From the editor….
Armageddon appears to have struck the once lovely village of Perth-Andover as our buildings and homes continue to be demolished and relocated.
What used to be a beautiful and cohesive riverfront community now looks like a bomb hit it.
As I was walking my dog the other day, we stopped at the building that was once home to Kelley’s Pub and then, The Black Lion Pub & Restaurant.
The place is about to be torn down, and so the current owners have salvaged as much as possible before the place is razed to the ground. The doors and windows are gone, so my dog and I walked in through the front door.
It made me want to weep. The building actually looks now like it did back in 1997, before we remodelled it into what would open as Kelley’s Pub in March of 1998.
That is, it’s just an empty shell of a building once again. Back before it was a pub, the building had been a bulk oil station up on Perth Hill, and then it did a turn as a recycling centre.
When I first saw the building back in 1997, it was in pretty rough shape and was home to a number of pigeons who came in through open eaves. It didn’t look anything like the pub it would become….it was just a shack!
It took a few months of labour, but eventually the job was done, the refrigerators and shelves were full and we opened for business.
I then spent 12 years of my life, along with my brother and sister, helping to operate Kelley’s Pub. In 2010 Rod and Colleen MacIntosh took over and remodelled the place into the Black Lion Pub.
They did a beautiful job spiffing the joint up. They expanded the kitchen, put in new equipment and completely redecorated the place.
And then the flood came. Although the building was up several feet on pilings, the water was so high it reached nearly four feet up the inside walls.
Like every other home or business that was flooded, the place was devastated….but the pub could have been repaired and restored.
That is, it could have been rebuilt if the New Brunswick Department of Safety hadn’t condemned every piece of equipment, all the cutlery and all utensils and china in the restaurant.
Everything was ordered to be destroyed. So now you might be thinking that this is a good thing, that the NB Department of Health and Safety has nothing but our health and safety in mind, but you would be mistaken.
Stainless steel and china can be easily disinfected for re-use. Condemning everything in the restaurant (and the Black Lion wasn’t the only establishment that got these orders….local flooded churches, for instance, were ordered to dispose of all their serving stuff as well)
By condemning expensive equipment that could have been cleaned and repaired the Department of Safety ensured that the Black Lion Pub would face a tremendous financial burden to replace the lost equipment.
And then, new government regulations administered the coup de grace to the Black Lion Pub by requiring that eating establishments now have a foundation underneath.
Rod and Colleen would have to build an entire new building with a foundation and with all new equipment in order to reopen their business.
This was just too much to bear, so the building is going to be demolished, the Black Lion is not to be and we should all weep for what we are losing.
Not just this one business, but all the businesses that we have lost in all our river valley communities.
During the years that my family and I operated Kelley’s Pub we saw new rules, regulations and sanctions put into place every single year that cost us ever more money.
It was a continual struggle to make ends meet. There seems to be some kind of local fantasy that people who own their own businesses are somehow independently wealthy… like they must be already rich in order to open their own business. I can assure you that this is not the case.
Those rules weren’t about making restaurants cleaner and ensuring public safety….those ever more stringent rules and regulations were all about making sure that the only restaurants that could conform to the new requirements and licensing fees were backed by big money…that is, corporate owned fast food establishments.
As corporations continue to rule our governments, they make sure to destroy mom & pop establishments, no matter what business they are in because stifling independent voices is what corporations and governments excel at.
In New Brunswick an astonishing one out of every eight persons works for the government.
So, this department of safety representative with his cushy government job…what do you think his pay scale was? A hundred grand a year salary maybe? Maybe more…With benefits, a retirement plan, paid vacations and Blue Cross….certainly more money and benefits than any independent rural restauranteur is ever going to see … so this guy killed off a local business, destroyed several jobs, and has deliberately deprived the community of yet another independent small business.
Do we see a pattern here yet? What is going to happen when small businesses no longer exist….do you suppose those cushy government jobs will still exist if there’s no one left for them to regulate and lord it over?
If you work in the public sector, think about it. How much job security do you really have if there are no small businesses left to pay the taxes that pay your salary?
I had to laugh….but not because it was so very funny, mind you….but because it was so very apt…when I heard a local resident refer to our village as “Perth-Bendover”.
All of our small rural villages are under attack by our corporate government. The government….federal and provincial… wants rural citizens to relocate to the cities….ostensibly to make better use of goods and services. You know, that beloved government by-word called “sustainability”.
But in reality, it’s to open up the province to hydro-fracking, clear cutting and toxic oil pipelines.
If this is not the future you want for yourself and your kids, we all need to take a stand now and make our own future by supporting local businesses, farming and manufacturing.
It’s too late to save the Black Lion, but can we save ourselves????
Stephanie Kelley
