Stewart Skinner

Fire destroyed the Watsons Home Hardware store here on Saturday night.

This coming weekend will see a few folks all across Ontario trek from home to a polling station to cast a ballot in the Ontario Liberal Party’s leadership contest. The party is using ranked ballots for the first time, allowing participants to rank their candidates one through four and has moved away

A couple years ago I read a profile of a Palestinian farmer published by Reuters. The farmer had just lost his harvest after members of the Israel Defense Force refused him access to his cropland. I have found myself thinking about that farmer a lot over the past couple weeks… were he or his childre

It was a beautiful sunny day in April 2022, the kind of day that gives you an immediate boost because it is so darn nice outside. I walked along a path winding through freshly-ploughed fields to the Kenyan village of Mwaita, singing along to Stan Rogers to try and wake up my tired brain. 

Soil is not an easy thing to understand. It is poorly understood and the vast majority of us walk…

Last week’s introductory instalment used Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk’s report along with publicly-available data from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) to show the land swaps were unnecessary to hit current housing targets, given there are 88,000 acres already in development plans

The most challenging aspect of Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk’s report last week that outlined a flawed process undertaken by Premier Doug Ford to facilitate the development of lands formerly protected in Ontario’s Greenbelt is the myriad of pathways that must be explored to fully comprehend just how

The dreamer is always thinking about what is next. What could be. What if we made that just a little bit better? Temper that with a stoic rationalist who, even with reams of information at their fingertips that indicates better is possible, decides to stick with what is working right now. There are

“If you don’t know where you came from, how will you know where to go?” asked the voice recording of my Grandma Skinner. I heard versions of that phrase often when spending time in the log cabin south of Mitchell that my paternal grandparents called home by the time I came on the scene.

Major League Baseball has blown through the midpoint of the season with games on pause this week, as stars head to Seattle for the All-Star Game. Figured I would risk a turf war with Mr. McNee over in sports and give a midseason report card on the bluebirds.

Anyone remember the publicity stunt a few years back where Loblaws said, “Hey everybody, we are engaged in a massive price fixing ring between Canada’s two biggest bakeries and the Canadian grocery oligopoly, here is a $25 gift card, please take it and give up your future right to take part in a cla

Last week, two travelling farmers found themselves in a bustling downtown complete with an inordinate number of shoe stores and two lovely ladies enjoying an afternoon tea. On the hunt for ice cream, Dad and I had pulled into Washington, Iowa and discovered what seemed to be the Iowan version of Lis

During my years as a graduate student at the University of Guelph, I was lucky enough to live in my Mum’s childhood home smack dab in the middle of Puslinch. Like many other small hamlets that dot the areas around Guelph, Puslinch was a creation of a bygone era when farmland was carved up willy-nill

A couple months ago I got sucked into HBO’s show Succession, a show currently nearing the end of its fourth and final season. The show, allegedly based on Rupert Murdoch (owner of a media empire), features the influential Fox News and the complex relationships he has with his children. Intergenerati

For many Christians, this past weekend marked the most holy of holidays – Easter. There are countries around the world that come to a screeching halt for Easter holidays, not unlike Christmas here in Canada. Easter is a big deal for many people because the crux of Christianity lies in the 72-hour pe