I’d overlooked it for years. I think it was back 2006 when a number of us organized a weekend to celebrate the township’s anniversary. We were artists, shop owners, civic workers and town boosters volunteering our time. Leading up to the event, we’d looked for a place to meet. That’s when financial specialist Brian Evans offered us a room at his Toronto Street office. I stepped into his board room for that first meeting and noticed a collage of photographs of a turn-of-the-century building framed on the wall. I’d never seen that Edwardian-era building before.
“What and where was that?” I asked.
“Don’t you know?” someone responded. “That was our original post office.” And when I asked where, they all said right where the new post office is today. “They knocked down the old one and threw up that new one.”
There’s not a day goes by when I visit my post box in the “new” post office in town, that I don’t imagine what still having that extraordinary piece of history on Brock Street would mean to our town. Its original two-story stone structure (cornerstone laid by Col. Sam Sharpe in 1914).
Its amazing clock tower (built once and then increased in height so the clock could be seen from farther away). Its storied halls (there was even a shooting range in the basement to help train members of the 116th Ontario County Battalion before going off to the Great War).
Where now? Demolished in an era when ridding ourselves of the old and saving money seemed more expedient than adapting and preserving the past, and when people who cared about such things as history, heritage and character did not speak up soon enough. And, not doubt, the cost of maintaining the old post office must have spurred the dire warnings of fiscal conservatives back then – “It’s cheaper to destroy it than maintain it.”
And the building was knocked down and replaced with its antiseptic modern descendant in 1969. What’s more, according to former museum curator Allan McGillivray, some saner heads attempted to preserve the bell tower and clock, but they too were demolished (just the bell and cornerstone are left as relics at the museum).
Why am I waxing nostalgic about an old brick post office? Well, yes, Canada Day (or as we used to call it Dominion Day) is next Monday and heritage means a lot to historians such as me. But in spite of what euphoria might swell our hearts come Monday, July 1, let me point out a few other potential tear-downs and fiscal casualties we might soon be facing, and wishing we’d reacted to, before it was too late.
Consider such unglamorous things as: the roads we drive on; the parks and arenas we relax and play in; the Cottage Hospital we rely on and cherish; the library services that we nearly lost before some stopped the Doug Ford administration from axing them; and, yes, even such unsexy aspects of township life as building culverts.
The creation, delivery and maintenance of these essentials have always been close-at-hand. Within our control. Why? Because they’ve always been designed, debated and decided upon by the elected officials closest to us. We’ve taken that as a given.
But what is given, we’ve learned particularly in the past year’s provincial Conservative musings, can just as just as quickly and quietly be taken away. Need I remind you of the Mike Harris’s so-called “Common Sense Revolution” and the equally disastrous “Magna Budget” introduced by his successor Ernie Eves?
In the guise of personal tax cuts, reduced welfare spending and downsizing of education and health workers’ jobs, the province also expropriated the right of municipalities to collect public and private education taxes and then dumped the entire social service portfolio into the laps of towns, regions and cities that had no means (or experience) to handle it.
How did Ontarians handle that? Eventually, citizens concerned with the loss of local control voted the common-sense revolution out.
Out, but not away forever. As safe as perhaps we might think our services and local autonomy are today, I fear it’s that complacency that the governing forces at Queen’s Park are counting on, in order to introduce yet more “for the people” innovation in the guise of fiscal responsibility. It’s time we paid attention to what we potentially could lose. It’s time to stop waiting for somebody else to notice the threat and sound the warning. Let’s not be a town lamenting “Don’t know what we’ve got, ’til it’s gone.”
Let’s cheer loudly “Happy Canada Day!” But let’s also remember just how quickly and quietly that 100-year-old post office (that today could have housed a museum, a concourse of boutiques, a tourism office, or, so help me, a modern post office) was dismantled for fiscal benefit. Not with a bang, but with barely a whimper.