Niagara Loses A Pioneering Advocate For Preserving Our Green Spaces

 By John Bacher

 On January 23rd 2010, a major milestone took place when the people of the Niagara Region lost one of the most prophetic figures in the advocacy of our beautiful landscapes, particularly our unique Niagara fruit lands, from the combined blight of new expressways and urban sprawl.

Niagara conservation pioneer Bob Hoover

Robert Hoover – a founder and the first president of the Preservation of Agricultural Lands Society (PALS), one of the longest standing conservation groups in southern Ontario – died on January 23rd at age 89. 

A professor Emeritus of Brock University, Robert Hoover used the force of his mind to battle against bulldozers and ugliness.  He was willing, in this heroic cause, to testify in the most gruelling of public forums, the Ontario Municipal Board. 
 Unlike most expert witnesses at the OMB, Bob Hoover always testified without pay. He faced the added nastiness of constant media scrutiny and manipulated ridicule.  At one time this caused an OMB hearing to be suspended, as he was stricken suddenly after being insulted by a barrage of testimony that was based on obscure and irrelevant references in his extensive academic research, and accused of having a “Messiah complex”.

Despite such attempts at crucifixion, spurred on by editorial allegations of “intellectual dishonesty”, Bob Hoover rose again to face a battery of expensive lawyers, planners and other apologists for the land developers on the urban fringe.
 Bob Hoover had much in common with a close friend who was the same age, the late Mel Swart.  Both were raised in devout Methodist homes, where they were told to be their brother’s keeper.  They came to imitate the saints and prophets they studied from their youth and followed the Christian example to endure suffering in the service of others. Both were veterans of the Second World War and were comitted to seeking ways of peace. 

But what was most remarkable is how both would endure a gruelling sunrise to sunset dedication to election campaigns on behalf of the New Democratic Party, motivated largely by their sincere belief in the sacred nature of the democratic process.

 In this, Bob Hoover, like Mel, was relentless and continued to endure the most lengthy dull meetings at the age of 89, in support of the principles of social justice and the protection of the environment in which he believed so passionately in.
 Bob Hoover, until coming to St. Catharines in 1970 and becoming subsequently a Canadian citizen, lived in the United States. There he took up all the devout causes of his Methodist family, members of whom had been prominent in the abolitionist movement against slavery in the 19th century.

While his ancestors may have read the fiery gospel by a dim and flaring lamp during the Civil War, he used non-violent methods to combat the vicious racism of America in the 1950s and 1960s. He participated in all the major US civil rights marches and braved the attacks of guard dogs and sprays of tear gas.

He took up the cause of low income predominately black communities by in Newark, New Jersey, as City Planning Director, refusing to sanction schemes for destroying neighbourhoods that were perpetrated by politicians who were later convicted of corruption and links to organized crime and giving up his job rather than betray his principles.
In Niagara, Bob Hoover’s greatest accomplishment was to be the critical expert witnesses in four OMB hearings. The first two successfully stopped urban sprawl onto 1,350 acres south of Lake Gibson in Thorold, immediately adjacent to both the Short Hills Provincial Park and the drinking water reservoir for the City of St. Catharines and surrounding communities.
Then came a much longer and exhaustive OMB hearing, where he stood ground against an army of experts who used highly manipulative testimony. In the fire of this battle, emerged the principles that later provided the basis for the provincial Greenbelt. His last hearing, also successful, stopped schemes to dump sewage waste, into what later became the Provincially Significant Wetland of the Lyons Creek Clay Plain.
 For all his confrontations with the powerful, Bob Hoover following the lessons of his
faith, truthfully loved his adversaries.  And he was convinced that there were other ways to win the land other than in the controversial arena of the Ontario Municipal Board.  He knew too that zoning, which he loved to term the “police powers” of the municipality, to restrict developers, was only one of the instruments needed for good planning.  This he explained to us was especially true regarding agricultural land, where farmers have to work with nature to produce food. For this reason, he became the intellectual driving force in Ontario for the purchase of conservation easements to fruit growers in Niagara, which was achieved by the NDP in 1994/5 and then killed in one of the first cannon shots of the Mike Harris Common Sense Revolution.

What better tribute to the wisdom and good life of Bob Hoover could there be than for the current government to finally enact this easement program to bring political acceptability to the Greenbelt he did so much to foster.

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