Commentary

How do your choices for council feel about libraries?

October 22, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By JAMES MATTHEWS

Libraries are vital to communities.

People can go to a library and escape the din of life. Then, away from the day’s hurly-burly, they can tuck into a book, a magazine, a newspaper. Listen to music in some libraries.

Libraries are repositories for a community’s history by way of various archived materials. And the open access to information and educational materials there can open avenues in one’s life.

Personally, libraries have been great to me over the years.

Guest speakers and visiting writers were a means for me to avail myself of books when money was too tight to buy them.

When I was a kid, I met at a library a girl named Alice and her Mad Hatter friend with his March Hare, the queens White and Red, and the Cheshire Cat. And we were all mad there. I was mad. You were mad. And there was found a lesson in simplicity and the wise suggestion to begin at the beginning and go on until you come to the end, then stop.

I don’t remember how old I was when I discovered Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But I remember how the words were put together and how the sentences tickled me. Years afterwards I read the book to one of my children through her mother’s belly where she rose like dough in a bread pan. And it became one of the stories that we’d return to over and over through the years.

A library was a bookstore to my young children. That’s what they called it. Daddy, can we go to the bookstore? We were parents too young, and I was a part-time sportswriter. Always a month behind on the utility bills, we didn’t have money for children’s books. Not even second-hand store offerings.

That was about 20 years ago in Newfoundland. My daughters bundled up in their bulky winter clothes, and we’d trudge off to the public library to their “bookstore.”

“We haven’t read this one yet, daddy,” Emily said and showed one of Robert Munsch’s books she’d pulled from a bin of books for young readers.

And Isabella said that it would have to be read at home because libraries are quiet places and daddy always does the noises in the stories when he reads them to us.

There are many other families, especially in this economy, who are in the same position when trying to nurture young readers.

An aside: Why do they make children’s books so bloody expensive and hope to encourage reading from an early age? Always puzzled me. Curiouser and curiouser.

These are difficult times. For everybody, let alone the young parents trying to keep the lights on while encouraging in their youngsters good reading habits.

Charles Dickens wrote a book called Hard Times. I found it in a school library in Iqaluit. I didn’t read it. Dickens always seemed too wordy for me to be able to quickly get into. But I’ve read about the book.

Dickens promoted the concept in Hard Times and others of his work that the imagination should buoy people in difficulty and that their social conditions shouldn’t define their lives.

Lofty idea, that.

Especially these days when libraries seem quieter, and more people seem to read longer works less and less, caught under the sweep of social media.

Except for a handful of government grants, libraries are funded mainly by way of municipal taxpayers. Come to think about it, that Public Library Operating Grant money is pulled from our taxes, too.

If you plan on marking the ballot entitled to you in the Oct. 26 municipal election, give some thought to library funding. And put the issue to candidates on the hustings, should any of them knock on your door and offer their campaign literature.

Maybe you don’t frequent any of Orangeville’s public library branches because you’re too busy toiling to keep your lights on like so many of us. But you might consider some of the ways our taxes have been used over the years and broach the topic with any candidate that darkens your door.

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