No idea what’s going on
August 2, 2026
We walked into the Broadway in Barrhaven by the Home Depot, and my wife said, "Oh, the Prime Minister was here yesterday for breakfast." I said, "I didn’t know that." She goes, "I saw it on my Facebook group," and in that moment I kind of realized, I have no idea what is going on in town. A few days later I was reading an article on X about hyperlocal newsletters, and what a hyperlocal newsletter is, exactly, is what the Barrhaven Bugle is.
My fascination with newspapers probably began when I was in grade 7 and got my first job as a paper boy. I started delivering the Vancouver Sun in my little town, and I ended up doing it for three years. The financial freedom it brought me at 12 was one thing, but it also brought me a love of newsprint and reading the Herman cartoon on the front page every day. As I was taking my newspapers out of the box at the pickup site and putting them in my bag, there was something about holding the newspaper in my hands and feeling the texture of the newsprint.
My first real job - the Army Reserve - came from a newspaper ad. That career turned into a 35+ year adventure. Everywhere we lived, when they still printed news, I would get the local paper. The last one was Pembroke - the Pembroke Observer. When we were in Petawawa I enjoyed reading it, and my daughter delivered it for a while. And for five years I wrote for it as a member of its editorial board, which meant I got a featured article every six weeks or so in the Saturday edition. It was fun to put my thoughts down on paper and see them the following Saturday. Before that, in Toronto, I had been a serial letter-to-the-editor writer, and I eventually had seven or eight letters published in the Toronto Star and one in the Toronto Sun. I spent a year in Syria and contributed to the UN magazine the mission ran a few times.
I have just had this kind of fascination and ongoing relationship with this form of communication, and miss it when I’m not connected, I suppose.
One of the things I noticed over the years, with the death of newspapers in general, is that the internet really did not replace them. Facebook came along, we ended up with a fractionalized local news space. Where one source turned into about 40 different sources, so if you wanted to know what was going on you had to join the applicable pages. Every club had a page, every organization had a page, every business had a page.
The thing though, is you wouldn’t be exposed to things you did not know about. If you did not know about it, you would not see it. That is what caused this lack of cohesiveness and this lack of identity. It would be like your town losing its team. I am sure Quebec, when they lost the Nordiques, lost a little bit of their identity, because they were the home of the Nordiques. To me, losing the local newspaper feels the same.
One of the issues with local newspapers is that they are hugely expensive. They are a people business. You need reporters, editors, sales, circulation and so on. As they bled subscribers and advertising (to Facebook and the like), they were just no longer able to sustain themselves. When that happens, your news - your local news - disappears.
So the Bugle is a newsletter that is just Barrhaven. We do not go outside of Barrhaven. We talk about what happens in Barrhaven. Take the Prime Minister. He’s our Member of Parliament. Somewhere else he is the Prime Minister, but here he is Mark Carney, MP. Our local representative on the Hill, which is 15 km, and another world from here. Barrhaven is not Ottawa, and Barrhaven is not Orleans. When Ottawa amalgamated the boroughs and all these cities, it was another thing that took away a layer of identity. I have only lived in Barrhaven for seven years, and I have to say that other than shopping in a few of the bigger places, I know very little about it.
It is important to me to have that connection, though. And a hyperlocal newsletter can create that connection for 110,000 people. Barrhaven is a place, not a footnote, and we need to celebrate that.
When I named it the Barrhaven Bugle, I named it the Bugle in the sense that, yes, it starts with a B, and Barrhaven starts with a B, so it was not particularly challenging. The concept, though, looks back to the days when the bugle was the communication system. Where a horn would be blown, and based on the tune, soldiers knew what to do. As a guy with a strong love of history, I like to connect things with the past, because what we do today is not much different than what we did before. The means change, but fundamentally the need for identity, a single reliable source of news that shares the facts, and not opinions is something a lot of people say they want.
I do not want to talk about politics and all that means. What I want to talk about is community and what is happening here. When I report on what councillors do, it is not me reporting on their political activities. It is me recounting what they did or said. I am not commenting on what I think of it. I am not saying they should have done something better or different. I am just saying this elected person, this week, did this thing. In the Tuesday newsletter I report what is coming from the two wards in Barrhaven, what is coming from the Member of Provincial Parliament, what they did and said this week, and what our Member of Parliament did and said. My goal is to leave you the space to decide if what was done or said fits with your world view.
And this is a difference. When you look at Facebook, or other socials, it is easy to drop a two second opinion. When one person says A, inevitably someone jumps in to say B. Then someone else challenges one or the other, and in minutes the comments descend into a binary argument for or against this person, idea, or event. I want a place for the facts. There are so many places to get opinion, some people begin to form their beliefs, not from fact, but from opinion. And that’s fine, but I don’t think the Barrhaven Bugle needs to be a place where opinions rule. For that reason, I am not going to focus on comments. You can comment on the newsletter for now, and we do have a Facebook page slowly gaining traction, but we are here to tell people what is happening - not what to think about it.
I want to talk about the calendar, what people are doing, and what impacts our neighbourhood. I want to be connected. Today, as one person, I can connect myself. What amazes me is that for very little extra effort, I can connect 110,000 people, and that’s why this isn’t an email I send myself, but a newsletter for everyone. In the past it would have taken a dozen people to do what I do. And here is the thing, if I do not do it with technology, then nobody is going to do it, because we are not returning to the days of the local newsroom. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need the news.
Jay Tarzwell, publisher