shawville

All mail delivery stopped except social assistance cheques

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist

Pontiac’s Canada Post drivers joined the 55,000 or so postal workers across the country who walked off the job last week as part of a nation-wide strike after failing to reach a new collective agreement with their employer.

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) representing Canada Post employees has been in negotiations with the federal government since Nov. 2023 around issues including pay, health benefits, pension, and whether Canada Post will shift to delivering seven days a week, something the Crown corporation feels it needs to do to be able to compete with other delivery services like Purolator and FedEx.

For the six delivery drivers who spent Friday morning on strike outside the Shawville post office, a secure and reliable pension was the number one thing they hoped would come of the negotiations, that and protection of their five-day work week.

“A lot of people always say, ‘Oh, you make enough money,’ but for me it’s not the money, it’s the pension,” said Kayla Wilson, a driver for the Shawville post office. “I’m young and I’d like to have a pension to look forward to when I’m older.”

Canada Post’s latest offer, made last week, included an 11.5 per cent wage increase over four years, as well as protection of the current stable pension plan for current employees.

However, according to information from the union, the corporation proposed a less predictable, market-dependent pension plan for future employees. The union is concerned Canada Post will gradually phase out the stable pension plan while those who paid into it are still living off it in their retirement, which could pose problems. 

For Terry Matte, another Shawville driver, this is scary.

“I took this job for the pension,” she said. “At the age that I’m at, you’ve got to have something steady.”

Andrew Lang lives in Shawville but delivers mail out of the Lac-des-Loups post office, where no other mail delivery service operates. On top of a stable pension, he’s hoping to be accurately compensated for the time he works.

“I’ve got 307 addresses I’m responsible for. I could have 60 on a normal Monday and I’m expecting anywhere from 150 parcels on a single day in the month leading up to Christmas,” Lang said, explaining that most of the overtime he works during busy periods is not compensated.

“I would much rather be sitting in my car right now and delivering the mail, and seeing the people I deliver mail to. That’s a part I enjoy about the job is the people. I don’t enjoy standing on the side of the road,” he added, a sentiment with which every driver gathered agreed.

Media reports late Monday evening suggested Canada Post and the union had yet to reach an agreement, and the two sides were still far apart at the table.

As the strike continues, transportation of all mail has been put on hold. Government social assistance cheques, however, including pension, child benefit, and old age security cheques, are scheduled to be delivered to residents this week.

Are you a Pontiac resident somehow affected by this strike? Tell us how by writing to sophie@theequity.ca.

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist

Jaycie Hodgins spent a lot of time at the Shawville District Recreation Association as a kid.

Through the RA’s summer camps and soccer program, not to mention the years she’s spent playing hockey with the Pontiac Lions, she’s benefitted from the countless hours given by community volunteers towards her development as an athlete, and as a leader. And she sees this.

Now in Grade 11 at Pontiac High School (PHS), Hodgins is stepping into these leadership roles herself.

This summer, she returned to the RA’s summer camp, this time as a counselor. She felt she was able to wrangle and care for the kids with confidence thanks to certain training she’s already received, including CPR training offered in a Grade 9 science class and communication skills learned in teacher Matt Greer’s leadership class.

“Without the class I probably would have been like a chicken with my head cut off. I just wouldn’t know how to deal with certain conversations, especially as a teenager talking to adults about their children,” Hodgins said.

“There was an incident at the RA one time, and I was really glad I knew how to do CPR and the heimlich. I had that skill under my belt, and if we can maybe open that up to other people to make sure that there are more youth certified in that, I think it’s really important.”

A new fundraising effort from the Shawville RA, led by Matt Greer, also an RA council member of many years, aims to offer these foundational leadership skills to more youth in Shawville and across the Pontiac in an effort to increase the pool of youth who can volunteer to lead sports and recreation programs.

The campaign’s goal is to raise $6,000 from the community in the next 76 days. If the RA achieves this, it will be given an additional $24,000 from La Ruche, a Quebec crowdfunding platform for community projects.

The $30,000 total will be used to offer interested youth various trainings, including First Aid and CPR courses, as well as coaching and refereeing training across various sports.

