By Doug Draper
For the third time in six years, the only Niagara MPP who has held an
Veteran Ontario Cabinet Minister and St. Catharines MPP Jim Bradley
Ontario cabinet post since Tim Hudak, the province’s Conservative leader, held several cabinet posts in the former governments of Mike Harris and Ernie Eves, and Peter Kormos had a short stint as a cabinet minister in the NDP government of Bob Rae, has been shuffled once again.
Veteran Liberal MPP Jim Bradley has moved from appointments to the province’s Tourism Ministry in 2003, to the Ministry of Transportation in 2007 and, as of this January 18, to the Ministries of Municipal Affairs and Housing in the government of Premier Dalton McGuinty.
While transportation minister, Bradley may be credited with approving further expansions of Hwy. 406 to four lanes southward to Welland and with finally extending Go Transit services to the Niagara area after years of regional councils here pleading for Go services going back to the days of the provincial Conservative governments of Mike Harris and Ernie Eves.
However, it is too bad Bradley did not go so far as to fulfill Niagara’s regional government’s request to recast Hwy. 140 as the 406 all the way to Port Cologne – effectively paving the way for that the 406 to be Niagara’s true ”mid-peninsula highway” over a pie-in-the-sky plan (still on the books) to spend more than a billion of dollars on a new highway cutting through some the nicest rural lands in the region.
It is also too bad that Bradley is not holding the transportation ministry long enough to work with Niagara’s regional government and representatives in New York State to hopefully build a 21st century, high-speed rail system running from New York City, up the Hudson Valley to Albany, and through to Erie and Niagara Counties and southern Ontario. He was aware of this exciting opportunity for our binational region and appeared interested in pursuing it.
Whether the person who takes his place in the province’s transportation portfolio, Toronto area MPP Kathleen Wynne gives the kind of attention Bradley did to Niagara transportation needs or spends more of her time expanding and building highways north, east and west of Toronto to accomodate all that traffic congestion and residential sprawl, remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Bradley certainly has opportunities in his new portfolios of housing and municipal affairs to do some good. He can help meet the growing demand across this region and province for affordable housing and, through municipal affairs, he can work with municipalities to upload some of the costs the former Conservative government downloaded on property taxpayers a decade ago.
He can also take advantage of the opportunity to either get rid of or reform the Ontario Municipal Board by, at the very least, providing intervener funding to local resident groups participating in OMB hearings so they are on a more equal playing field with members of the development community and their lawyers.
He should also work with municipalities to change an unfair and undemocratic system that forces regional councils across this province to pay for police service budgets through property taxes and yet gives regions little or no say over those budgets or the wages and benefits paid to police officers.
Bradley, once a municipal councillor in St. Catharines himself, has been quote in the mainstream press saying he’s looking forward to “being an advocate” for municipalities. Let’s see how he does. We’ll be watching Jim!
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