “Ron, get it back under control.”

Goldenberg got it back under control. “We’re not doing exactly what you want but given the situation we’re dealt with, we’re doing the best we can. You might not like it, you may not agree with it…”

Finally, after 10 minutes of increasingly irrelevant exchanges, Prévost exercised closure. “This discussion has gone on long enough. We had a town council meeting and we had a public presentation as well. We have a lot of comments and suggestions, modifications — you name it. We took all these and we met with Mr. Muhlegg and his associate and reviewed all issues to see which ones could fly and which ones couldn’t fly.”

The mayor said the town wouldn’t be bound by anybody’s expectations or timetable. “I have to say you’d be quite pleased the way we had a rapport in terms of give and take…we will of course be reporting on that – it’s not a closed agenda. We’ll be making it public.”

Grinnell reminded the mayor that he, Grinnell, represents 543 residents who are passionate about it. “It’s not just me. You’re an elected official. They’re telling you something.”

“Our responsibility is to the Town of Hudson,” Prévost replied. “Sandy Beach is a part of it, but only a part of it. It has to be scheduled into our other priorities.”

After the meeting I asked Muhlegg and urban planner Marc Perreault whether they had come to the meeting expecting a notice of motion for their latest proposal. They had no comment, so I asked them in whose court the ball now rests. “You could say in both courts,” said a third associate.

I’m on thin ice here, but I think Prévost realizes the razor’s edge his administration is walking on the Sandy Beach project. He should politely ask his councillors to abstain from opening their mouths before putting their brains in gear. From Prévost’s comments and Nicanco’s response, I also think both sides recognize the need to give to get. There’s another factor as well. Neither man is well, with time running out on Prévost’s term and Muhlegg’s ability to keep going.

That doesn’t mean the wily businessman is a pushover. Prévost told me in the past Muhlegg has a good legal case against the town. Muhlegg’s last words to me: “If we can’t build, I’ll sue!”

Words that no Hudson taxpayer wants to hear.

I see my friend and accomplice Peter Ratcliffe has been dabbling in local politics in my absence. I had delayed posting this in the hope that a wider public discussion would have taken root at this point in the election cycle. I was fooling myself.

Two people have assured me they’ll seek the mayoralty. Half a dozen others have told me or told people who told me, that they’ll seek election or re-election as a councillor. At this point, I would say not one has shown themselves to be qualified, but my rule is not to name names until they’re posted on the DGEQ website. As of today, Saturday, April 1, nobody from Hudson is a registered candidate, either for mayor or for one of the six council seats, so as of this moment it’s all talk.

I commend Peter and others for initiating any kind of process leading to naming candidates. What depresses me is that none of this is happening in public. There’s a Facebook group that meets over beers. Another would-be candidate has initiated something called a design charette, a process whereby a consensus on planning and development is arrived at. There have been several private meetings where potential candidates put out feelers to gauge whether they had any support. I appreciate the invitations but neutrality is important to me. If you attend one, you have to attend all and be universally mistrusted as a snitch. In Hudson, local politics has been a secretive process for as long as I can remember.

From the conversations on Facebook as well as on this and other sites, there seems to be general agreement on the problems and challenges facing Hudson — ageing infrastructure, rising overhead as a percentage of fixed costs, economic stagnation. Every budget, there’s less money available for discretionary spending without raising taxes or incurring debt. There’s also a sense of gridlock, of being trapped in a downward spiral that I think leads so many of Hudson’s citizens to throw up their hands in frustration and despair. Frustration and despair lead to talk of possible mergers, feeding into that negative dynamic. Just stop it and as Peter says, Just Fix It.

The major disagreements are over priorities. Shouldn’t safe streets, with protected spaces for pedestrians and cyclists, take precedence? Why isn’t the town taking a more proactive role in shaping and controlling development? Shouldn’t we be concentrating on quality of life and the survival of Hudson’s natural, architectural, cultural and recreational environments? How can we think about densification and development when there is not enough drinking water to fight fires and supply peak demand? Why would we need a new town hall and refurbished public facilities when all we’re doing is incurring debt and providing offices for full-time staff?

And that list hasn’t begun to scratch the surface.

As another election cycle approaches, the growing hubbub suggests this is the most important election in Hudson’s history and our fate as a functioning community is at stake. Bullshit. Quebec has designed and engineered municipalities to function on autopilot, with minimal input from its elected bodies. As long as Hudson pays its bills for policing, public transit and regional governance and harmonizes its bylaws with those of the three layers of government above it, Quebec doesn’t care how residents feel. Quebec feels it has discharged its responsibility by ensuring we have an adequate quantity of drinkable water, fire and police protection and waste management and nobody is stealing from the public purse. Everything else is our problem and the town has the discretionary taxation power to deal with it. Most of Hudson’s wounds, real and imagined, are self-inflicted First World problems.

Since it came into being in 1969 as the result of a referendum, Hudson has a history of alternating bitterly contested elections with acclamations. Taylor Bradbury was elected and re-elected because he vowed to keep taxes down. He kept taxes down by refusing to invest in infrastructure. By decreeing 30,000-square-foot lots the town avoided having to invest in sewers. Bradbury carries the curse of having refused to buy Sandy Beach for $275,000 but residents supported him at the time.  Bradbury’s legacy:  chronic parking problems, sewage-filled ditches, collapsing streets — but no public debt.

Mike Elliott was elected twice (1989 and 2009) because nobody else wanted the job. He and his first council were tossed out in part because a group fronted by Steve Shaar was pissed at Elliott for having spent town money to enact the pesticide ban, which would cost the golf clubs. They organized behind closed doors and paid for a bunch of attack ads in the Hudson Gazette to convince voters the Elliott administration had to go. (In the end Quebec’s golf clubs end-ran the pesticide ban by cutting a deal with the province that made them self-regulating, which they are to this day.)

Shaar twice won re-election (1997, 2001) because he had a shrewd sense of timing that would have gotten him a lot further in politics. Steve dealt with things when they needed to be fixed and often rolled up his sleeves to do it himself. He was masterful at forcing residents to accept compromise, even if it resulted in zoning aberrations. The 1998 Hudson’s Valleys/Alstonvale subdivision agreement gave the town the Cirko Trail and resulted in an entire sector of town that had to drive through Vaudreuil-Dorion to get to the commercial centre. Shaar’s 2001 deal with Nicanco resulted in another enclaved community. Nonetheless, Sandy Beach would have been built had it not been for Nicanco’s stubbornness when it came to conforming to fast-changinging environmental demands on developers. Shaar’s legacy: Hudson’s Valleys/Alstonvale, Sandy Beach (legally, the town can’t prevent development to the 2001 bylaws) Community Centre, Bradbury Park (and by refusing to finance any part of it, the Hudson Village Theatre, by forcing the arts community and its backers to mobilize).

