Incredibly, we find ourselves at the start of yet another new year. It seems unreal, not just because our perception of time was permanently altered by the Covid years, but also owing to this Phony Winter. Our new columnist James Culic may have gotten his green Christmas, but I think many of us were holding out hope for the more seasonal white stuff, maybe even getting in some snowblower action. (Incidentally, while we loved our years living in North Vancouver’s temperate climate, if you want to know what winters are like there, take last week’s gloomy overcast and multiply it by four months.)
In recent days we’ve presented year-end commentaries from CAO David Cribbs, Regional Councillor Diana Huson, MPP Sam Oosterhoff, and Pelham Town Councillors Wink, Hildebrandt, Niznik, and Olson. Councillor Ker sent his regrets, saying that he was too busy to get something written by the end of the year. Councillor Brian Eckhardt did not respond to repeated invitations to contribute.
Today’s we hear from the man behind the wheel himself, Mayor Marvin Junkin, whose 2023 was marked both by political achievement and personal loss, and around whom the community rallied with empathy for the latter.
As for us worker bees at PelhamToday, council reporter and billiards sharpshooter John Chick checked in last week, and today our longtime news writer Don Rickers delivers some unwelcome but not unexpected news—confirming that in a few days he is departing these shores, not just Pelham, but also Ontario and Canada, and moving to Europe to start a new chapter with his Belgian-born spouse, Anne. We’re going to miss the big guy.
It seems like just last year that Don came on board at what was then the Voice of Pelham, mostly at the recommendation of a former colleague of his at Ridley College, who knew that Don had retired and was at somewhat loose ends. Don actually started with us in 2018, which even looking at those numerals still seems recent, but that’s six years, two would-be North American coups, a new King, and a global pandemic ago. Apparently time flies whether you’re having fun or not.
Don was the second of two excellent, non-academically-trained writers—who generally make the best reporters—with whom I’ve been lucky enough to work in Pelham, first at the Voice, now at PelhamToday. (Journalism programs teach cautious stenography, not investigative ingenuity, and demand obedience to arbitrary and often outdated rules of style. Civilians are not so shackled.)
In Don’s case, being a Niagara native and a longtime resident, he had a wealth of contacts and knowledge about the region. He’s also a big man with a big personality—a rarity among us stereotypical scribbler wallflowers, who prefer to watch quietly from the sidelines. When Don is in a room you know it. Belgians, you’re gonna need bigger waffles!
Happy Birthday to us
PelhamToday turns one year old this month, a partial truth if ever there was. We’re built, of course, on 25 previous years of talent, knowledge, and spirit derived from the Voice of Pelham, the weekly newspaper founded in 1997 by 50 community-minded residents who saw a need and filled it.
Yet even by the late ‘90s it was clear that the internet would prove a mighty opponent to the news industry status quo. It may be hard to remember now, but by then consumer online services had already been around for well over a decade. I got my first personal computer in 1979 and a CompuServe account in 1983, that early provider of email and chat "channels." The digital writing has been on the wall now for at least a generation, and it has always spelled the end of words distributed on pulped wood.
The miracle was that the Voice held out for as long as we did in the face of increasing expenses and declining revenue. In the wake of last summer’s demise of Niagara This Week —one of 70 Ontario weekly papers shut down at the same time—insiders are also forecasting the end of Niagara’s daily print editions by 2025. Some even see the Toronto Star and Globe & Mail going online-only in the near future. And as you may have seen, Quebec’s Le Soleil published its last print edition yesterday after a 127-year run.
Thankfully, Ontario-based Village Media, which runs PelhamToday as part of its network of owned and affiliated news sites, is a great employer, an anomaly in this industry, and is on solid financial footing. I’m told that PelhamToday, in fact, has the highest “open rate” of any Village site—that is, the percentage of readers who actually open their daily afternoon email from us, listing that day’s stories. I’m not surprised. The Voice’s dedicated readers have by and large become PelhamToday’s dedicated readers. Despite some initial grumbling about the loss of print, our reader demographics are virtually unchanged from the Voice days. (What? You're not signed up yet for our free afternoon headline email? New Year's resolve to do it now!)
A fresh face comes aboard
With Don Rickers’ departure and the start of our second year comes the arrival of new staff writer Sarah Ferguson, new to PelhamToday but not new to Niagara news. You may recognize her byline from the decade-plus she has spent reporting from Ft. Erie to NOTL, including in central Niagara and Pelham. Sarah is also the exception that proves my rule about journalism training—owing to that decade in the trenches she’s actually great at her job despite the professional degree, and brings to it some very welcome enthusiasm. Sarah will introduce herself to you tomorrow, her first day aboard.
The fibre is great but the optics not so much
Remember how half the town’s streets were torn up last spring and summer? And then the other half—first by Cogeco, then by Bell—as contractors installed fibre optic cable? (It is literally what it sounds like, by the way—it’s cable that carries light pulses, currently the fastest means to distribute data services over distance.) For nearly a decade and a half we’ve waited for decent internet service to arrive in Niagara. By comparison, some 20 years ago in Indonesia, a developing country, we had faster internet there than we’ve ever had in Pelham.
This may come as a surprise, and you’ll be forgiven for not realizing it, but fibre optic is very likely now available at your address too. Why the apparent hush-hush? Because Bell, for one, seems curiously uninterested in telling you.
Back in the summer, as cable-diggers swarmed boulevards and pulled up driveway pavers, we received flyers from both Cogeco and Bell promising that we’d hear from them again when service was connected and ready to speedily flash at our house, all blinkety-blink-like. That notice has yet to arrive.
We discovered that fibre was now live in our neighbourhood only when we ran into a Bell technician a week or so ago around the corner, pulling a cable across a lawn. “Sure,” he said, “Just call to order it.”
Well, guess what.
It turns out that entry-level fibre service is only half the cost of DSL service—which if you are a Bell customer is likely what you currently have. But even the lowest-speed fibre service is hugely, hugely faster than “fast” DSL. For most home users it will be more than enough speed—faster, in fact, than any but the newest laptops and other devices can handle over WiFi anyway.
So why hasn’t Bell let you know it’s available?
Remember that part a second ago about fibre costing only half as much as DSL? Could this possibly, maybe, motivate what we might generously describe as slow notification to us customers that we can save a crap-ton of cash, and get better service at the same time? One certainly wonders, doesn’t one. The optics, as it were, aren’t good.
So consider yourself advised. If your current provider hasn’t told you yet, fibre is most likely already available to you, and probably has been for weeks. On the plus side, once we ordered it, installation was next to immediate, with a tech dispatched to the house within 48 hours, and the new modem/router provided free (and it’s huge, four times the size of the old router). The speed so far is extraordinary. Images or zipped files that previously took minutes to upload are gone practically before we lift our fingers from the trackpad. Netflix and other video streaming is instantaneous.
Finally, modern tech arrives in Pelham. It’s a great way to start the new year—and new century, 24 years belatedly!
Next time, a toaster saga update. See you then.
