Hanlon ‘improvements’ environmental disaster

(October 21) - It was hardly a surprise. The alleged “improvements” to the Hanlon Expressway passed the Environmental Assessment. This means that in the opinion of the Ministry of the Environment there is nothing wrong with the plans of the Ministry of Transportation.

The first plan is to build a major cloverleaf intersection at Laird Road. Then other changes at Kortright, Stone and College.

On the face of it, the project is an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Its impact will dwarf the development of the Hanlon Creek Business Park, yet it is pitched to us as an integral part of it. They want to rush the start into 2011 because of the HCBP development. Once this intersection is built, another just north of Woodlawn Road will be next, joining the Hanlon to a bigger and faster highway to Kitchener- Waterloo. Curtis Road lines up almost perfectly with a virtually unused intersection on the Conestoga Parkway at Wellington Street.

It’s all a folly.

Workers and supplies and products should be able to get in and out of the business park without relying on big 18-wheelers chugging up and down the highway. This is especially true if the type of companies being attracted there turns out as planned. Green jobs, you would think, rely on green transportation. All it takes is political will and corporate imagination.

If politicians force necessity to become the mother of invention, businesses will become inventive.

Go on the Internet and Google the Ontario Environmental Commissioner. You will find out why it is no surprise the highway redesign got approved. In his 2008 annual report, Gord Miller takes a hard and critical look at the whole process of environmental assessments. He calls it “a vision lost”. Born in the hope that public input can stop large developments from killing our natural heritage, it has morphed into a rubber stamp.

Miller says the process leads “inexorably towards the approval of projects.” Only two have been refused since 1996. A major flaw, in his opinion, is that large development projects are frequently split up into small components that each get their own assessments.

This piecemeal approach is supposed to be frowned upon, but happens all the time. Last January, an assessment was approved for the stretch of Highway 6 from near Hamilton to the Hanlon. The one just approved takes it from Maltby Road to Wellington Street. Another will look at the intersection planned for Silvercreek Parkway at Curtis Road. Yet another looks at the redevelopment of Highway 7 to Kitchener. The impact of the mega highway will be far greater than the sum of its parts.

Miller talks about the need to improve the Environmental Assessment Act by introducing the concept of a sustainability assessment. “Among other characteristics,” he says, “sustainability assessment emphasizes precaution; addresses cumulative and indirect effects, … recognizes natural limits; and above all, aims for greater community and ecological sustainability.”

What a concept. We wouldn’t just look at how well a cloverleaf fits onto a couple of acres of land today. We’d also look at how the highway fits onto a couple of hundred square kilometres of land 10 years from now. Some things make so much sense you have to wonder why they haven’t already happened.

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Incidentally, the city’s capital cost projection for the interchange is $3 million in 2011 and $17 million in 2012. Tonight, councillors start examining which big ticket items they will move forward with and which will be postponed.

Why not tell the province we can’t do the cloverleaf because we’re putting the $20 million towards a new library?