Shaar’s untimely death due to cancer in January 2004 resulted in councillor Liz Corker taking over as interim mayor for the next 18 months before being acclaimed mayor in 2005. Shaar had already begun the grant and subsidy application process to pay for the sewage treatment system and water filtration plant/aqueduct upgrade but Corker had to get the loan bylaws approved by residents. I realize now we weren’t asking the right questions when the bylaws were presented, but who knew that LBCD, the town’s consultants on the project, had underestimated the total cost by a third? There was no public outcry when Corker explained the principle that a third of the town would pay two-thirds of the cost and vice versa. The first hiccup was Corker’s announcement in early 2008 that there was no money left for the $1M water hookup to the west end. Then there was a revolt by downtown landlords and property owners when they got their tax bills, prompting the first of many readjustments.

I suspected something was wrong with the way the town was dealing with its long-term debt but readers told me I was barking up the wrong tree. I wrote a series of stories in 2008 and 2009 adding up what Hudson owed and questioning why Louise Villandré, Hudson’s town manager and clerk since Bradbury’s time, wasn’t rolling the sewer and water loan bylaws into long-term debt. Instead, she was using the town’s line of credit to cover the interest and carrying charges on the bridge loans. When I asked Corker about it she told me to ask Villandré, who told me it was because the town was expecting grants from Quebec and Ottawa and there would be no point in transferring more of the bridge loans into long-term debt than was needed to cover the actual cost to the town. Villandré also said the town’s external auditors had signed off on the deal.

Corker’s legacy: Hudson’s sewer treatment system, water filtration plant, Sandy Beach Nature Park, the deal that gave us Whitlock West and another enclaved development in exchange for the Viviry Valley Conservation Area, the Perreault Point development in exchange for cash instead of a waterfront greenspace, Oakfields and the new medical centre.

Elliott was acclaimed mayor for the second time in 2009, after Corker decided her health wasn’t up to another term and Tom Birch, her heir apparent, had to make more time for his venture capital projects in the wake of the 2007 economic collapse. I detest acclamations so I called around to discuss possible candidates. Prévost’s name came up in a conversation with a fellow University of Western Ontario grad. Prévost declined for personal reasons. Along with Elliott, four of six councillors were acclaimed with a 40% voter turnout. (Tim Snow and Diane Piacente won their seats.)

Elliott wasn’t long on the job before he began feuding with Hudson’s fire chief Peter Milot. The fight was over a used ladder truck the department had purchased. It barely fit into the 50-year-old firehall and prompted the threat of a CSST shutdown Elliott himself engineered. It was part of a larger boys-with-toys issue Elliott had with the fire department’s independence, which he saw as a challenge to council’s authority.  He forced a showdown. Both Milot and assistant chief James Campbell walked and Elliott began the process that culminated with $7M in loan bylaws to build a new station and re-engineer the public works yard, something the Corker administration had long discussed. (The Halcro Cottage relocation was a $300,000 byproduct.) Elliott took on the town planning advisory committee, replacing tenure with five-year terms with a new member named every year. Thus Hudson’s activist TPAC was declawed.

Mike is no fan of mine (I blew the whistle on his unpaid taxes) but I credit him with an intimate knowledge of the town and a real concern for its institutions. I’ve had arguments aplenty over his legacy but nobody, not even the SQ, MAMOT or UPAC found a shred of proof that Elliott enriched himself at public expense. Did he turn a blind eye to what Villandré was up to in exchange for her silence on his tax bills?

2013 was Hudson’s annus horribilis. Villandré was gone by April after treasurer Sylvain Bernard uncovered her fake billing system and her abuse of her signing privileges on the town’s line of credit, all covered by resolutions legally adopted by the Shaar, Corker and Elliott administrations. Elliott resigned by June, citing health issues after the SQ opened an investigation into Villandré’s defalcation. “Hudson has to bend a little,” he told me the day he resigned. A month later, we reported he owed approximately $65,000 in back taxes, interest and penalties. Since then, we’ve come up with our own motto for Hudson. Bend a little, spend a lot.

The leadup to the November 2013 municipal election was anticlimactic, with a lame-duck council led by interim mayor Diane Piacente hiring a new director-general, Catherine Haulard. It also rescinded a Villandré-era resolution that paid managers overtime. Otherwise, council’s hands were tied by the police investigation and a forensic accounting probe. Every fraudulent cheque Villandré signed had been co-signed by a member of council, so it was initially suspected that the rot was worse. The external auditors had signalled their concern in their annual report about certain ongoing practices they found irregular or questionable. Through four administrations, those statements never made it out of Villandré’s office and into the hands of the mayor and council. This is why the Prévost administration ended up having to pay Bourassa Boyer’s bill.

I’m told the Prévost administration thinks I’m too tough on them, unfair in my criticisms. In response I’d say no more so than with the Elliott, Corker and Shaar administrations before them.

Seven months away from the election, what have Ed Prévost and his council accomplished? On the plus side, they’ve cleaned up a mountain of garbage, though not without incurring considerable expense to the taxpayers. They managed their way through the SQ, UPAC and MAMOT probes. On a personal level, Ed came out clean after renegade councillor Rob Spencer let fly with a bucket of unsubstantiated shit about Ed’s dealings with developers.

The negatives? Analysis paralysis. Hiring hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of expertise to tell them what to think about everything from Pine Lake to a strategic plan. They were elected by more than 70 per cent of the turnout to fix the town. One of the first things they did? Turned around and ask the town for everyone’s strategic priorities, then spent the next two years and approximately $100,000 to draft an absolutely useless document. Why did we elect you if you needed us to tell you what to do?

Meanwhile, this administration still hasn’t adopted a conservation plan that will allow them to adopt a master plan that meshes with the harmonized master plans of the Montreal Metropolitan Community and Vaudreuil-Soulanges MRC. Surely to God somebody would have picked up on this at the MRC meetings and municipal federation workshops? They wonder why people mock them for the Fair Trade Zone, the eco-trolley, the performing arts centre and a third skate park in 20 years? It’s this finger-up-the-nose daydreaming that loses voters, not hard, decisive actions.

I confess to a bias against candidates with no record of attending council meetings before they were elected. Over the years, I’ve seen what happens when people with no clue of how things work try to cover up their cluelessness by spouting bullshit. None of the current council seems particularly embarrassed when they show their ignorance in not knowing how things are supposed to work by turning the floor over to Jean-Pierre Roy, Cassandra Comin Bergonzi or Natalie Lavoie to explain what the council should be able to explain. It makes me think they exhibit that same cluelessness in caucus meetings where it’s decided how much of our money is spent and on what.

It demonstrates why Quebec ensures that every municipality has a bureaucratic autopilot that can take over when les elus are too clueless to be allowed near the controls. Four years in, the current mayor and council keep making rookie mistakes. The level of transparency is abysmal, the worst I’ve seen since Jean Drapeau and Lucien Saulnier ran Montreal. My most recent discovery: last March, they restored the Villandré-era policy of paying managers overtime. Wasn’t this the same crew that carried on endlessly about town employee entitlements?

Ed Prévost wasn’t the best candidate in 2013. What Ed had going for him was that his opponent had done business with the town and was therefore suspect. I confess to having been the conduit for the facts used as ammo in Ed’s drive-by smear campaign against Jacques Bourgeois. I wish I could take it back. Jacques knew how municipalities are run, how the bidding system works, how the MRC and MMC regional governments operate. He knows Hudson far better than Ed ever will and had several excellent candidates on his slate. None of that would have made a bit of difference in November 2013 because Hudson voters wanted someone to punish. All Prévost had to do was point the finger and the witch hunt was underway. Shame on us all.

