Fantastic arguments against boundary expansion

Vincent J. Curtis

9 Nov 21

RE: Stop the sprawl into Hamilton’s farmland.  Op-ed published in the Hamilton Spectator 8 Nov 21

The arguments used against Hamilton expanding its urban boundary approach the fantastic, and not in a good way.  And the piece by Doreen Nichol expressing such concern for Hamilton’s farmland was a bit rich coming from a Burlingtonian.  She needs to get out more.

Canada has no lack of farmland.  When you cross into Manitoba on Ontario’s Highway 17, the forests suddenly fall away and there before you lie the great prairies.  Two days of hard driving, passing hundreds of miles of wheat and canola fields, gets you to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, cattle country! The farmlands of Hamilton may be classed as agricultural, but they are already owned by the developers in anticipation of expansion, and crops will never grow on them again.

It is true that Hamilton gets some produce from California and Florida, and also the Okanagan Valley; but if Hamilton could grow oranges the world will have reached the climate disaster that Nichol is so fearful of.

The insinuation that boundary expansion will cause climate change were fantastic.  Urban boundary expansion will not cause the oceans to rise by another inch, slightly more of the polar icecaps aren’t going to melt, and Hamilton having the climate of middle Ohio is not a calamity in any event.

Nichol dismisses urban boundary expansion as some plot by developers tcrying to create a “pseudo-demand” Having nothing to do with “building affordable LEED-certified housing” but rather “the intentional destruction of farmland so developers can sell McMansions constructed on large lots” and having “everything to do with profit maximization because developers set the prices.”

Good Marxist that she is, utterly ignorant of the workings of the free market, and finding the making of money by developers such a horrible thing, it would be appropriate that Nichols was paid nothing for her work.

-30-