A Post from Hamilton, Ontario’s Watchdog Group – Citizens at City Hall – better known as CATCH
(Niagara At Large is posting this because it is an issue that is not going away for our greater Niagara region.
There is still a critical mass of politicians in the Hamilton and Niagara region who want to cut a new mutli-lane highway through this region – through some of what is left of the best food-growing lands in Ontario – above the Niagara Escarpment to connect the GTA with the U.S. border, around more car and truck traffic.
As we approach another Earth Day, can we not find 21st century alternatives to ever more trucks and car?)
City Out Of Step With Province
Ontario Transporation Minister Glenn Murray
From CATCH, Hamilton
A speech last week by the Ontario cabinet minister who oversees transit, road building and other major infrastructure indicates that Hamilton councillors are significantly out of step with provincial policies. City positions on the aerotropolis and the mid-pen highway, and council’s lack of enthusiasm for LRT, are clearly not shared by Glenn Murray, the man selected by Premier Kathleen Wynne to direct both the Ministry of Transportation and the Ministry of Infrastructure.
Murray’s keynote address to the Transport Futures conference provided details on provincial government spending priorities for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) and the reasons behind them. While his comments were not specifically critical of Hamilton’s direction, it was clear that the Wynne government has a very different transportation and planning vision.
While Hamilton councillors are loudly demanding a new mid-peninsula expressway, Murray described highway development as “last century kind of infrastructure” that is inefficient and unaffordable. His government will determine new investment on “what does it cost to move one person one kilometre and what speed to we move them at”, he explained, comparing one of Toronto’s biggest expressways with its transit system.
“So the Don Valley Parkway, which is on one side of where I live, moves about 54,000 people in a day. The Yonge Street subway does that in about 90 minutes – about 38,000 people an hour.”
Under the previous Conservative government at Queen’s park, ninety percent of Ontario’s new office jobs were built more than a kilometre away from major transit lines, which Murray says forced “90 percent of our new workforce” to use cars to get to work and “probably cost us more in highway congestion and highway infrastructure and loss for movement of goods and services than almost anything else.”
In the meantime, “every OECD country” as well as cities across the US “are all involved in high speed rail”, explained Murray. “We are just starting to get into the conversation in Canada in a way that other countries are already fully engaged.”
The minister argues that “there has to be a connection between higher order transit and where commercial and employment lands are created” – in sharp contrast to Hamilton’s controversial decision to locate all its new employment lands around the airport. Murray didn’t comment directly on that aerotropolis plan, but it appears inconsistent with the thinking at Queen’s Park.
“Employment lands, if they’re going to be in Markham and Hamilton and other places or Richmond Hill, have to be well connected. The zoning has to support high levels of intensification,” he declared. “We’ve got to make sure that we’re using our planning to co-locate our employment lands and where people live with the right kind of services that make those attractive choices more available, so that there’s less demand for transportation infrastructure.”
The low job density planned for the aerotropolis (37 per hectare instead of the provincially-mandated minimum of 50) was a key criticism made by citizen opponents at the Ontario Municipal Board hearings in January (whose outcome is not yet determined). The minimum density requirement is a central tenet of Places to Grow, the province’s growth plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, and a document Murray says is “one of the best pieces of land use planning done in North America in fifty years” because it efficiently aligns infrastructure with growth.
“The next round to determine winning is to make us the most mobile society in the world, and that goes with two things – proximity and connectivity. So proximity is really, really critical.” Murray says. “You can not do this by adding developments at the edge of Places to Grow or at the edge of the line.”
As an example of the trends, the minister recounted how Coca-Cola has just moved a 400-employee plant into downtown Toronto to avoid the suburban congestion facing both their employees and their delivery trucks.
“Coke simply could not manage having their employees sit in traffic for an hour or two hours to get to their former offices,” explained Murray. “They simply couldn’t manage having their trucks on the road not moving for two or three hours at a time. That friction to their workforce and to the movement of their goods was simply unacceptable.”
Reducing reliance on automobiles, Murray believes, is also necessary to improve quality of life and meet the transportation challenges of an aging population who need walkable communities and transit to access basic services and improve their health.
“Two-thirds of our seniors live in the 905,” he notes. “They live in low-density suburban communities, where as my mother quaintly put it, I have to use a litre of gasoline to get a litre of milk.”
Murray is the lead provincial minister for implementation of the Big Move, a $50 billion transit enhancement program that includes light rail service in Hamilton, and all day GO service through the city to Niagara.
