Dear editor:

Congrats again. The Lake Report crew puts out a great paper and it succeeds at a time when people are leaving print media.

The issued published Oct. 13, including your Election 2022 Special Edition, is a perfect example of everything you guys get right.

My late wife and I loved living in this community and I still do, for over 16 years now, and my memories go back to the two summers (aged 15 and 16) I spent on a farm on Firelane 5 as a farmhand making 60 cents an hour.

Clearly this whole region is a paradise in so many ways and it will always attract more people.

That’s a given.

I don’t think that can be stopped. Perhaps it shouldn’t. But it does need to be “managed.”

So that means the coverage you give to the need for thinking deeply about what direction NOTL should go is crucial.

My belief is that keeping the past alive is also crucial to maintaining the very, very special qualities of Niagara-on-the-Lake.

How to do this in practice is of course the question and many seek to address this in their own way, from their own perspective.

That is normal and human.

What I fear greatly, is that economic interests will overcome quality of life and reflection, and the aura of the past that pervades our community.

That aura makes it one of the most historic places in Canada, ranking with the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City and with l’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.

Life must not be a constant search for “more money” – not by people, not by municipalities.

It should be a search for enhancing the quality of all our lives and a celebration of those who came before, whose traces we should observe and honour and live among in harmony.

Kaspar Pold
NOTL