“Best election you ever lost,” my Louise likes to joke with Jacques when she runs into him. I remember another side of it, the time I got a call from Jacques’ granddaughter. She had heard me talking about Hudson’s scandals in front of a room of Westwood Senior students. She had asked Jacques if he was the person I was referring to. He called me, pleading to tell her what I knew. I left her a message telling her that I had no reason to doubt her granddad’s honesty. I hope she got it.

Some issues are bogus, like the development-versus-greenspace straw man being set up prior to this year’s election. In Quebec, development is an administrative process. It should not be a political debate. A municipality adopts a master development plan (in harmony with all those above-mentioned political considerations. A developer presents a project to the urban planning department. If and when it satisfies the zoning, subdivision and density bylaws laid out in the master plan, it goes before the TPAC, which suggests alterations or major changes depending on whether it is being proposed as an infill development or new subdivision. Once it makes it through the TPAC funnel, a recommendation is made to council. Council determines whether it should be approved or rejected. If it requires a zoning change, it is subject to approval by referendum unless the municipality and MAMOT agree it should be a PPU and therefore exempt.

Bottom line:

– Forget slates. The voters decide, not the candidates. The only time slates work is when a cohesive, coherent team of like-minded people can convince the voters they have the know-how and discipline to make a real difference. Hudson is a community of cliques, silos and competing personal interests. There is no cohesion, as we’ve seen in the endless squabbles over who should pay what for water and sewers. It will take leadership to unite all those warring factions. I don’t see any evidence.

– Forget election slogans. Back to Proud?  Elect Competence? Team Transparency? In Hudson, what matters is why we shouldn’t elect someone. Prévost demonstrated that to perfection in the last election.

Noble principles and grand visions have their place, but not right now, not in Hudson. Most taxpayers will settle for four years of peace, order and good government. For me that translates into safe, maintained streets and sidewalks, people and dogs under control, enough good water, competent garbage and snow removal and the lowest possible tax bill. Anyone who can guarantee me that gets my vote.

 

Back from a whirlwind two-week rail jaunt through Japan, both of us sick as dogs with the mother of all head colds as I write this. We’d packed face masks, Vitamin C, Cold FX and echinacea. All it did was delay the onslaught. We ditched the face masks on the flight back, so there’s no telling where we caught it.

Wednesday, Feb. 22: Montreal to Chicago O’Hare on Air Canada, then Chicago to Tokyo Narita on All Nippon Airways. Re-read John Hersey’s 1946 Hiroshima. Hersey was an American journalist, the first writer to tell the story of what it was like to be among the survivors of the world’s first atomic bomb. It’s a little book, 118 pages, and widely considered to be the first example of what came to be called New Journalism, a terse factual writing style stripped of the writer’s point of view.

This trip is a pilgrimage. Hersey’s book was one of a handful my father bought as a young reporter and kept through a dozen moves. I was 14 when I first read it. It convinced me to become a journalist like Hersey, like my father. I have to see Hiroshima, to stand at Ground Zero, to visit the museum describing the horror in clinical detail and the memorials dedicated to the dead.

Another reason we want to visit Japan while we can: we’re convinced Donald Trump is clinically insane, incapable of rational judgment. We see the Republicans playing along, riding Trump’s bandwagon on a mission to hijack America. During our stay the Americans station THAAD missile launchers in Tokyo after three North Korean ICBMs splash into Japanese waters. Meanwhile, Russia’s Putin talks about the use of tactical nukes. How many nuclear weapons does it take to guarantee no more Hiroshimas?

Before leaving I drop a message to Sed Chapman, an American contributor to Quora, a site devoted to quirky questions and answers. Chapman has lived in Japan for years and I’ve come to appreciate his insight. Specifically, I ask him what the weather would be like and what first-time visitors to Japan should expect.

Chapman’s reply: “Draw a line due west from Tokyo. Everything above the line will be cold and rainy or snowy. The Pacific side will be warmer and maybe a little drier. I don’t think you need to worry about reservations as it is off season. You can always get hotel reservations in the larger train stations. Bring fleece, a rain parka, gloves and a hat. Get an umbrella here. Change money here. Bring card for cash at 7-11 and post offices. Download maps before you come.”

We plan our trip like we always do — I buy the Lonely Planet for Japan and Louise begins marking it up with a highlighter and sticky notes. We agree on musts and maybes. Eventually we will spend four days in and around Tokyo and two in Hakone, a popular tourist destination in the mountains west of Tokyo. Kyoto and environs get three days. We budget two nights for Hiroshima and leave the remainder of our two weeks open. We book Airbnbs in those four cities because as we discovered in Portugal, there’s no better way to experience a country.

We bring one IPhone to navigate, text, book lodging and stay in touch. For $10 a day, Telus offers a voice/data travel option. We end up never using the Telus plan because Japanese Airbnb hosts supply portable hotspot devices and WiFi can be found almost anywhere on our itinerary. Mindful of Chapman’s advice, we download everything from the Tokyo subway map to a universal booking app. We print out all Airbnb directions in Japanese as well as in English. We talk to people who have visited Japan. There are many ways to get around the main islands – by plane, bus, rental vehicle. Everyone advises us against driving ourselves. Japan drives on the left, Romance alphabet signage is spotty and it’s unlikely you’ll find an English speaker at a gas station. So we opt for a pair of Japan Rail’s 14-day unlimited passes.

Japan isn’t the only nation with fast trains, but Japan’s Shinkansen bullet trains are so advanced technologically and such a civilized mode of transportation, no other mode of intercity transit compares. To reach cities not on Shinkansen lines, narrow-gauge Azura and other Limited Express trains are slower and not as luxurious, but they’re as good as anything you’ll find in North America. Finally, suburban commuter trains open up infinite local possibilities to curious day-trippers, like the amazing bamboo groves outside Kyoto.

Travelling by rail in Japan is a snap. With the JR pass you reserve your seats at a JR office, which are everywhere. You show up at the station with enough time to browse through the kiosks selling bentos, beautifully presented box lunches with combinations of every conceivable edible — sushi, sashimi, maki rolls, rice balls, tofu, you name it. Everywhere, you’ll find hot and cold tea, delicious canned coffee, excellent Japanese beer. Sustenance in hand, you ask the ticket agent for the platform number and make your way to the pictograph showing you exactly where to stand to board your car. The train pulls in on time, you take your seat and relax. Sleep is not only possible, but widely practiced by the chronically sleep-deprived Japanese.

Our introduction – finding our way from Tokyo’s Narita Airport to Shinjuku, a western suburb of Tokyo. Shinjuku, with three million passengers transiting per day, is the busiest transmodal station in the world. It has 200 separate entrances and exits to two train lines and four subway lines operated by half a dozen different carriers. JR passes don’t work here; the Japanese use a rechargeable cash card, either Pasmo or Suica, akin to Visa and MasterCard. Because passengers pay on the basis of distance, the turnstile will occasionally spit out one’s card because there’s not enough credit to cover the trip travelled. When that happens, the passenger goes to a bank of fare adjustment ATMs to pay the difference or refresh his/her cash card.