“In the spring there were definitely some concerns raised about a lack of volunteers, and part of the discussion was tapping into our youth and really trying to cultivate that, and build the pool,” Greer said, noting the RA has seen a significant increase in demand for services since more people have moved to the community from the city over the last five or so years.

“People, mostly parents, are stepping up to make it happen, but we’re feeling like there’s an untapped resource in our community, which is our young people,” Greer said.

He emphasized that while this campaign is being led by the Shawville RA, his vision is that it can support the growth of recreation and summer camp programs across the region.

“It’s not just about fighting for Shawville, it’s about the Pontiac. Let’s say we had 50 kids doing different things through this training, it would be amazing if they were scattered, and helping out in Fort Coulonge and Otter Lake.”

People interested in supporting this effort can do so by visiting https://laruchequebec.com/en/projects/leaders-of-tomorrow-shawville-ra.

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist

The users’ committee responsible for advocating for the rights of residents accessing healthcare services in the Pontiac hosted its first annual general meeting (AGM) on Monday evening at the Shawville CLSC to update the public on what it has accomplished since it formed in Nov. 2023.

After six years without one, the new CISSSO users’ committee was established to work with the three residents’ committees in the region to ensure proper living conditions for people living in long-term care and advocate, more generally, for better health services in the region.

Jennifer Larose, president of the Pontiac users’ committee, explained the committee’s responsibilities in her opening comments at the AGM.

She said they are to ensure users of the CISSSO health and social service network are treated with respect for their dignity, to speak when needed for users to the authorities, to have a particular concern for the most vulnerable groups of users, and to help improve patients’ living conditions.

To do this, the users’ committee works with three residents’ committees who represent people living in the Mansfield and Shawville CHSLDs as well as the long-term care home at the Pontiac Hospital.

Larose said the committee members spent the last 10 months learning their responsibilities, familiarizing themselves with their code of ethics, and looking into the first concerns brought to their attention.

“We have paid much attention in the past months to an issue of great importance to all of our residents, namely the food put on their plates,” Larose said.

“Indeed shortly after our inception, we began to hear stories of wasted food, questionable menus, unrecognizable food items, etcetera, so we decided to look into the matter.”

With some exceptions, the food served at the Pontiac Hospital and the three long-term care homes is prepared in the hospital’s cafeteria and then sent out to the homes.

Larose said members of both the users’ and residents’ committees started collecting evidence of their concerns, including taking photos, speaking to residents, and trying the food themselves.

“It’s being wasted. The patients aren’t really eating it, and if they’re not eating it, it’s bad for their health,” Larose said.

Nancy Draper Maxsom is vice-president of the residents’ committee at the CAP long-term care home, where she first began hearing complaints about the food.

“So then I started to go to the hospital and I ate there at lunch every day for two weeks. It was not really good,” she said, describing soggy, overcooked vegetables, meat that was hard to chew, and meals she said would not be familiar for Pontiac residents. “It was not Pontiac food.”

The users’ committee brought its concerns to CISSSO’s Pontiac director, Nicole Boucher-Larivière. She said while the health network has already been working on improving menu options for two years, bringing changes including more fresh fruit, fresh rather than pre-toasted toast, and a new menu of puréed foods that have been shaped to look like solid food, there is more work to be done.

“I understand the users’ committee, they want to bring it even further, but we’ve been working on this for a long time and we plan to keep working on it,” she said.

Boucher-Larivière noted CISSSO has been circulating surveys to better understand residents’ experience and enjoyment of the food they are served, as well as a survey to be filled out by staff who are tracking what kind of food, and how much of it, isn’t getting eaten. She said the results of these surveys, which should be ready in October, will give CISSSO an indication of what further menu changes are needed.

Boucher-Larivière also said residents can always request to be served the second option for a hot meal, if they don’t like the first option they’ve been served.

For her part, Larose said she feels the committee has been heard. “Now I want to see the results and I want to see if there’s going to be some changes,” she said.

The AGM also featured a talk from Calumet Island native Jean Pigeon, spokesperson for healthcare advocacy coalition SOS Outaouais and the director for the Gatineau Health Foundation.

