SO GUESS WHO'S REALLY IN CHARGE & WAGGING THE DOG'S (i.e. REGION'S) TAIL?

 

Two guesses and no it's neither you nor me! Developers and Builders have been lobbying and donating for decades to our provincial governments to exert pressure on municipal councillors and planning staff to grow, grow and GROW !  This growth is economic growth combined with population growth. Just look at how much worse our water supply is today versus thirty years ago. We used to be able to water our lawns with zero restrictions. Look at our hospital emergency departments. O.K. maybe they were never "good" but eight to ten hour ER waits. Never! Look at our highways plus even city congestion on the roads. I remember when driving a car was actually pleasurable. Sewage treatment getting better? Hardly. Look forward to the slow death of all our rivers as they are overwhelmed with partially treated human sewage. How about water quality? The Region of Waterloo have never demanded full cleanups at any contaminated sites much less full disclosure including criminal charges when citizens have died from pollution negligence including the Elmira Water Crisis and the Bishop St. TCE contamination by Northstar and Borg Warner (indirectly).    

There are legitimate reasons for growth including humanitarianism. The reasons also include accepting the best and brightest when they want to live here versus overcrowded, economically undeveloped, third world countries .  Even low birth rates in a country may very well be a good reason for SOME immigration. What is not a good reason however is what I believe is the predominant reason that industry, developers and government want high immigration and that is plain, simple greed.  More population equals a bigger market to sell everything to. It means a much larger supply of labour, hopefully deferential and modest labour satisfied with low wages and zero union protection.  When our major employers realized that they had to share the pie more fairly with employees actually doing the hard work and dirty jobs; they got testy.  All they wanted were desperate but hard working people who would take almost any job, work hard and show up day after day without expecting annual cost of living raises, benefits or any kind of democracy in the work place. Putting it bluntly if it was legally allowed they wanted wage slaves. 

Look at today's K-W Record . Two separate articles about developers and their demands are on the front page.  Both articles continue on pages A2 and A3 plus a third article is also on page A3. Long time Record reporters and employees Luisa D'Amato, Bill Jackson and Jeff Outhit have written these articles and done a solid job. There is lots of appropriate criticism of our local municipal and regional politicians. They were told by water experts decades ago as to what they had to do including putting all water related items from sourcing, maintenance, water treatment, sewage, distribution etc, in one governance basket. Instead it appears as if regional councillors in particular pretended to do that and talked about it but simply were satisfied that saying things like we have an INTEGRATED URBAN SYSTEM  (IUS) somehow made it so. Now they are telling us well it really isn't so. The province of Ontario also gets a failing mark as they actually have the authority to force this kind of governance upon the other bodies. 

I am also after 36 years beginning to understand how inept and incompetent both our local and provincial governments have been and why all three (municipal, regional, provincial) have so grossly failed here in Elmira to clean up health threatening and life shortening industrial pollution. Kudos to the K-W Record for these articles.