Second-class treatment

Dear sir:
I was pleased to read Bell Canada is finally going to upgrade the phone lines in Rainy River District, so that we may become part of the “super” highway, but I did not need your editorial to tell me that once again Lake of the Woods Township would be left out of the upgrading, as improvements in any services in this district always exclude our township.
This exclusion applies to both government services and private industry.
Part of the problem, of course, is that we in Morson are further away from Fort Frances than is Atikokan, and, of course, we are not on either of the main links as are Nestor Falls and say LaVallee, even though our assessment values in Lake of the Woods Township are close to or exceed many of the smaller townships in the district.
My frustration grows each time I hear about the wonderful things that are happening in this district when we have no cell service, no natural gas, and call time for a hydro outage is at least three hours.
And now we are excluded from the Bell Canada upgrade but I assume that we will still be paying the same rate as those who have the upgraded service as is the case with Ontario Hydro (or whatever they call themselves now).
Private industry is not the only culprit in this neglect. How many of you have travelled Highway 621, our main link to the rest of the district lately. Please take notice if you should decide to drive this way, after you leave Blue Township, notice how the trees grow in the ditches, and the further north you go the worse the potholes are.
I really hope that it will not take 20 years to get a decent road to go with our brand new bridges. How would the residents of Fort Frances like to have a response time of about three hours between an ambulance call and arrival at a hospital.
Then there is sharing in the costs of “local services.” We here pay the same provincial taxes as everyone else in Ontario and our fair share, based on assessment as the rest of the district for these services, but we have no social housing, no child care, no toy libraries, and the Northwestern Health Unit and Rainycrest are miles away.
While I am glad that finally Bell Canada will bring better infrastructure to our neighbours, I cannot help wondering why in this modern age, some of us are expected to pay the same as our neighbours while being treated as second-class citizens.
Signed,
Valerie Pizey
Mayor, Township of
Lake of the Woods
RR 1, Sleeman, Ont.