In Shinjuku we search for the entrance to the Marunouchi Line, which we will ride west for two stops to Nishi-Shinjuku. In vain we scan the hundreds of signs. Then, as we experience countless times throughout our trip, a sympathetic soul takes time from their own journey to see us to the right platform on the Marunouchi line four levels down.

Once at Nishi-Marunouchi, another dilemma. Which exit? We emerge onto the street and head for a Seven Eleven convenience store (more on these later) where we’re supposed to meet up with our host. Except that at 6:30, the appointed hour, Masa doesn’t materialize. I wait with the bags while Louise finds a WiFi connection and reaches Masa. Wrong Seven Eleven; the right one is a 10-minute walk. Masa walks to escort us to his Airbnb apartment.

On the way, he cautions us against getting into conversations with anyone in the building. “I may have to shut down my Airbnb,” he confesses. Great. First night in Japan and we may be tossed out. Masa stops us on the sidewalk before we get to the building. “Wait here,” he says. “I want to check for the building superintendent.” As fate would have it, the woman herself sweeps out of the building and past us without a glance. Masa beckons us to the door and hands us the key. Just inside the door is a sign in Japanese and English. The English reads “Airbnb is not allowed in this building.”

The story has a happy ending. The apartment is modern, well-equipped and bigger than most Japanese hotel rooms. We don’t run into a soul for the next three days and the location is fantastic, within walking and subway distance of everything. That evening we walk toward Shinjuku’s bright lights and find ourselves in the beating heart of Tokyo and its 14 million inhabitants.

Three days of sightseeing follow, beginning with Shinjuku’s skyscraper district and an elevator to the top of Tokyo’s Metropolitan Government offices. From the observation deck one gets a sense of the sheer size of Japan’s largest city and the location of landmarks like the Imperial Palace. It’s a great city for walking — clean, safe at any hour and with spotless public bathrooms everywhere. But there’s a catch. Public trash receptacles are rare, so don’t expect to dump those sandwich wrappers or coffee cups just anywhere. (It’s considered gauche to eat while walking.) We quickly discover few bathrooms provide paper towels or blow dryers. You’re expected to carry your own package of all-purpose tissue and dispose of it in the toilet.

An aside on Japanese toilets. Occasionally, you’ll find old-school public bathrooms of the footsteps-on-either-side-of-a-hole variety, but everywhere we stay, the sanitary facilities are technological marvels, with heated seats that lower automatically, warm-water bidets and infinitely variable flush.

By the third day, we gain a working knowledge of the Tokyo subway system and feel confident venturing further afield. We take in the Imperial Palace, spectacular Japanese gardens with the cherry trees just beginning to bloom. We visit Shinto and Buddhist temples and watch security preparations for the 2017 Tokyo Marathon in Hibaya Park. We rubberneck our way around upscale Ginza with its luxury-goods shops for the 1% and six-figure playthings like a gold and bronze Bugatti Peyron.

An article in a tourist guide leads us to Kagurazaka, a hilly district known as Petite Montmartre, with cobbled streets and narrow alleys filled with little shops and stalls and an overwhelmingly French theme. There’s French music playing on loudspeakers, shops with French names. In one patisserie, we run into a gaggle of young women dressed up as geishas, something we are to see a lot of in Tokyo and Kyoto. They’re beside themselves when they discover that we speak French.

The Japanese are wild about all things French, and that appears to extend to Quebec. One loses count of buildings with French names, of cosmetics and lingerie advertising campaigns in French. Quebec maple syrup is a huge culinary hit. We spot $40 litre jugs of Quebec maple syrup, boxes of Leclerc maple cookies for $5.

Tokyo behind us, we head for Odawara, a small city 40 minutes Shinkansen ride west of Shinjuku. It’s our first time on a bullet train so we’re like kids. We’re aboard an N700, the more modern of the two most widely used types. We loaf along at between 180 and 220 km/h, although the bullet trains exceed 300 km/h on the longer intercity runs. It’s like travelling on an extremely comfortable aircraft, with big reclining seats and all the legroom you’d ever want. An attendant passes with a refreshment cart. I go walkabout to explore the amenities and discover men’s and women’s toilets, big, comfy restrooms, powder rooms, Wi-Fi facilities and public telephones. A most civilized form of public transportation. Why can’t Canada build and operate trains like these?

Our Odawara Airbnb is steps from the station, upstairs from a bar and grill and across the street from a Lawson convenience store. Japan’s convenience stores are open 24/7. The two biggest chains are Lawson and Seven Eleven, American transplants now headquartered in Japan and spreading throughout Southeast Asia. They’re where you go to get cash from a Cirrus-enabled bank ATM. They offer an incredible range of reasonably healthy fast foods: nori-wrapped seafood rice cakes, hot skewers of beef, pork and chicken, meat or veggie-filled steamed buns and a decent cup of coffee or tea to take out. You can also pick up a mickey of single-malt scotch, several brands of excellent Japanese beer or sake and a decent bottle of red or white.

We had planned to use the Airbnb in Odawara as our base to hike and explore onsen (hot bath) country around Hakone, a popular weekend destination for exhausted Tokyo residents. We’d packed our bathing suits after seeing photos of ancient stone pools fed by volcanically heated spring water. It was a letdown to discover most onsens in that part of Japan are modern spas and swimming pools fed by a system of pipes from volcanic springs. Neither of us enjoys public hot tubs so we pass on the experience.

With two-day passes on the local train/bus system, we hike a few badly maintained trails and ride the cog railway to the volcanic formations above Hakone. Bad news. The first section of the Hakone Ropeway, an aerial tram crossing the mountain to Lake Ashi, is closed. They propose to bus us to the far end, where we can continue down to the lake. Except that they don’t mention that the other section closes at 4 p.m. So we ‘re ordered off the bus at the summit and forced to line up with everyone else for the trip back to the top of the cog railway. Why not just tell us before you piss us off?

This reluctance to volunteer information or deviate from established protocols is what irked us most about Japan. We experienced it more than once and found ourselves wondering how the country proposes to deal with the 2020 Summer Games and the huge influx of foreigners with no comprehension of Japanese. (Japan hosted the successful 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics but the numbers are nowhere near the same.) Eventually we were directed to a notice in Japanese and English to the effect the tram was closed for maintenance, but the onus was on us to ask.

To judge from the number of hacking, sneezing cold sufferers on the trains, we arrived in the midst of the high grippe season. Is this why so many Japanese wear face masks? There’s no gender or age pattern among mask wearers. Everyone from students to seniors wears them, serving behind counters, operating or taking public transit, biking and walking. Train conductors and bus drivers wear them. Subway packers wear them. Most are of the disposable surgical variety but we saw plenty of non-disposable masks in designer shapes and colours.

The wearing of face masks in Japan dates back to the 1917 Spanish influenza that killed millions worldwide. Since then, medical science has concluded that while it may prevent someone with a contagion from infecting others, the wearing of a surgical mask is no guarantee against catching something. Like the vaccination threshold to achieve herd immunity, over 90% of the population would have to wear masks to protect itself from contracting airborne illness. By my own rough estimate, the mask-wearing level in Japan is somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population. I’ve concluded mask-wearing is as much about signalling disengagement and laying claim to one’s private space as it is about hygiene. With a good shot of superstition.

