Building Strong Communities, The Cure to Division and Government Bullying | Shirley Guertin

Shirley joins us from Ontario where she has operated a family-owned equestrian riding farm for 49 years. Shirley is displeased with enforcing unlawful provincial mandates in order to stay in business. After serving her community for nearly 5 decades, Centaur Riding School is closing its doors. Like many Canadians, Shirley is concerned with where Canada is headed so she helped establish Stand Up Canada where she and others identified a chink in the armor which later birthed ‘Shield Our Seniors’ (SOS). Shirley is here to share her story with us today.

On Shirley’s family business…

We were forced into being the police for the Ontario government and enforcing all kinds of measures, which I completely disagree with, have always disagreed with…and it's just hard to watch when it's on your own property. Enough's enough. When COVID first hit in March, 2020, my daughter who runs the facility with myself we had some pretty hard conversations as to which horses we would euthanize first because we didn't know if we would be able to keep feeding them if there was no money coming in to pay for them…no matter how good it is for people, for their souls, for their physical bodies, for their emotional bodies, how much it helps the kids grow…

On Realizing the Need for SOS…

When I was with Stand Up Canada, part of my role was to look after social media, which was quite active [and I was contacted one day] by a woman whose dad was in a nursing home in Ontario. It was pretty bad what was happening…I had no idea where to send her. At the next national meeting I asked the question, where could this lady get some help? And it was dead silence [so] we started a group and we called it Shield Our Seniors. We started having meetings and it's a very different thing to start…here we were dealing with families of seniors who were not activists [but] this group has grown beautifully. I have to step back because of closing my business.