Cornwall Ontario – When you talk to people in Cornwall many are stunned to realize how much cash the City of gives to fund Aultsville Theatre and how little the community gets for its dollars, especially during a budget time that just had council pass a motion to keep the tax increase this year to an astounding 4% with the Mayor and councilors Elaine MacDonald, her pet monkey, Councilor Carilyne Hebert, and “Flipper” Bernadette Clement voting against the cap.
The total reek of corruption again is shown by this theater that boycotts the largest newspaper in its market.
CFN doesn’t get press releases, invites, or offers to sponsor as we had in the past where the event had ads for as little as $100 and a few passes.
With 15,345,991 human page views in 2017 does that make anysense?
But the City Hall led conspiratorial boycott’s tentacles slither into charities and not for profits; many of whom have sanctioned directors and board members. For example Aultsville has former Councilor Syd Gardiner on its board who publicly stated that this newspaper only endorsed candidates that bought advertising which was easily proven to be false by the fact that we in fact did endorse candidates that hadn’t bought ads from us and didn’t endorse a few who did. Likewise St. Lawrence College also boycotts this newspaper, perhaps in fear of losing its stipend from the city if it did? Also, OPG, another government entity also boycotts this newspaper going back to the weirdness that was Linda Halliday and the infamous murdering of beavers in our Nature Park.
Looking at the Aultsville image at the top we see that ED poobah Bob Peters essentially double dipped coughing up city dosh to sponsor the event not once, but twice, (Choose Cornwall and Cornwall Tourism – both under his auspices) and this is in addition to the utterly ridiculous amount of money given to keep the group afloat even though it essentially is the auditorium of St. Lawrence College and is shackled by the college Union agreements which make the facility non competitive for example with the Brockville Arts Centre.
With water mains breaking in record numbers needing costly emergency repairs, metric tons of cash spent on out of town lawyers to cover scandals including this year’s topless debacle, to the cost to the community by a city actually hurting local business by waging a fiscal war against its largest newspaper isn’t it time this election to follow the steps of Brampton and clean out the corrupt and or utterly incompetent city managers?
Update
CFN was contacted by former sponsors that were not even asked to sponsor the event this year.
Only reinforces my decision to move out of Cornwall.
I agree in principle with the article. But most municipalities have a performing arts venue under their control, so this is not new. Ottawa has at least two, Centrepointe and Shenkman’s.
It would appear that even the “clique” doesn’t support this endeavour ? Why have this event in such an expensive venue ? Perhaps, a local Hotel’s reception rooms ? It would be better optics for the Porsche crowd ? What are the “real” dollars attached to this event ? With the “hocus-pocus” financial transparency of the City , that question will never be answered, at least truthfully !