Masks and smartphones. It seemed like almost everyone riding Tokyo’s incredibly complex subway and commuter train network is clutching their phone, many wearing earbuds. That or asleep and sometimes both. More than once we watch someone nodding off and dropping their phone.  I can understand why they fall asleep. The Japanese work incredibly long hours, beginning in preschool. Jet lag meant we were up at 3 a.m. In the Airbnbs and hotels where we stayed, we’d hear people up and at it at all hours. Schools start at 8:30 and finish at 5:30 or 6; many seem to have adopted the British system of a daily break after lunch for physical activities before resuming classes. Most wear school uniforms, which extend to jogging outfits and backpacks. Daycare and juku (after-school tutoring), seems to be universal. There’s a critical public daycare shortage because accredited, regulated early childhood educators are underpaid. At the same time there’s an ongoing national scandal over unregulated private daycare and ‘baby hotels’ where overworked parents are forced to pay extortionate rates to park their infants with providers who don’t have to undergo background checks.

It’s common to see an exhausted mother on the metro, holding her sleeping toddler as they make their way home well after dark. My mind’s eye retains images of women bicycling through the rain, carrying two or more kids in bike seats with clear plastic covers.

There’s no promise of better to come. Japan has the oldest population of any major nation. In 2016, a United Nations estimate placed half its 127 million citizens over 46.9 years of age. Germany, with a median age of 46.8, is close behind. (China is 37.1, the U.S. is 37.9, the UK is 40.5, Canada 42. Japan, with an average life expectancy of 83, is the world’s highest, making it the planet’s canary in the demographic coal mine. Without significant immigration, its population hasn’t changed significantly in a decade. By 2030 it’s estimated there won’t be enough people in the workforce to cover the cost of entitlements. Already, universal free health care has given way to universal co-pay, with the individual responsible for 30 per cent of the bill up to a monthly co-pay cap.

Not once during our stay do we smell marijuana being consumed in public; Japan’s draconian drug laws are a powerful dissuader. Japan’s drug of choice, alcohol, plays an essential role as a coping mechanism and release valve. Every major railway station features a Tully’s or or other franchise outlet where businessmen will drop by for a few belts and a light supper of drinking man’s food before continuing home. Later in the trip, we duck into a local bar to try shodju, a spirit distilled from barley, rice or almost anything else. Two of those disengage one’s brain from life’s ordeal. The exception to Japan’s obsession with public hygiene: pools of vomit outside the blocks of drinking establishments. Overconsumption is a way of life among Japan’s salarymen. Social activists blame the insatiable demands of the nation’s corporate overlords and greedy shareholders. Alcohol remains king.

Conversations with those we met throughout our visit reveal the deep concern for Japan’s future. Exploring the grounds of Onshi Hakone Park, built as a lakeside estate in Motohakone by a German doctor prior to WW1, we get to chatting with an elderly couple. Like the majority of Japanese who lived through U.S. General Douglas MacArthur’s army of occupation, they both speak good English. They have doubts about a world with Trump  and worry about what will happen to Japan, with a falling birthrate, an aging population and almost no immigration to offset the demographic shift. Outside a grocery store in Odawara, we run into a woman who lived in the U.S. for four years. She wonders what will happen to Japan’s post-Boomer generations. They sign on to a life of hard work on the premise that they will enjoy the same quality of life when they retire. What they don’t know, she says, is they’re doomed to pay for the benefits of their elders while leaving none to look forward to themselves. What will happen when they find out they’ve been lied to?

Tuesday, Feb. 28: 5 a.m. wakeup call to catch the Shinkansen for Kyoto. Fitful sleep our last night in Odawara, punctuated by rowdy outbursts and the cigarette smoke from the bar downstairs. A lot of people smoke, but smoking in public is tightly controlled or banned in many places, so smokers restore their nicotine levels with a vengeance in local bars. If you don’t like smoke, don’t go in.

In Kyoto we head to our Airbnb with a series of photos showing where to turn. We walk miles before I realize our host has started us off with a photo of a reflection. We’re headed exactly the wrong way. We retrace our steps and find our cozy apartment less than five minutes from the railway station. As soon as we figure out the essentials, like how to turn on the heating, we strike out for the commuter train that runs to Arashiyama, the site of an amazing bamboo grove that gives us new insight into the Japanese relationship with tradition. All around us, young men and women are dressed in traditional Japanese samurai robes, intricately brocaded kimonos and wooden sandals. Giggling girls hire rickshaws, not to be pulled through the narrow paved paths through the magical green glade but to pose for photos with the handsome young drivers. It seems to be a Japan-wide nostalgia among the young for a simpler, more formal life they attempt to recapture by dressing up. We find it indescribably touching.

Kyoto is a stunning city straddling a river and surrounded by mountains. It contains a significant percentage of Japan’s oldest structures because it was largely spared by the B-29s and major earthquakes. From massive Buddhist temples and 300-year-old neighbourhoods to art-deco towers and the unforgettably beautiful Ponto-Cho and Gion quarters, Kyoto is an ideal walking city. Kyoto’s subway (use that Pasmo or Suica card) isn’t anywhere the size of Tokyo’s, but it makes it possible to see more in a day — and that includes a strolling lunch through the spectacular Nishiki market.

We begin at the downtown end, eating our way east. We start with seven-spice rice crackers and burdock soup, followed by pickled vegs and slices of barbecued rare breast of duck, smoked baby squid, marinated tuna sashimi, multi-flavoured peanuts, bean gelatine in powdered green tea, smoked shellfish and a Kyoto delicacy, a salad of tofu skin and baby setake mushrooms washed down with Kirin draft beer and black soybean tea. We marvel at $500 handmade knives and $100 titanium chopsticks.

Tuesday, March 2: Thus far we’ve been struck by the formal politeness of the Japanese. Best example so far: train conductors bowing upon entering and leaving each car. Today, the driver of the #59 bus gets out of his seat, walks around to the side door, pulls out a folding ramp, then helps a wheelchair-bound passenger into a wide central space served for handicapped passengers. Everywhere, ways are found to adapt. There is unfeigned compassion for the challenged and infinite patience for the elderly. Traffic lights are leisurely, with a chirp-and-echo system to guide the blind. Teens jump to give up their seats on public transit. People offer help to tourists buried in their maps.

Kyoto’s Imperial Palace is 63 hectares of gardens, forests, shrines, temples and royal compounds dating back to the 12th century. Couldn’t get into the Sendo Palace grounds without lining up for four hours on the off chance of getting a pass. So we hike to the main palace compound and get in with a numbered tag. They keep crowds down because it’s more orderly. The compound provides an architectural explanation of how Japan’s hereditary monarchy is central to the nation’s sense of social stability, something we’ve witnessed in other southeast Asian nations. Japan’s Emperor is no longer considered as a deity (WWII and Emperor Hirohito’s backing of Japan’s hegemonist military-industrial complex ended that) but the Royals play a stabilizing role. The gardens are breathtakingly beautiful.