He spoke of the two critical challenges he believes the Outaouais region faces when it comes to healthcare: namely a lack of provincial funding ($200 million short compared to other regions of Quebec, according to a study he cited from an Outaouais development think tank), and the region’s proximity to Ontario.

Finally, the committee’s secretary treasurer Bruno St-Cyr presented its financial report for the period of Apr. 1, 2023 to Mar. 31, 2024.

The committee began with $66,000 in November. Significant expenses included $5,000 spent on professional support, and another $24,038 spent on hiring human resources to get the committee up and running. Money also went to promotional materials, local advertising, office supplies, and travel expenses, leaving the committee with a $25,925 budget surplus.

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Reporter

Members of Kebaowek First Nation and its environmental assessment team set up shop in the Pontiac Archives on Wednesday to raise awareness about their concerns with the plans to build a nuclear waste disposal facility at the Chalk River nuclear research station, a kilometre from the Ottawa River.
The group was made up of Kebaowek’s waterkeeper Verna Polson, land assistant Mary-Lou Chevrier, and Rosanne Van Schie, a forest conservation expert who has been working with the First Nation to do environmental assessments on the site of the future waste facility.
Kebaowek is 200 kilometres upstream of Chalk River, near Témiscamingue, Que. The First Nation has been leading efforts to challenge plans from Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), the manager of the Chalk River nuclear site, to build what it calls a near surface disposal facility for up to 1,000,000 cubic metres of what CNL says is low-level radioactive waste.
This spring the group from Kebaowek visited communities up and down the Ottawa Valley, meeting with residents and sharing the results of months of environmental impact research they have done – research that shows the waste facility could harm several species at risk that live on or next to the site.
“I’m hoping we can all come together. There’s strength in numbers, and that we can all learn and be on the same page and stop the NSDF [near surface disposal facility],” Chevrier said.
“It’s important we all get on board and voice our opinion now in case anything bad happens.”
The stop in Shawville was one of the last before Kebaowek heads to Ottawa this week for a federal court hearing where it will be challenging the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s (CNSC) January decision to grant CNL the license to build the facility.
In February, Kebaowek filed for judicial review of CNSC’s decision on the grounds that the regulator did not adequately consider the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and that free, prior and informed consent was not obtained from most of the 11 Algonquin First Nations with unceded claims to the territory.
Only one community, the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation, consented to the nuclear waste facility going ahead, signing a long-term relationship agreement with CNL in June 2023.
Article 29.2 of the declaration says, “States shall take effective measures to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of Indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent.”
This article is critical to the case Kebaowek plans to bring forward this week at the administrative tribunal for its court challenge, scheduled for July 10 and 11.
“The argument is CNSC knew full well of this legislative piece but administratively just didn’t address it,” Van Schie explained to those gathered at the archives on Wednesday morning.
The commission’s record of decision assures the disposal facility “is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects,” and explains that because UNDRIP is not yet law, the commission is not empowered to determine how to implement it and must instead be guided by current consultation law.
But Van Schie said Kebaowek believes that because UNDRIP is supported by law, by way of the United Nations Declaration Act, and because the Canadian government has committed itself to the principles of UNDRIP, the nuclear safety regulator should be held accountable to this declaration.
Van Schie added that beyond concerns around absence of consent for the facility, the First Nation will also be making the case that proper forest management plans were not completed by the regulator.
“When we got on the ground we quickly determined there were a number of gaps they didn’t address, including the use of the site by moose and deer, and doing a count of the animals didn’t happen either,” Van Schie said.
“The objective is to find gaps in the administration of the environmental assessment.”
Several dozen people met with the team from Kebaowek at the archives on Wednesday, among them Warden Jane Toller who expressed the MRC’s ongoing opposition to the nuclear waste facility.
Shawville residents Melissa Smith and Hayley Pilon, both members of Kebaowek First Nation, spent several hours in the morning listening to the information the team from Kebaowek was sharing.
“It is a major issue and I don’t think it’s very well publicized,” Smith said. “I live in Shawville and I didn’t even know until 9:30 this morning that there was a meeting coming here.”
Pilon, a massage therapy student at Algonquin College, took the day off school to attend the event because she is concerned what impacts the nuclear waste facility might have on the health of the Ottawa River.
“I would love to know what I can do, what the next steps are, what we can do as a small community to help support the cancellation of the CNL nuclear dump,” she said.
“I was part of the meetings to do with the incineration they wanted to do in the Pontiac. It kind of just seems like that just got finished, and now this is starting up. It’s just one thing after the other.”

