The Association of Municipalities of Ontario’s (AMO) ‘healthy democracy project’ was launched in 2022; after several trends raised concerns about the strength of local democracy.

These trends were evident in Haliburton County, with fewer candidates running for election or re-election, and a corresponding increase in acclamations. Voter turnout was also lower.

AMO’s Petra Wolfbeiss and Henry Khamonde are coming to Minden Hills May 28 to talk about how people can create positive change in the community; discover ways to engage effectively with local municipal governance, and learn how many voices lead to meaningful change.

Wolfbeiss is the director, membership centre for AMO. The told The Highlander, “it’s really important the voices and experience of people across communities are heard and represented on local councils.”

She added AMO created the project to tackle two key objectives: increasing the diversity of council and candidates, and boosting voter turn out.

“We can move these forward by improving people’s understanding of municipal government and the impact is has on our daily lives,” she said.

AMO has developed a toolkit to help elected officials engage with local schools and share the importance of getting involved in community from a young age. “We know that cultivating future leaders also means listening to youth. Families can do their part simply through conversations at the dinner table with younger people,” the AMO representative said.

She added municipal government is closest to the people. “If you look out your window, almost everything you see is impacted by your local municipal council. Roads, trees, parks, housing, the water you drink, all of the planning decisions.”

She encouraged people to learn about municipal government, and understand what councils plan to do and what it means to their community.

“Municipalities are constantly inviting people to provide input and they work hard to provide this information where people will see it. We need to do our part. Connect with your local government, whether it’s signing up for newsletters, following on social media, or meeting with your councillor. If there is a topic you care about, join community groups that share your interest.”

With municipal elections slated for October 2026, Wolfbeiss encourages people to find out about their local candidates. “If they come to your door, have a conversation about what you care about.” She added municipal websites often have information about the local election.

“From then on, it’s mostly about paying attention. Does council need your support to get an important housing project completed? Do they need your help in putting on a great local event?

“It’s also really important to provide input that is constructive and respectful. It’s ok to disagree – because different opinions can result in stronger decisionmaking. But we have to put civility back into civil discourse. Remind yourself that at the end of the day, everyone just wants the best outcome for the community.

“So those are some of the key things: build your understanding, get involved, and respect difference.”

Wolfbeiss stressed that diverse opinions and diverse councils make for competent councils. “People with different life experiences bring unique insights to the conversation. It helps councils to understand the impact of their decisions on different people across the community. They can make better, more informed decisions. Everyone in a community matters. And this needs to be understood and reflected in discussions and decisions at council.”

Register by May 23

The event is hosted by the Township of Minden Hills, and supported by Aging Together as Community, the Haliburton Highlands Healthy Democracy Project/Haliburton County Community Cooperative and Telling Our Stories Speakers Series.

Minden Hills Coun. Pam Sayne said the event is “to encourage people to run, to vote; and to get engaged with our community. I think this is going to be a very important activity.”

Bonnie Roe of ATAC said, “at our strategic planning meeting, we discussed our need to engage with the municipalities and County on healthy aging as a whole, about what we do, garner their support, and focus on community action. I also asked Coun. Sayne to speak at our LGBTQ+ luncheon on diversity, equity and inclusion, or did she have any connections at OMA? We decided the topic was worthy of a larger meeting and they had this ‘health democracy project’.

Engaging in democracy is May 28, 6-8 p.m. at the Minden Community Centre, 55 Parkside Dr., Minden. Light refreshments will be provided. Register by May 23 at Eventbrite or agingtogetherhc@gmail.com

The Haliburton Kawartha Northumberland Peterborough health unit (HKNP) is seeking provincial money to advance an “innovative” youth substance use prevention program that it recently launched in Peterborough and plans to expand to Haliburton County.

Dr. Thomas Piggott, HKNP medical officer of health, said the initiative is centred on the Icelandic Prevention Model (IPM), which challenges people who have, work, or interact with kids daily to find different ways of engaging and educating on key issues.

Peterborough Public Health (PPH) began investigating IPM in 2019, before it merged with the Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge district health unit (HKPR). Work was paused through the pandemic but picked up again in 2023. A launch event was held in Peterborough April 29.

