President’s Message

In this March 2025 President’s message, I am pleased to report to you on many successful winter outings and our plans for continued growth of club members. However I am wondering about the thoughts that are going through the minds of our esteemed members on the state of the relationship between Canada and the US.

In Canada our political scene has stabilized somewhat with the election of a new Federal Liberal leader, Mark Carney, with a landslide of votes as well as the election of Conservative, Doug Ford, as Premier of Ontario. Carney has now been sworn in as our Prime Minister and soon will face an election campaign focused on the economy and the pending unemployment crisis as a result of the punishing US tariffs.

The relationship between Canada and the US continues to deteriorate with the potential destruction of our economy by tariffs and threats to our sovereignty. I am not sure if “Elbows Up” will be a strong enough response, as Canadians realize that Trump is serious about his ambitions to annex Canada. Making jokes about him is not the way to defend our democracy. Hoping that Trump will be gone in four years is wishful thinking and in my view, as Canadians, we need to prepare to deal with this existential threat to our country.

That said, there is lots of good Blue Mountain PROBUS news to report on. We’ve enjoyed an excellent year of winter activities with sustained cold temperatures, lots of snow and the strong volunteer leadership of Jake Johnson - Collingwood Blues hockey games, Bill Brennan - Snowshoeing and Monty Richardson - Legends Skiing.

• Chris and Joan Meleskie hosted our first Cocktails and Conversation evening at their home and had an excellent turnout.
• The Paddling group led by the ever energetic, Carl Wintermeyer, has formalized an exciting schedule of canoe/kayak events, which will be presented at our next meeting and added to the club web site.
• David Thomson will be forming a Social committee and making plans for a new and improved Christmas Lunch as venue reservations must be made well in advance for these events. After exploring the possibility of a combined event with Collingwood PROBUS a decision was made to continue planning on our own which allows us more flexibility for the date, entertainment, and location of the luncheon.

On the technical side, our webmaster, Bill Booth, has implemented a significant upgrade to our website to improve the process for signing and tracking our newly designed liability waiver. Once signed, the new waiver will be effective for all club activities. Thanks to Chris Meleskie, Carl Wintermeyer and Tom James for their valued input to develop the waiver wording.

We continue to ask all members to bring guests to our monthly meetings and to consider volunteering as activity leaders on the Biking, Paddling, Social and Management committees.

Please contact myself, Ron Mitchell, Stephen Hyndman or Chris Meleskie if you have an interest in any of these roles.

We have a fascinating speaker this month, Nicola Ross, author of Loops and Lattes and I look forward to seeing you at the monthly meeting.

Michael Coward
michael.coward@gmail.com