We head to a cafeteria on the palace grounds for lunch. Udon curry chicken noodles with ginger, mushrooms, salad and tofu sides. Simple, hot, filling and incredibly delicious for 400 yen each. Japan’s currency is easy for Canadians to figure out. Think of a thousand-yen bill as $10. Everything below that is in 500, 200, 100, 50, 10, 5 and one-yen coins. (Suggestion: keep 10,000 and 5,000-yen bills separate so as not to mix them up) This is a cash society, so forget credit or debit cards unless you’re at a cash machine or in a high-end shopping district. If you’re confused, a cashier will pick the right change out of your hand. You’ll get a receipt for everything because there’s a value-added tax on every transaction.

Last stop in Kyoto : the Golden Temple, best reached via bus with a 500-yen one-day pass. It’s an impressive little building in a beautifully manicured setting. It’s fascinating because of the sheer volume of selfie-snapping, candle-lighting, incense-lighting visitors for whom the site is a pilgrimage to wishful thinking, like buying a spiritual lottery ticket.

Friday, March 3: We took the 8 a.m Shinkansen to Hiroshima.

I • A Noiseless Flash
“At exactly 15 minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.”

That is how John Hersey begins his 1946 narrative on the effects of the world’s first atomic bomb used on a city. First published in the New Yorker’s Aug. 31 edition, it is quickly reprinted in book form as Americans come to realize the human toll of all-out nuclear war. More than 70 years later, there’s no official number of victims: 100,000 plus died in the blast or the days that followed, 140,000 by November, 200,000 by 1947, 250,000 dead by 1950. One’s survival depended on proximity to the blast and factors like the colour of one’s clothing, or whether someone suffered flash burns before he or she was exposed to fallout.

But all that comes later, at the museum where the Japanese penchant for documented accuracy includes pieces of granite and concrete with human shadows seared into the stone as their owners were vaporized. There are fragments of clothing, lunchboxes, eyeglasses and anything else left to identify 40,000 schoolchildren brought in to the city core to help authorities clear fire lanes for an expected American incendiary attack. There is also a dispassionate layperson’s description of the differences between the U-235 device that incinerated Hiroshima and the plutonium bomb that levelled Nagasaki days later to force Japan’s capitulation and end WWII.

I thought I was prepared for the sight of Ground Zero. I wasn’t. You walk around a bustling city corner. Directly in front of you is the famous skeleton of the domed tower, the ruins of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. I realize now it was the juxtaposition of the ruins with the throb of life all around it, but for minutes I stood paralyzed by the blast of emotions.

Hiroshima is built on a river delta. Across one of the branches from the memorial is an eternal flame and cenotaph under which are listed the names of every known victim. On the far side of the plaza is a dome of bare earth, perhaps 10 metres in diameter. Under it lie entombed the ashes and remains of thousands who were never positively identified. A group of elementary students bow to the cenotaph while another class waits  its turn. They come from all over Japan and they never stop coming.

At the far end of the exhibits is the Visitor’s Hall containing U.S. President Barack Obama’s hand-written message and the paper cranes he made. “We have known the agony of war. Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace and pursue a world without nuclear weapons.” As of February 2017, the Mayors for Peace initiative has 7,219 member cities in 162 countries and regions. Their goal: a worldwide ban on nuclear weapons by 2020. Whether you’re a believer or not, pray.

Publicly, anyway, the Japanese tend to rationalize America’s use of nuclear weapons to end a war their leaders were ready to fight to the death. Their own governments stop short of acknowledging the atrocities committed by Japan’s Imperial Army in unprovoked attacks on China and the brutal occupation of its southeast Asian neighbours. On the other hand, millions of Americans still believe the perfidy of Pearl Harbor and the loss of American blood in battles across the Pacific justified taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians whose only connection with the war effort was being told to support it or else. Weeks later, I’m still incapable of rationalizing anything connected with Hiroshima. As at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem, it’s impossible to walk through the evidence of human suffering and not be overwhelmed by the horror and grief. Alone, I hike up a washed-out garbage-strewn forest trail to a Buddhist stupa overlooking a cliffside cemetery and stand dazed overlooking the city. I can’t remember the hotel where we spend the night, but I couldn’t sleep.

Saturday, March 4: We have to leave Hiroshima. We’ve booked nothing. So we pick Matsumoto, a small city in the middle of the Japanese Alps. It means a day spent travelling, first taking the Sakura 580 on the Shinkansen line to Shin-Kobe, the narrow-gauge Hikari to Nagoya and finally the Shinano 11 to Matsumoto. We grab a couple of steamed pork dumplings and donuts at a platform kiosk in Nagoya before heading into the hills, through tunnels and bamboo forests being harvested for construction scaffolding, past farm villages clad in solar arrays.

Our spirits lift the moment we step off the train. The movements of Japanese trains are punctuated with ringtones. You’ll hear snatches of Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven along with lesser composers. You may catch a synthesized Gershwin riff or a Beatles refrain. But this was the first time we’d heard anybody welcome a train’s arrival. As we pull into the station, a woman’s voice with a smile in it sings out “Matsu-mo-toe.” We can’t help smiling back.

We check into the new Hotel Richmond, where we are to spend three of our last four nights in Japan. Matsumoto is an old city. Although it has been extensively rebuilt over the centuries, the Black Castle, built in 1598, is one of just five Japanese wooden castles of original construction. The castle charges admission, but that includes an English-speaking guide who provides a blood-curdling history lesson on how the Portuguese taught the Japanese to use early firearms against one another.

We stop at a sweet potato shop for a bag of fries and strike up a conversation with the Akiyama family – Masahiko, Chisato and their son Masaki. Masahiko, the production engineer for a medical equipment manufacturer, lived in the U.S. and visited Niagara Falls, while Chisato teaches English in a school and Masaki is getting a good basic grounding. The more we walk and talk, the more we get to like this young family. We trade business cards, which in Japan is a significant gesture, and talk about getting together before we leave. Then I head to a serious drinker’s bar where I sample shodju, a distilled liquor known for its anaesthetic qualities. They weren’t lying.

Sunday, March 4: Highland Express (it’s neither) to the delightfully named hamlet of Shin-Shin-Shima, then by bus to the foot of Mt. Norikura, one of the country’s most popular ski centres. Spring skiing is at its peak and here we are without any clothing or equipment. So we ask the Kanko Centre receptionist where the snowshoe trails begin. She looks down at our hiking boots. Her gestures suggest the snow is up to our knees. Hey, no harm in trying, right? Hiking map in hand, we set out on the main road into Norikura Park. The snow is well-travelled and hard underfoot. Plenty of snowshoe tracks and the recent passage of an experienced freestyle cross-country skier make us feel cocky.

The main track is just like a wide, rolling Laurentian foothills valley, with birch and cedar groves and names like Whistling Track, because the downhill supposedly makes you feel like whistling. Except that we aren’t whistling. By now, the heat of the high-altitude spring sun had softened the snowpack sufficiently that we sink every dozen steps. We press on for a couple of kilometres just to say we have (and to catch a tan) before stopping for a picnic lunch at a summer campsite. We beetle our way back to the reception centre just in time to catch the Shin-Shin bus.