Piggott feels the program is an “absolute need” rather than “nice-to-have,” given concerning trends in youth behaviour in Peterborough in recent years. The city has the highest rate in Ontario for Cannabisrelated emergency department visits and ranks sixth for self-reported underage drinking. Tobacco use among students in grades 7 to 12 is also above the provincial average.

“If we can find new ways to wrap our communities’ arms around children and really support them, we can send kids on a different trajectory than what we’re seeing for a lot of people now,” Piggott said.

The program is being led locally by health unit staffers Lora Keitel and Martha Faulkner, with about a dozen organizations actively coordinating, including the John Howard Society, United Way, the YMCA, the OPP, and Canadian Mental Health Association.

The team is also working with Planet Youth, an Icelandic-based firm that helps with start-up.

Planet Youth advocates for a 10-step approach. The first phase is all planning, focusing on identifying partners, finding funding sources, and pre-data collection. Faulker said staff has been working on that since last fall and will soon by ready to move onto community participation and engagement.

“We know adolescence is a critical stage in healthy development. Youth are more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors, and experiment with substances for a variety of reasons – social inclusion and belonging, poor mental health, challenges coping with life stress, and just wanting to enjoy something,” Keitel said, noting most of the supports currently in place for struggling youth is reactive, rather than preventative.

“We’re never going to treat our way out of the mental health and substance use crisis we’re in. We need to realign our focus and work to incorporate harm reduction for us to make impactful change in our communities,” she added.

The health unit has identified two secondary schools it will work with initially – Holy Cross and Kenner in Peterborough. Keitel said it’s important youth learn to adopt healthy behaviours in the four areas they spend most of their time – at school, socializing with friends, at home with family, and leisure time.

Faulkner noted there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, with staff to tailor its efforts to individual people and larger situations on a case-by-case basis.

She attended a Planet Youth conference in Iceland in March, where she spoke to people from communities in the U.S., Spain, Romania and South Africa who have adopted IPM.

“All of them have seen a decrease in substance use harms and an increase in overall wellbeing,” Faulkner said.

Faulkner said there will be regular check-ins with parents and youth, as well as community surveys to help form the program’s future direction. She told the HKNP board during a recent meeting there is an intent to expand the program to Kawartha Lakes and Haliburton and Northumberland counties.

Piggott warned it’s not the kind of program to deliver immediate results.

“This work will take years to decades to see the real benefits of, because the challenges we’re seeing today have been decades in the making,” he said.

What started as a practical joke between two buddies on Esson Lake has morphed into a new tradition that Norm DeMelo and Billy McKenzie say will support worthy causes across Haliburton County.

The pair joined forces back in March for an impromptu ice out contest, inviting other lakefront residents to guess what day the last shard of ice dissolved into the water.

Initially, the competition was to be for bragging rights, until DeMelo upped the ante.

“Billy is a guy on our lake who is always posting on [social media] about smoking briskets and pulled porks – so I volunteered him, saying Billy can cook something for the winner,” DeMelo said.

That piqued people’s interest, with more than 40 cottagers participating. Each of them donated at least $10 per guess, raising $500, with the funds to be donated to Central Food Network in Highlands East.

DeMelo said his wife, Allison, volunteers at the Wilberforce food bank and pitched doing something to help the organization in its time of need.

CFN’s executive director, Tina Jackson, recently told The Highlander that her operation is recording approximately 100 extra monthly visits now compared to prepandemic levels. Last year, CFN saw 4,128 visits to its food banks in Wilberforce and Cardiff, averaging 343 stops per month.

“Alison knows all about the demand and how demand has increased so much over the past couple of years,” DeMelo said. “She did her own swim marathon last year, where she asked people to donate and she’d add some distance to her swim. She did 10 kilometres open water swimming – people donated canned goods and other food. We were able to donate two big boxes of food last summer.”

McKenzie said he’s not one to shy away from a challenge, so, after being put on the spot by DeMelo, gladly obliged. He already has an action plan for a 20-pound brisket he’ll cook for the contest’s winner, Chrissy Mackintosh, who was one of three people to guess April 22.

“It will take about 17 hours. It will be seasoned with Billy’s secret rub, AKA ‘Billy’s Love’ and it will be smoked at 225 degrees Fahrenheit over charcoal and applewood,” said Sara Presson, McKenzie’s partner.

