High-speed rail plan may cause hardship for rural Ontario

Among the many problems surrounding the Ontario Liberal government’s plan for highspeed trains between Toronto and London is its utter disregard for people living in the rural area west of Kitchener.

In its pre-election haste to push the half-baked project forward, the government mapped out a proposed route in a straight line following a hydro line between Kitchener and London. An environmental assessment is going ahead that considers only this route.

But no one talked to rural people, says Nicole Langlois, spokesperson for InterCityRail, an advocacy group that is urging other alternatives be considered.

“The government did not consult with any municipality or the public in this region before making its decision,” said Langlois, who lives in Kitchener and grew up on a farm near Embro.

“Only the major centres (Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, London and Windsor) were consulted.

“Those who stand to lose financially are not even part of the conversation.”

Their concerns include:

• Some farms would be split in half by the proposed rail line. High-speed rail lines can’t be crossed by level crossings. Overpasses and tunnels would have to be built, but only for some roads. So farmers would have to take detours to access the rest of their property.

• Emergency vehicles would take longer to reach people because of the limited ability to cross the train line.

• Despite government’s commitment to preserving the rich farmland of southern Ontario, building a brand-new line would destroy about a thousand acres of farmland.

• There is potential damage to wildlife and their habitats.

Many rural municipalities are asking the government to consider an alternative strategy that would use existing rail lines instead of building a new one. In this plan, named “high-performance rail,” there’d be stops at

smaller centres as well as large cities. The trains would be fast, though not as fast as the 250 km an hour of high-speed rail.

There are many other reasons to be concerned about high-speed rail. The cost is enormous. Our cities are too sparsely populated for highspeed rail to be sustainable.

And, as Kitchener-Waterloo’s New Democratic Party MPP, Catherine Fife, points out, shouldn’t the government first bring all-day, two-way GO trains between Kitchener and Toronto before starting this glamorous new project?

Fife sympathizes with rural residents who feel shut out.

“Everyone needs to be included in the process,” she said. “Unless those voters are respected, you’re designing a plan that will fail.”

On Wednesday April 18, Fife hosts a town-hall meeting about GO trains. It’s open to the public and starts at 6:30 at the Communitech Data Hub, 14 Erb St. W., Waterloo.

At 7 on the same evening, there’s a meeting at the New Hamburg Arena, hosted by InterCityRail to discuss its concerns.

Long ago, Kathleen Wynne cast her lot with urban voters. She made the latest announcement about high-speed rail from the Kitchener tech firm Vidyard. As premier, she should care about all Ontarians, no matter where they live. But as leader of the Liberals, she knows her party lost the trust of rural voters long ago. She has nothing to gain politically by listening to them now.