“It is the largest building investment in the history of Ontario in transportation infrastructure,” said Murray. “And while we can look for many ways to pay for it, you cannot build on that scale without some revenue.”
He emphasized that this “primarily has to be about good planning” to get the best value for the investment, “because simply in this new economy, transportation and transit infrastructure is one of the most important tools in the government’s economic development toolkit to retain and attract jobs and investment dollars an increasingly competitive world economy.”
CATCH (Citizens at City Hall) updates use transcripts and/or public documents to highlight information about Hamilton civic affairs that is not generally available in the mass media. Detailed reports of City Hall meetings can be reviewed at hamiltoncatch.org. You can receive all CATCH free updates by sending an email to http://hamiltoncatch.org/newsletter/?p=subscribe. Sharing links are available on the hamiltoncatch.org.
(Niagara At Large invites you to join in the conversation by sharing your views on the content of this post below. For reasons of transparency and promoting civil dialogue, NAL only posts comments from individuals who share their first and last name with their views.)
Niagara At Large 
Regrettably, it is the “Province” that is out of step with the province. We should not expect this group of crony politicians with their urban pseudo elitist sycophantic cohorts, with their deep antipathy towards rural Ontario’s values, to understand the needs of Southern Niagara.
There … some red meat for the haves with which to punish the have-nots for having the temerity to need jobs, schools, hospitals, roads, a patch of turf to claim as their own, and, God help us, honest leadership. The Orwellian ‘Smart Growth’ belongs in the same trash heap as co-parenting, spam & polyester leisure suits.
As long as we keep electing and appointing the disconnected, the disinterested, the dismissive, ciphers that can’t differentiate between a screw driver and a butter knife, we in Southern Niagara will continue on this ever accelerating spiral of impoverishment, this steady agenda driven dismemberment of our communities. I for one am exasperated by being told that if I don’t like it I should move.
As for the blow-dried Mr. Murray and his fancy-pants friends, I doubt they would want to get their Guccis dirty to meet the car-driving salt of the earth, the scary populus that lives beyond the fringe of the concrete sterility of the GTA. Beware … we be dragons.
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Chris I hope when you say no new escarpment crossing is being considered you meant in the Burlington area . Because in Grimsby and Beamsville there has been loss of life on escarpment crossings that have seen a huge increase in truck traffic . These access roads cut through the Heart of both communities with the noise and pollution on these once quiet local roads . They were not designed to handle the increased commerce of the Region let alone the Province!
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Wow!!! Did Chris Wojnarowski write that … or did Timbit Hudak write it?
Enough of that though … to deal with the CATCH article reprinted above … I receive CATCH releases directly (I live in the Hamilton area) and often disagree with some of the things they say.
In this case though, I have to grudgingly admit that I kind of like what I am hearing from the Transportation Minister. I have made it clear in the past that I am no fan of the Liberals … but I was an employee of MTO and was a member of the team that did the Mid-Pen/Niagara-GTA studies.
POLITICS DID NOT PRE-DETERMINE THE OUTCOME!
The thousands of hours of work that went into the project resulted in a decision that:
1: a new connection was needed between Welland and Fort Erie. Work is continuing on that.
2: new capacity was needed between Burlington and Ancaster. The latest round of Public Information Centres has determined that widening of existing routes would be sufficient – no new crossing of the Niagara Escarpment is needed.
3: there is no immediate (within 20 years or so) need for new capacity between Hamilton and Fort Erie that could not be handled by a widening of the existing QEW. NO NEW HIGHWAY IS NEEDED.
The Conservatives and the Chambers of Commerce in the Hamilton and Niagara areas continue to push for a new highway. They say it is needed “to help business.” What a crock of horse dung! The studies that have been done have already shown a new highway is NOT needed.
I am very pleasantly surprised to see the new Transportation Minister actually having the testicular fortitude to say there is no need for a new highway.
Can we please focus on using our tax dollars properly!
Our health care system is a disaster. There is no justice in our so-called “justice system.” Let’s focus on using our scarce public funds to make the needed changes there — not on a new highway that isn’t needed.
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Mr. MacKenzie, you honour me with your attribution to Mr. Hudak. However, the depth of my concerns would more likely be articulated by Ms. Horwath.
Not-with-standing the substance of your position, this is not about blowing money on an unnecessary road, nor is it about claiming the sanctity of an existing unused rail bed that would serve admirably.
