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Saturday December 16, 2017

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday December 16, 2017

Exclusively rural Flamborough ward is coming apart

Farmers may feed cities but based on the Ontario Municipal Board’s ward boundary ruling it looks like cities politically devour farmers.

April 26, 2012

The most lamentable change in the board’s redrawing of Hamilton’s electoral map is the elimination of the current Ward 14 in west Flamborough, effectively shutting down the one voice around the city council horseshoe which speaks exclusively for rural residents.

Under the plan, the ward will be wiped out and partitioned between Ancaster and Dundas, reshaping the unique agricultural community into a mixed urban-rural precinct. In its stead a new ward will sprout on the Mountain.

Ward 14 comprises more than one-third of Hamilton’s total land mass and accounts for a big portion of the $1 billion plus economic activity which agriculture annually contributes to Hamilton’s economy.

June 24, 2016

For the past 11 years Coun. Robert Pasuta, a farmer himself, has been the voice of that community, which since amalgamation has become part of the flavour and fabric of the city.

Pasuta’s updates to council on the state of asparagus, corn, and soybean crops are a quirky but restorative reminder of how singularly blessed Hamilton is, how just a short distance from the choking traffic and concrete of the big city the elemental forces of nature still call the tune that people’s lives and livelihoods dance to.

The weather and soil will remain if the board decision stands. An independent political voice for farmers will not.

Word of the board decision knocked the wind out of Pasuta. He’s got his legs back under him now. If legal grounds permit, he firmly supports appealing the ruling. (Continued: Hamilton Spectator) 

 

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Thursday July 19, 2012

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator, Thursday July 19, 2012

Ontario voters warned of huge privacy breach

The personal information of up to 2.4 million Ontarians has been compromised by the disappearance of two memory sticks from an Elections Ontario office in Scarborough.

The information, which includes names, addresses, genders and dates of birth, was not supposed to be stored on unencrypted and non-password protected memory sticks by Elections Ontario staff, the province’s chief electoral officer, Greg Essensa, said Tuesday. The portable storages devices also should have been locked up when not in use. Yet, none of these security protocols were followed, he said as he apologized to the people of Ontario.

“I take this matter extremely seriously and I sincerely apologize to all Ontarians for the worry that this may cause them.”

The security breach, now under investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police, began, in one sense, with the results of the provincial election last fall. The instability of a minority government, according to an initial report on the breach by law firm Gowling Lafleur Henderson, meant that Elections Ontario had to be ready to conduct another election on short notice.

The agency’s headquarters in Scarborough, however, did not have enough room to store both the materials for a future election and the materials that had been returned from the election just conducted. That’s why the agency was forced to lease additional space, also in Scarborough — and it was at that temporary location where the security breach took place, on or near April 26 of this year, the report said (Source: Ottawa Citizen)