For the past few weeks there has been a furor in Haliburton County over the proposed division of the County into two different tourism regions. You don’t need to know who’s going with who to know that dividing a county is a bad idea. Tourism businesses, The County and special interest organizations have spent years promoting Haliburton County as a tourism destination. Some would say that all this effort is just now starting to mature. When the Ontario Government proposed taking a sword to the county and splitting it into different, larger tourism regions it was not well received.
There was some suggestion that our economic development department didn’t represent us well enough and that our resistance to the split was not loud and clear. The issue caused the start of a letter writing campaign and was the subject of a number of press articles. The fear through all this was that Queen’s Park wouldn’t pay attention to the voices of the people.
Enter Rick Johnson, our MPP. Rick has been our representative for a year. It is the custom for the Premier to call the representative and congratulate him/her on their first year in office. The Premier asked Rick, and I paraphrase, “how’s tricks in your riding”. Rick, the good representative that he is, told the Premier that people were good n riled over the issue of slicing the county. Hocus Pocus. The premier said he would look into the issue!!!
I know this doesn’t mean that we’re automatically going to win the day, but just think how fortunate we were that Mr. Johnston got an “anniversary call” and the issue got to le grand fromage. On our own we would never have got that kind of attention.
Rick …. Happy Anniversary. And Good Luck to us!!
Mike Jaycock 