This is about the survival of small town Ontario and the dignity of the hard working people whose lives are being systematically dismantled in this ongoing urban power consolidation. For the people of the Southern Niagara area, this is an existential matter that transcends some dusty report, no matter how well intentioned.
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To build Metrolinx, as I understand, it is going to cost about $2 billion over 25 years. Our major pension plans are scouring the world looking for stable returns in infrastructure projects . CPP has invested in Mali , Chile , and has many Billions in New York Realestate . By investing a small portion in metrolinx every year would that not be reward to the plan on return for investment . Let alone spending money IN CANADA to have it support the TAX PAYERS here! Ohmers and the Ontario Teachers Plans also could be investors . How about in vesting the portion that the Ontario Government contributed to these Pension Plans on be half of their members . They would still be the beneficieries of a solid investment and we the Tax Payers (including them ) would benefit!
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Nice rhetorical flourishes, Chris! What they have to do with the issue at hand is not entirely clear to me, but I did enjoy reading them…
Like Will MacKenzie, I subscribe to CATCH, in part because I want to know what’s going outside the borders of the Niagara Peninsula (I live in Welland), but mostly because I am downright envious that Hamilton has a group of citizens so concerned with the good of their city and its citizens that it keeps a close — and informed — eye on what happens at City Hall. I’ve met some of these good folk at events in the Hamilton area, and they never struck me as starry-eyed Liberal cheerleaders. Like smart activists anywhere, they’ll give credit when and where it’s due. In this case, it’s to the new Minister of Transportation.
Anyone who knows me knows my feelings about our provincial government — but I, too, like Murray’s comments. If Chris — or any of the Niagara mayors who are so anxious to see the Mid-Pen corridor become a reality — can present a sound case for this project, then I urge them to do so — because I haven’t seen one as yet. “Build it and they will come” does not constitute a sound case for this particular boondoggle. (That’s why the Mid-Pen is embraced by Tim Hudak, because he uses outdated ideology to try to conceal his lack of any real ideas.)
The economy of this part of Ontario is not stagnant because of the lack of a new highway. And, Chris, a little logic, please — if you want the government to give us some hospital services, then for goodness sakes do not urge it to waste billions of dollars on paving over what is left of this peninsula…and for what? A “Highway to Prosperity”? Come on — you know better than that.
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I too am familiar with CATCH, and concur that they are not starry eyed Liberals. But the operative qualifier is “Hamilton”, not “Welland” or “Port Colborne”. Their agenda does not include the well being of Southern Niagara, nor should we expect anything else. When we are all fighting each other for the same dollar, Hamilton will elbow out St. Catharines, who in turn will elbow out Welland every time.
The lack of the Mid-Pen if emblematic of the malaise felt throughout the Southern Tier. It is the same lack of respect for rural communities by the urban elites that marginalized this area in its effort initially to get then keep a proper functioning hospital within a reasonable distance.
In basic terms, this is an all-encompassing comprehensive matter. Selectively decoupling the Mid-Pen from the hospital, from job creation, from sustainability as a viable community is the fundamental flaw underpinning the anti Mid-Pen position.
Building the Mid-Pen is in many aspects the equivalent of building the Seaway. I would posit, the greatest resistance, for obvious reasons, will come from St Catharines and Bradley who chaffes at the very thought that Welland may actually be restored as a thriving community.
In closing, I concur that the Mayors of the Southern Tier should get their spit together and put forward the case for the Mid-Pen. But if the hospital petition with 22,000 signatures is any example, the question is … will the urban elites even bother to acknowledge it?
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Well, it all depends on who forms the next provincial government — Tim Hudak wants to see a Mid-Pen Highway, but his views on trade and the economy haven’t changed in nearly fifteen years. Despite his youth, he’s a dinosaur. Personally, I think the Mid-Pen is a 1990’s attempt to solve problems that we have not yet even begun to understand, in terms of how the economy is changing and why, and what that portends. I am suspicious of throwing tax dollars at a huge infrastructure project (which would inevitably be a P3) based on the notion that the economy of even the near future is going to look anything like the globalized economy of the past three decades.
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I think if they want a Mid Pen highway, stop making all taxpayers pay for it. Make it a user fee toll road. If taxpayers cover it, put some funding into public transportation as well, because a new highway does nothing for people who have to walk or take the bus everywhere, esp. if they plan on building industries and jobs on route.
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