Comments on The Burd Report: Cobourg 4, OPP 3

This is a warning be civil or your comment will ne...

2008-06-18T12:15:00.000-04:00

This is a warning be civil or your comment will never see the light of day!

Takes one to know one Wally.

2008-06-18T09:16:00.000-04:00

Takes one to know one Wally.

Because George Bush Sr decided not to march north ...

2008-06-17T20:46:00.000-04:00

Because George Bush Sr decided not to march north once Kuwait was "liberated" to oust Iraq's tyrant, Saddam Hussein implemented a failed plan to MURDER the president of the USA.

To refer to that as "dissing" is reflective of a peurile mind.

I cannot agree with you more especially the last c...

2008-06-17T19:18:00.000-04:00

I cannot agree with you more especially the last comment about the perceived dissing of the Mayor. What really galled Delanty was the money and prestige being given to Gary Clement. After all who was he to be the highest paid person in the Town of Cobourg, and Clement wasn't even a Rotary Club member!

Cobourg politicians who want to get rid of the Cob...

2008-06-17T17:29:00.000-04:00

Cobourg politicians who want to get rid of the Cobourg police are portraying the current debate as being about saving money. People who want to keep the Cobourg police see it as an issue of quality of service.

There are problems with the money saving approach. Firstly the majority of the population who attend meetings and vote don’t want it cheaper. They believe that the relatively crime free nature of Cobourg may be due to having a locally based police force who know most things that are going on, and will go the extra mile to catch culprits. The idea that the police ever catch anybody is completely alien to people who have lived in big cities, and it takes some getting used to. So when Councillor MacDonald says our police are worth an extra $4 a day many people agree with him, and applaud him for coming out with such a succinct concept.

On the cost saving front Councillor Frost tries to save us money, but in this particular case we don’t want our money saved, we want decent policing. When the Mayor says a change to the OPP will save us money we begin to see some hidden agendas that are not really hidden any more. At the council meeting the Mayor said he needs to keep the savings to pay for a new community centre, but nobody has really agreed to a new centre, let alone designed one. The Mayor doesn’t see the savings actually going back to residents in the form of reduced taxes. Perhaps the Deputy Mayor and the Mayor have never talked about this, because clearly they are singing from different song sheets.

It is not even clear that saving money is really an objective. Rather like the Iraq war not being about WMDs but really about Sadam dissing Bush’s daddy. In the Cobourg case it appears that the Mayor feels he has been dissed by the Cobourg police and this is payback time.

I can't believe MacDonald actually said something ...

2008-06-17T10:16:00.000-04:00

I can't believe MacDonald actually said something I liked! His statement that he didn't think residents would want to lose their local police force just to save $4 a day shows an understanding I didn't think he had!

But where is Stan Frost at, especially given the chair of the PSB, Bryan Baxter, supports keeping the local force?

Overall it's encouraging that our own miserable Council did the right thing for once!