Editorials - Dec. 15, 2023

What a wonderful time of year it has been! The Christmas parade season has now wound down, with Blyth hosting the last parade in the area. Even though the weather hasn’t been very seasonal (for those who enjoy a white Christmas), it’s easy to get in the Christmas spirit with the excellent offering of community Santa Claus parades.

 

All of the local towns did an excellent job of organizing their parades and the communities really came out to support them! So much hard work went into the beautiful floats and Santa made his traditional appearance on a variety of creative transportations, but the real highlight of each parade was the smiles and friendly waves. It’s hard to be in a Grinch-y mood while all of your neighbours are shouting, “Merry Christmas” back and forth block after block. Sharing that experience with the little ones ensures that our towns will continue to be tight-knit, friendly communities for generations to come.

 

Thank you to the clubs, businesses, organizations and municipalities for ensuring that community spirit shines bright in our county, and thank you to all of the spectators who came out to cheer them on! Huron County knows how to parade! – DS

Since we know this fine newspaper is not above equating politicians with the titular Grinch Who Stole Christmas - see the great ‘Zinnch-cident’ of 2019 - the time has now come to ask ourselves how Huron-Bruce MP Ben Lobb became the “B-Lobb Who Stole Christmas”.

 

Ben clearly doesn’t hate Christmas, as those in his riding received his Christmas card from the House of Commons this week, and yet it was his Private Member’s Bill that threatened to steal Christmas away from the politicians who work so hard to keep Ottawa doing... whatever it does. Indeed, Federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre had suggested that his party put forward “thousands of amendments” in an effort to keep Parliament sitting through the holidays unless Justin Trudeau’s Liberals exempt some from their carbon tax. One of those groups are farmers, after Lobb’s much-lauded Bill C-234 proposed exemptions for several farm-related activities. The bill was passed in the House and then amended in the Senate.

 

Locally, few will argue with Lobb’s sentiment and his efforts to keep more money in the pockets of farmers, and now it’s taken centre stage as a bucket and spade Canada’s most- and least-popular politicians can fight over in Canada’s largest, most well-compensated sandbox. Ben Lobb season is upon us. It’s his world, we just live in it.

 

Whether you support it or not, a bill crafted by our very own MP has become one of the sticking points in the House of Commons. What role it will play in providing carbon tax relief and whether it will help make Poilievre the next Prime Minister remains to be seen, but, for now, Lobb’s bill has its day in the sun and we’re all watching. – SL 

Seaforth set the scene for an exciting and historic feat of engineering ingenuity on Friday, Dec. 8 as a skillful team methodically saw through the subtraction of a tractor in need of extraction from somewhere it shouldn’t have been - embedded within the walls of a building on the town’s main street. 

 

A full eight weeks had elapsed since the unexpected not-so-meet-cute collision between a minding-its-own-business building and an out-of-control farm vehicle resulted in a costly and destructive lesson in applied physics. Mass plus velocity equals smash, bang, boom. 

 

A building of any vintage would be challenged to recover from this kind of damage. It doesn’t take a Master’s Degree in architecture or engineering to understand that the future of this historic structure was in perilous danger of losing its noble struggle against gravity’s endless beckoning, unless urgent action was taken by a team of super geniuses and restoration experts. Anything less results in rubble, regret and no chance for redemption.

 

Curious and incredulous onlookers alike assembled amongst neighbours, friends and business owners for what was, with any luck, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness something remarkable. Anyone present will someday look back remembering that they were in Seaforth on the day a building was wrestled away from the clutches of history, triumphantly remaining historic for future generations to experience and enjoy. Or the day a building fell down due to a tractor. It could have gone either way.

After a meticulous couple of hours, under the unflinching gaze of hundreds of spectators and teeming media, the tractor was evicted from its temporary home and the building, a little worse for wear, waved its unwelcome tenant goodbye as relieved restoration workers tended to its wounds and boarded up its windows.

 

Congratulations to everyone involved with the successful operation - an inspiring collision of planning and execution. – SBS