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Reporter

Illumination of the Main Street sidewalk in Shawville is no longer at the whims of often faulty Hydro Québec street lights.
In April, the municipality installed 12 solar-powered street lamps along the street’s northern sidewalk – seven west of Centre Street, and five east of it.
The new lights are thanks to a collaboration between the municipality and Jill McBane, owner of Main Street’s Boutique Shawville Shooz, who many years ago took it upon herself to raise money for their purchase.
“As a store owner here I have no outside lights. In the winter time when you close up at 4 or 5 p.m. It’s pretty dark out there,” McBane said.
“When you’re in other towns and you see all of these nice attractive lights plus they’re serving a purpose, I’m like, ‘Why can’t Shawville have these?’”
McBane joined forces with the local business group Shop Shawville to organize street markets over the years that doubled as fundraising events for the lights.
When Richard Armitage was elected to Shawville council, McBane did not waste any time getting him on board with her project.
“When I got elected in Nov. 2021, the very next day Jill contacted me and told me that she had a project underway to get sidewalk lamp posts on this side of Main Street,” Councillor Armitage recalled, sitting in an armchair in McBane’s shoe store last week.
“She contacted me about once every two weeks for two years, and we finally got it done,” he laughed.
In total, the solar lamps cost $53,024.93. Shop Shawville raised $3,285 for the project, $40,423 was covered by a Volet 2 grant from MRC Pontiac, and the remaining $9,316.14 was paid for by Shawville.
“Without the help of Richard and Shawville council we’d be still raising money for these lamps,” McBane said.
“If they hadn’t gotten the grant, I was going to start an auction or do something to jump up the process because at $15 a table it would take me forever to raise the money.”
Installation of the lights began at the end of March.
The municipality decided to set the lamps along the business side of the sidewalk and away from the sidewalk’s edge to prevent the posts from being hit by car doors and bumpers, and make snow clearing easier.
Armitage said the municipality learned the perils of installing objects along the street edge of Main Street’s sidewalks when it put in some trees, before he was elected councillor.
This spring, only two trees were left standing, and one of them was dead, so the municipality decided to remove them and plant new trees at Mill Dam Park where they would be protected from the offenses of parking cars and snow removal machinery.
“Most of them got killed by getting hit with bumpers and stuff, and street salt. It’s just not a friendly environment for trees,” Armitage said, noting the hope is that placing the new lamps right along the storefronts will increase their lifespan and make it easier for people to park on Main Street.

HQ street lamps unreliable
It’s not that Shawville’s Main Street has been without street lights all of these years.
The municipality pays $78,000 a year to rent and electrify 220 street lights from Hydro Québec. About 20 of these are along Main Street.
In exchange, Hydro Québec is supposed to maintain the lights.
But Armitage said that many of the lights are currently out of order, and that often when repairs are made, they only last a few days.
“The sidewalk is dark, and we have a lot of issues with hydro street lights not working,” he said.
It’s for this reason that in the winter of 2022, the municipality decided to purchase the streetlights from Hydro Québec and signed an agreement with the corporation to that effect.
The purchase agreement stated that the hydro company had 12 months to repair all street lights, at which point Shawville would buy them for $55,000, about the cost of a year’s rental.
Once Shawville owns the lights, the operating cost would drop to about $25,000 a year.
Armitage said the sale was to be complete by Feb. 2023, but that the municipality still has not been able to purchase the lights.
“Hydro still hasn’t gotten about 50-some lights working. They come and they fix them and they’re out in two days. It’s just an ongoing battle with Hydro,” Armitage said.
“So thank goodness these [solar] lights work.”