Back in Matsumoto, we realize we’ve made a one-day mistake in our plans, so we rejig our hotel and train reservations to allow for an overnight in Nagano, host city of the 1998 Winter Olympics, where we hope to see snow monkeys. After considerable deliberation we sup at the Everest, a Nepali restaurant for a $13.50 set menu of chicken curry, butter naan and a tray of other excellent samplings washed down with Nepalese Everest beer. I suspect business is slow; everyone from the owner on down is glad to see us.

Monday, March 6: Up before dawn to catch the Shinano to Nagano. Over breakfast we catch up on news from back home, dominated by stories of Trump stomping around in his bathrobe, supervising the wrapping of White House phones in aluminum foil and raving about Obama bugging the White House. It’s the perfect mindset with which to visit a valleyful of monkeys.

They’re not cheap, these snow monkeys. A one-day pass is $35 per adult. That is until we learn this includes a 90-minute bus ride from the train station to the mountains and back and admission to the park filled with the hot springs where the monkeys spend the cold months. The entire back page of the pass is filled with terms, conditions, guidelines and disclaimers. Rest rooms are few and far between. No handicapped access, absolutely no swimming or bathing with the monkeys (Masahito told us he knew someone who had tried it and the monkeys beat the crap out of him). Don’t let kids wander. Monkey behaviour is unpredictable and they may have decided against a day at the pool. Watch out for other wild animals, poisonous plants and venomous snakes. It can snow a lot and get really cold and chilly. The path in and out is long, muddy and slippery. Crampons are available.

The place is jammed, both with monkeys and their human cousins. The monkeys hang out in the hot pool or nearby, picking lice off each other and eating them with enjoyment. The visitors get as close as they can with some of the most expensive camera equipment available, snapping thousands of photos. The monkeys totally, utterly ignore the humans except for one hopeful oldster hanging out on the bridge to the site, begging. It’s the best therapy for Trump poisoning.

Tuesday, March 7: We head back to Matsumoto via Nagoya, both bone-weary and drained from another cold day in the mountains. In the flurry to get off the train in Matsumoto, I leave my trusty canvas shoulder bag on the seat in front of us as I wrestle both carry-ons off the overhead rack. I always carry my passport, JR Pass, current ticket and wallet on my person but my asthma and heart meds are in the bag. So is my writer’s notebook.

We’re directed to JR’s Lost and Found, the last door in a dusty corridor where it appears that employees who have seriously screwed up are left to die of boredom. The office looks like a throwback to a ‘50s cop film with old phones, old desks and old guys with pocket protectors and vacuous expressions going through the motions as they wait for 6 p.m. and a few wets. None speaks English. Clearly, this won’t work. Brushcut, the guy with the unfortunate task of taking our complaint, finally picks up the phone to call a JR supervisor who speaks good English.

The train that dropped us in Matsumoto is a double-ender now heading back to Nagoya, then back to Matsumoto, she explains. But it wasn’t that simple even if the train crew finds my bag. Although these were all JR trains, they’re operated by partners, so each has its own lost-and-found protocol and the Nagoya lost and found department head would most likely not agree to place the bag back on the train because he would become responsible for it and the boys in Matsumoto would not likely take responsibility for it.

Another phone rings as she’s explaining all this. Combover, the other guy, answers, listens and put it down, then relays the message to Brushcut who relays it to the woman on the phone, which he then hands back to me. “They found your bag,” she says.

“When does the train leave Nagoya?”

“Five o’clock. But there’s a later train to Nagoya so you can go there and pick it up.”

“Look, I understand nobody wants to be responsible for this but I’m flying back to Canada tomorrow and I don’t like travelling without meds. I’m not taking another train to Nagoya and back to pick it up when your people can put it on the train. I’ll buy a seat if that’s what it takes.”

In the midst of this, Louise walks out before she loses her shit. I recognize my situation is hopeless but there’s that devil in me that wants to see if I can make someone snap.

“You understand…nobody is willing to take responsibility for your bag,” says Miss Helpful. “Perhaps you have someone who could send it to you in Canada…”

“So let me understand this. None of your three employees in this room will lift a finger to help me because it means they would be responsible and might have to stay after hours. Is that official JR policy?”

“I…I can’t answer that.”

“Did you even ask them?”

“No.”

“Did they offer their colleague in Nagoya that option?”

“No.”

By now it’s too late. The train has left Nagoya for Matsumoto. Brushcut walks away, leaving me to Combover, who pulls out an IPad and finds the Google translate voice-to-message-to-voice app. He’s offering me to forward my bag from Nagoya to Matsumoto. Whoever picks it up will have to pay the cost.

I tell him via Google Lost in Translation I might have a name of someone but I would have to check with him first before imposing. My concern is JR will go after him for the cost of everything, including the time of the lost-and-found clowns and the interpreter.

He sighs and writes his name in Japanese, along with a phone number. “He call me, okay?”

I thank him and bow. Celebrate the little victories, like a break with protocol.

I’ve saved the best of our trip to Japan for last. While in Nagano, we receive an email from Masahito and Chisato inviting us to dinner our last evening in Matsumoto. Chisato and Masaki picked us up outside our hotel and whisks us through Matsumoto’s busy suburbs to their tidy home. We drink tea and talk on floor cushions around the heated table, one of the best inventions I’ve seen when it’s below freezing outside.

Masaki, leads his class in math-obsessed Japan. He shows us how he uses an abacus to compute. So we challenge him to what a typical Grade 3 student in Canada would be learning. He looks confused, then reaches for his exercise book to show us what he has to master. It’s filled with multiplication and division problems involving 10-digit numbers and multiple decimal points. He did them in after-school and checked to ensure they were correct. They aren’t permitted calculators, not even in advanced math. No wonder he’s confused. I feel ashamed at what we’ve visited on our children. I would not be surprised if the Japanese government sees danger in teaching this nation’s youth English so they can seek their fortunes in a world they can excel in.

It’s a delightful supper of thin-sliced yellowtail and fresh watercress fast-cooked in a boiling nori-flavoured broth, then dipped in a variety of spicy sauces. The centrepiece is surrounded by delectable homemade dishes. Chisato pours Louise a glass of homemade yellow plum brandy while Masahito shows me how to pour a friend a glass of Asahi pilsener, then allow the friend to return the favour. We pour our own from there and dawdle over dessert.

Then it’s talent time. Masaki plucks out “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head” on his new ukulele while we sing along. Then it’s his father’s turn, sharing “Country Road” on his guitar. Chisato uncovers the piano and plays a beautiful minuet I’ve never heard. By 8:30, it’s everybody’s bedtime and we begin the goodbyes.

There’s one more thing and I regret asking it. We tell them the story of the bag. Never mind the meds or the bag, but I would like to recover my notebook and my Bhutanese medicine pouch. Is there any way that you could send them to us? On the table I place what it would cost in yen to send something of that size and weight to Canada. Their only reaction? Trying to hand me back my money. I hand Masa the piece of paper with the name and telephone number of the JR guy.

Since our arrival, they’ve taken the time to update us on the bag’s journey, beginning with its arrival from JR. Masa tried to send me the medications but I told him it might cause more trouble than good. A week later, I got the Japanese equivalent of an ExpressPost envelope with my notebook in it.