DeMelo has agreed to kick in a case of beer, while Mackintosh has invited the two men and their families to enjoy the brisket with them when it’s cooked this summer.

McKenzie, a cottager on the lake who lives full-time in Oshawa, said the contest has helped bring the Esson Lake community closer together. He’s never met DeMelo or Mackintosh in-person but is excited about forming new connections.

Presson said she hopes this will be the first year of many for the ice out competition.

“We think it would be a great tradition – it doesn’t take much time or energy, and it helps our community,” she said.

DeMelo added, “it’s just something fun to get people talking and excited about summer. It’s also about bringing awareness to CFN, our food banks, and the great work they do.”

About this time every spring, Larry Tompkins takes his boat onto Twelve Mile Lake and tests the water; for things such as temperature and dissolved oxygen.

It’s a volunteer gig using equipment purchased by Boshkung, Mountain and Twelve Mile Lake associations in 2019.

He’ll be back on the lake in the fall to take another set of 2025 measurements.

Demonstrating from his pontoon boat, Tompkins explains, “certain fish, primarily lake trout, can only survive at a certain oxygen level. It also gives you an idea of how much bacteria and algae is in your lake because algae eat the oxygen.”

He records his findings with pencil on paper and sends them to the Dorset Environmental Science Centre, as well as U-Links, which partners with 10 lake associations to monitor 24 lakes.

Tompkins is part of the province’s Lake Partner Program (LPP), which the Coalition of Haliburton Property Owners’ Associations (CHA), and the Federation of Ontario Cottagers’ Associations (FOCA) say could be at risk.

FOCA says the five-year agreement for the LPP ended in March, “amid turmoil due to a snap provincial election and the appointing of a new minister of environment, conservation and parks.

“Despite repeated reassurances that a new agreement was on its way to FOCA, we have now reached a critical point in the sampling annual cycle, and the 2025 data is at risk unless an agreement with MECP is confirmed now,” FOCA added.

Continuous, long-term data key for scientists

Gary Wheeler, a spokesman for Environment, Conservation and Parks told The Highlander May 12, “the program has not been cancelled and we intend to work with our partners to implement renewed agreements for the 2025 season.”

Jim Prince is with the U-Links program. He said he does not think the LPP will be cancelled, but that this is a preemptive strike by FOCA, similar to one done five years ago, to ensure the program continues. “The value for the cost is enormous and it gives the province the opportunity to say they’re doing something good about the environment.”

FOCA said, “the LPP provides immense value to the public and to Ontario as a whole. It is one of the largest long-term databases on water quality for freshwater lakes … essential for research and analysis conducted by universities, government, community groups, and scientists.”

The water sampling is done by 629 FOCA lake steward volunteers who monitored 546 lakes at 917 sites across the province in 2024. FOCA added although the sampling is done by volunteers, the LPP is not possible without the ministry’s involvement to conduct the lab analysis of the samples, and through financial support of a FOCA employee in Dorset who manages the hundreds of volunteers and coordinates requests for information and outreach about the program.

‘It’s a critical program’

Chair of the CHA, Paul MacInnes said he had sent emails to the MECP and MNR, as “most of the organized lakes in Haliburton County, as with everywhere in Ontario, use the Lake Partner Program, and have been using it for 15-plus years.”

MacInnes said consistency is key. “You need one lab doing all the lakes, 400 and some odd that are in the program in Ontario. It’s a critical program, and it can’t be done any other way.”

He added the timing could not be worse, as “you’re getting very close to the time where the test kits are sent out for the summer.”

He would hate to see the data disrupted, saying scientists need continuous long-term records. “That gives the scientists what they need, and we need those scientists to be coming up with some solutions.”

He said the CHA correspondence to government “focuses on the impact that unhealthy lakes would have on our economy in Muskoka, Haliburton, Kawartha Lakes etc. Our economies are based on healthy lakes.”

Back on Twelve Mile Lake, and Tompkins said he will still test the water this spring and fall, and send the results to U-Links and whomever else wants it.

“It’s still terribly important because without the data – being in business all my years – if you can’t track it, you can’t control it. Basically, it’s the same principle here. If we’re not tracking it, we can’t control it.

“It’s going to affect us as lakefront property owners. You’re sitting here looking at that beautiful lake, and you can’t use it. How frustrating is that going to be? And nobody is going to want to own something that they can’t use.”