You’ve heard the expression, “You can’t beat city hall.” Well, it turns out that you can. Or at the very least you can beat Metrolinx.
On Thursday, Metrolinx announced that they would no longer be considering the trail behind Margaret Greene Park as a location for the traction power station (TPS), a serious piece of infrastructure meant to regulate power from the hydro lines as its fed into the train tracks. Notice was posted unceremoniously on Metrolinx’s blog.
Regardless of the medium of the message, it was a welcome bit of good news for local advocates.
I’ve talked to many people invested in the idea that Margaret Greene Park was no place for a TPS, and their attitude about the situation is that they were fighting a hopeless battle that they were bound and determined to fight to the death. Though Metrolinx’s reps had said many times that no final decision had been made on the project, too many people thought the proverbial cat was already in the bag.
To everyone’s surprise, the cat wasn’t in the bag, and even more surprising than that, Metrolinx listened to the community.
It’s sad that citizen activists had been so pounded down by the system that the act of the government listening to the people is considered an unexpected reward. How far have we fallen that a large group people don’t think that their government’s going to listen to them as a default setting?
It might have something to do with the unanswered questions of the debate, questions that I hope don’t get lost in our Ewok victory celebration of the news.
First, how much influence did City of Guelph staff have making Metrolinx think a forest path behind the baseball diamond was a good spot for a TPS?
Why weren’t the Ward 4 city councillors given a heads up about such a major piece of infrastructure looking for a home in their backyard?
Why wasn’t the old Lafarge site more strongly considered when there’s land there that’s both directly under the hydro corridor and next to the Kitchener GO Line? Was the city and province concerned about crossing a private developer with a big property by taking a small piece of land for the TPS?
Why no public announcements until Thursday? Over 100 people came out in the middle of August, in the middle of a pandemic, to confront city and Metrolinx staff about the mere suggestion of putting a TPS in Margaret Greene. There was a lot of energy around this issue, and it felt like our leaders didn’t know what to do with it.
Part of the issue is the fact that both of Ward 4’s city councillors have negligible to non-existent social media presence. I’m not naive about the terrible side of social media, but those platforms also offer invaluable, immediate engagement with your constituents by the swift sharing of information with a large audience.
This is not to say that Christine Billings and Mike Salisbury don’t engage, they do, but it’s a matter of scale, and the economy of time. If you have a lot of people all concerned about the same issue, is it not easier to make a video with all the info and post it to your feed? It seems to work pretty good for the mayor.
I try to be sympathetic though because this is the first real crisis we’ve had in Ward 4 in a while. I’m a resident of this ward so read into this what you will, but life here, for the most part, is pretty good.
Ward 4 is well-serviced by commercial businesses, and much of it is walkable. We’ve got a rec centre with a library branch, and we’ve got lots of parkland like the aforementioned Margaret Greene. It’s a built-up part of town that’s relatively modern, which means not that many heritage features, and not that much in the way of infrastructure on the brink of crumbling due to age.
Yes, life’s pretty good in Ward 4, and though it could be better, there’s not much to generally complain about. Maybe that’s why we consistently have one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the city.
As a political animal, my hope is that this will make more people in my part of town more politically aware, because Metrolinx has been creating problems in Ward 4 long before the speculative placement of a TPS in the area’s biggest park.
That’s a long story, but it’s tied to greater issues of mobility in the ward. Let’s just say that there’s been more discussion about the best way to take the train to get out of town than talk about making it easier for people to travel around Ward 4 in anything but a private car.
Issues are rarely singular, and they’re rarely confined to the borders of one ward, but this time Ward 4 was the source, and there are lessons we need to take from that.
First and foremost, remember this: your voice matters, and sometimes you can beat city hall (or its equivalent).