In the end, it’s not the country you visit. It’s the people. Thank you, folks, for a wonderful visit.

Quadrennial Springtime, and some citizens are sounding like they’ll run for Mayor or Councillor. At least some are thinking, hopefully many will offer their skills and intelligence. I think we’ve got more people involved in opposition than I can remember. but the burning question is how many will run and on what platforms?

In Hudson’s last municipal election, at their request, I met with and spoke impartially to both mayoral candidates. I was very pleased that we had two actual thinking candidates with real world experience running for mayor and contested races in all sectors for the first time since I can remember. I don’t charge for advice and always warn that anything they learn will be worth exactly what they paid for it.

It’s not rocket science, the major concerns of Hudson are really obvious and both candidates had similar questions. But each candidate had a different approach. Mayor Prevost chose, for reasons he felt comfortable with,  to run without a cohort of potential Councillors while the other candidate ran a complete slate covering all electoral districts.

When you have only six Councillors to be elected, a potential mayor without a slate will have to make do with what’s chosen for them, while a potential mayor with a slate will usually not run the table and will have to do what’s chosen for them.  The difference might be that the potential mayor with a slate will have more minds engaged to formulate a platform and might therefore be able to cohesively gel into group action more quickly. I don’t think that’s been a problem for Mayor Prevost, with one obvious exception, he’s had the visible support of all elected throughout his term.

Both candidates last election developed comprehensive platforms for a wide range of Hudson issues, and both were equally in the dark about the reality they might find on the other side of the polls. My sincere feeling is that neither could have expected or planned for the depth of the challenges they’d face. Thankfully, both were just oblivious enough to what they were undertaking that by running they gifted us with an actual election and public discussion of issues.

We’ve been blessed to have some gumption and resolve in spite of poor health, loud negative noise and many other issues that might have caused lesser souls to bail out with justification. I feel that we, as a town’s people’ have contributed to and watched the negative toll on Ed Prevost’s health. When one is ill, one hopes for peace that he didn’t have, and I’m proud that Mayor Prevost has never allowed himself the use of his health as an excuse but has stayed calm and soldiered on. He and his wife and family are owed our sincere thanks for diligence and selflessness under trying conditions.

As we look towards the November 2017 we, as a public, should have a much better idea of what was wrong and has been fixed, what remains wrong, and what has been done wrong in this term. That’s not criticism, it’s the reality that no government is perfect. In the essence of any democracy, massive success is a very low passing grade of 50% of those who choose to speak, of those even willing to express an opinion. So, if only 49% of a populace want to tar and feather you, you’re exceptional.

There’s no time like the present to ask questions of potential candidates, but at the least we should be seriously planning the questions we wish to ask of candidates who may run. If we prepare by understandings how we intend to judge a good candidate from a less good candidate maybe we’ll make fewer mistakes and get better people.

Feel free to list them as comments on this blog, any candidate who doesn’t read this and other blogs won’t help much. What are your major concerns, what can you live with, what can’t you live without, what do you see as Hudson’s future? Are your platform and concerns balanced against the possible withing municipal law and the good of all citizens?

If you don’t think Hudson needs change and like it just the way it is, frankly go stick your head back in the sand, because without significant changes we’re all going to be getting our asses kicked badly for a long time to come.

One person can’t change Hudson. Six Councillors and a Mayor can’t change Hudson. The primary responsibility of democracy shares the burden of change with all electors equally. To be successful that demands interest and involvement that generates knowledge among the majority so that they may understand the sacrifices and benefits of any proposal on a community wide basis.

Let’s prepare and welcome the discussion with measured caution and serious questions that stop us staring at the past assigning blame and start us looking towards a brighter and happy future for all in Hudson.

 

 

 

 

Most important point you need to accept: There will be significant new development in Hudson. If you can’t accept that, I can’t help you and won’t argue with you, because you’re one of the Ostriches I referred to in another blog post, and you just haven’t been paying attention as our expenses have tripled, our population hasn’t changed and our infrastructure crumbles while we defer debt repayment.

We’re so far past the point of being able to just cut expenses to not develop that the only thing we really need to discuss is how we develop to build a better Hudson if we can save Hudson. And we’re horribly out of sync with the MRC and MMC densification mandates, we never liked those alphabet soup overseers much did we?

Pine Beach is water under the dam, it’s going to happen.We have non-negotiated ourselves against a cliff edge against far superior forces holding more cards. The developer will get it approved by a this Council or the next, because there’s too much at stake and we’re holding no aces and have no chips left.  Wasting breath arguing or trying to change it will lead nowhere, Council should seek reasonable accommodations and make it happen quickly.

We have a planning department. Sue me, but the facts say we big spend piles of money annually to plan, yet we don’t yet have a plan. That’s not a planning department problem, our planners are good enough to get raises, so let’s call it  a leadership and community visions problem through successive Councils and DGs. We’re years behind on drafting, submitting and getting a PMAD plan approved by the MRC, we ask for and miss extension after extension. PMAD is important to what Hudson looks like in the future, but we’re not having visible public consultations and discussion so one day we’ll have to rush one through.

We’ve got a desire to build on the Green and Sustainable cachets, but we don’t have a viable plan to get there. We’ve got a casual interest in hobby sized community sustainable farming but without a plan and some funding to make it enhance the revenue or value of Hudson it’ll be a distracting vanity illusion of progress leading nowhere.

I think we’re reacting rather than acting, being blown by the winds of many mouths, and I know we need to change the way we’re doing things to ever get results.

We need to stop waiting for the right solution to find us and get out and find the right partners to build what we want our future to look like. Start at the end we want to get to and work backwards:

As a community, let’s quickly spend some significant effort shopping for, finding and understanding some great development projects in other places that are best case examples of sustainability, accessibility, community building and quality of life. We have some great passionate citizens who understand planning and sustainability, if not the financial constraints or marketability. Merge some of those ideas with a bit of reality and we could find some winning ideas.

The potential solutions should span the range of downtown Hudson redevelopment to ruralish proximity to sustainable farming. The Scandinavians could be a great inspiration, as would the Dutch and other small communities in Canada. They need to be price competitive within their market, or have valid cost justification when transplanted to our market. We have worldly citizens who might provide insight into places they’ve seen in their travels.

Face it, if we don’t have a plan and can’t agree on what we want, developers and builders won’t waste their time here. So nail that down and once we know what we want, let’s seek some builders and developers interested in building a model small community of the future project as a toe-hold into the Canadian or Quebec market. This excludes 90% of the builders in Canada, but doesn’t preclude some interesting semi-custom modular home builders like Bonneville who might like to push their envelope of sustainability.

Let’s welcome and help any such builder find good land in Hudson, bust our asses to rezone it, and help them to seek Federal and Provincial funding for energy and water efficiency and sustainability.Wind, solar, community geothermal and every other showcase technology could have a place.

It’s really hard to move forwards when you’re doing things backwards. Let’s change how we’re approaching development, understand that we need development and try to do our best to shape that development into something we’d want to live in, a town of the future with a deep rooted past.

Warning, I have the keys to this blog and I’m not afraid to use them. I will aggressively delete any arguments or discussion that simply deny the need for Hudson to develop, no flat earthers needed here today.