Before I moved here last year to join CTV’s Parliamentary Bureau, I lived in north Oakville, Ontario, precisely 60 kilometres from my office in the Globe and Mail building at Front and Spadina in Toronto. We lived in what was then Liberal Gary Carr’s riding but is now the riding of Conservative Garth Turner. On his blog, Garth writes a lot about his riding, which includes part of the town of Oakville and all of Milton and, as I have fond memories of the time I spent living in that part of Canada, I find myself more than just professionally drawn to the stuff he posts.
Recently, Garth (left) took a bike ride up along Guelph Line — with the hills of Halton, that would be some kind of ride! — and while he marvels at the beauty of north Halton, he also has what I’d call a “Green Moment”:
… the defining feature of Halton is houses. They grow like weeds. People pay a lot to move here on the edge of the Toronto metropolis. … Roads cannot be widened fast enough. The 401 is a mess. Toronto smog days now extend all the way out to Milton, Oakville and Burlington.
I write about this because there will, of course, be consequences. Already are. Not just with real estate values, traffic patterns and unmet demand for community services. … Instead, this field stripped to its subsoil nakedness in the blistering late July sun is a symbol of something far more serious than those human problems which more taxes can solve. This is a rape of the land. …
This summer it has been 30 degrees or close to it almost every day where I live. Tomorrow the humidex is forecast to be 45. I read that Canada has never been warmer. The States, too. Yesterday came word of a study that showed the amount of sunshine hitting the earth is decreasing measurably, and yet we still get hotter – thanks to all the crap we have thrown into the atmosphere.
There are now restrictions on the amount of water people can put on their lawns. There are heat emergencies declared just about every week in the city. People with breathing problems are told to stay inside. Police are breaking into parked cars to free pets dying of heat exhaustion. The polar ice cap is melting and the sea is rising.
And I’m standing in front of 40 pieces of heavy equipment too hot to touch with an ungloved finger in a field denuded of vegetation where every molecule of moisture is being fried.
I hear that in October the Conservative government will be unveiling as new green plan – air protection, water protection, a made-in-Canada Kyoto strategy – and I can hardly wait. I’m not alone, watching a skinny coyote run across the gouged, empty dirt, looking for shade.
Our present patterns of behaviour cannot reasonably continue. Here in sprawl country the causes and the effects are obvious. It will take more than federal statues to change them. I would welcome a discussion on this issue as vigorous and passionate as the one we have been having over a strip of middle East land that is already a desert.