- by John Tamming

SHALLOW LAKE UNITED CHURCH: October 12, 2020 7 P.M.

The all-candidates meeting is held in that most Canadian of public spaces, the local United Church basement. There are no snacks, no coffee. All is business. Candidates have set up their little tables. Later they will each treat us to two minute speeches. But for now, the crowd is free range and we are at liberty to walk up to their table and button hole each of them with whatever issue we might have in mind.

At one end of the room, we behold the water hungry delegation from Pottawatomi Village. They are led by their own Saint John the Evangelist. His disciples are seven or eight in number and follow closely behind him. He carries a worn parchment in his hand, a single typed question. He approaches each table one by one and hands this same script to each candidate. The script beseeches the would-be councilor or mayor to tell the gathered flock precisely what he or she would do to deliver pure and living water unto them. They hear out the various answers – beg Owen Sound for a connection, pay a million each for East Linton water or wait for the escarpment to rise once again and for the village to be hurled into the river. They disagree with the answer, sadly shake their heads and shuffle on to the next table. They have sought but have not found. Their reward, they are starting to conclude, may not be of this earth. Or it may be bestowed only after they retain counsel, evoke memories of Walkerton and litigate the hell out of the municipality.

Isaac presides over another table. He attended Westhill with my son and traces his Keppel heritage back six generations. The emergency nurse actually lives on the acreage settled by the very first Shouldice. He nails his two minute speech and reminds us what his granddad told him – if you take care of the earth it will take care of you. Corny maybe, but real. Welcome to Georgian Bluffs, as authentic a corner of this province as you will find.

Candidate Ryan introduces me to one Mr. McComb, who I am told was reeve since Larry Miller was in diapers. Beside him is his indefatigable wife, Marilyn, recently acclaimed for yet another term as public school trustee. It is an avocation she will doubtless continue to pursue on the other side of the pearly gates. Ryan, a protection worker with Children’s Aid, tells me the story of when a somber and stoic Mayor McComb told an energetic and youthful Dwight Burley not to interrupt him. Dwight’s stunned reaction was apparently a moment for the ages.

I meet Bonita, co-proprietor of the United Church of Shallow Lake (together with God) who tells me she led a beer can recycling program to fund the painting of the steeple. I cannot fathom my Dutch reformed church cashing in Heineken empties for the glory of the Lord but I admire the audacity and silently mumble God bless the Uniteds.

Talk everywhere is of short-term rentals and the money hungry predators who run them. There is also much chatter about the Biodigester, this steel monstrosity of a thing which none of us have ever actually seen but which we are told sits in a local field somewhere beside some lagoon. It sounds a bit like it’s an ecological zombie. No one can manage to feed enough into it yet no one can muster the will to put its out of its fiscal misery. As with the village water, all candidates bravely pledge to deal with this problem “once and for all” and to “find a solution that works”.

This is our little polis in action. At times I ponder that the only thing which appears to bind together the disparate and strung out communities of Kilsyth, Springmount, Oxenden and old Sarawak is an intense desire never to be annexed by the overtaxed metropolis to the east and south. It is time to elect another slate of those who would continue the Resistance.

These are our teachers, our nurses, our real estate agents, our beef farmers. These are some of our best (and perhaps some of our more mediocre) stepping up and offering themselves up for four years for the good of our land and of our people.

This is the year my father-in-law passed, a former Reeve of Derby. I marvel at how many such gatherings Al Bye attended, the rushed conversations he held, the hands he shook, the guarded opinions he expressed and the garrulous citizens he avoided. And in the hurley burley, I suspect that more than once he grinned widely, pushed his chair back and took sheer delight in these, the fascinating politics of our tiny commonwealth.

After all, this is local democracy at work – in all of its understated and enduring beauty. 

photo by David Galway