Before Tuesday the 5th, she was apprehensive. After Tuesday, my neighbour down the street was wasting no time. 

“Sold my unit,” she told me this week, admitting her loss would be a hundred grand. Not in the Greater Toronto Area’s deeply troubled condo market, but on Florida’s coast. 

“I‘m never going back there again,” she said. “Not now with Trump. This is my home. Thank God.”

By the way, the couple putting a spiffy new cedar roof on their place near the golf course have been coming here from Pittsburgh for 30 years. “The next step now,” she told me, “is citizenship.”

Are they right to freak out and abandon the land of the Orange Man? Or is this just Trump Derangement Syndrome in full view?

Will the tentacles of MAGA reach into NOTL, which is so dependent on Americans and their dollars?

How much will Canada’s economy and your RRSP be whacked by the 47th president? Or, can we just look across the Niagara and stay smug?

Dunno yet. The guy can do nothing until January. This column will give you fair warning when that wall looms.

Speaking of walls, some folks are thinking they’ve hit a few with local politics. “I hope your last column will be read by at least someone on council,” Bill Garriock tells me, “Likely not, but there is always hope.”

Bill and others, like Brian Crow, have been warning about the financialization of NOTL — the swelling business of turning houses into mini-motels under the town’s generous B&B policy.

“Rather than getting better, the cottage short-term rental situation has expanded and become even more commercialized,” he says.

He points out that among registered short-term rentals there are 1,000 bedrooms given over to tourists instead of families who might like to own or rent.

“If fewer families are living here and it is tourists that are now occupying the thousand bedrooms, one can understand why the community is no longer able to support a hospital or local schools.”

And, as detailed here last week (“The Turner Report: The CRA, the B&Bs and thee“), there are another 500 or so local listings on Airbnb that don’t appear to be registered. Or legal.

So, the financialization of this place continues. And the old abandoned school will soon rise as a 129-suite hotel and conference centre. Sheesh. Who needs kids, anyway?

But wait. Let’s finish with a good news wall story.

Gerry Kowalchuk got his vanity book back from the printers a few days ago. Grandly dubbed the Queen-Mississauga Gateway Project, it’s a forever thing for grandchildren from NOTL’s own monument man.

I asked him why a private citizen would fork over $250,000 to build a stone wall going nowhere at the main Old Town intersection.

“I just stopped there at the sign one day,” he says, “I looked at this property here. That’s it, I said. It just came to me, and I never looked back after that.”

It took four years. Lots of political diddling. Design work. Bureaucracy. Then, being on-site almost every day as the dry-stone craftsman did his thing.

Now, the wall defines the heritage district and looks like it existed forever. “I’m told it may last 500 years,” he says.

Yabbut, why?

“I just love this place,” he says, “for the same reasons you do.” 

And it’s legacy, of course. The vanity book. The stones. The permanent marker of having been here.

Trump may have his wall. Gerry has his. One is designed to keep people out. The other says come on in, have a gelato, buy a $600 hat, take a $90 carriage ride, sleep in a quaint, possibly illegal B&B and leave your credit card on file.

It ain’t perfect here. But it’s on the right side of the river.

Garth Turner is a NOTL resident, journalist, author, wealth manager and former federal MP and minister.