Stalwart

Bill Wightman has seen the winds shift in Prince Edward County over the past decade and some. He was among a very small group of folks in 2000 who coalesced around an effort to resist the development of a wind turbine project on a ridge near Pleasant Bay in Hillier.

Landowners who had signed contracts with the developer had been warned not to tell anyone. This didn’t sit well with Wightman. He had to know more. The more he learned about wind energy—its frailty, its cost and its intermittency— the more he worried this project would be much worse than an eyesore on Hillier’s horizon. He became convinced wind energy would become an utterly wasteful indulgence by a government eager to be seen as green, even if the only real beneficiaries were the developers and a few landowners.

Vision Quest’s plans sparked a bitter and angry debate in this community that subsided only when then-Mayor James Taylor cast a deciding vote, denying the project from proceeding through the planning stages. It was at a time when local councils still carried some authority over such projects and developments in their community.

Undaunted, Vision Quest filed a second application for an industrial wind turbine project in South Marysburgh surrounding Royal and Lighthall Roads. If the Hillier debate had been divisive—the Royal Road fight was downright nasty.

The fight pitted neighbour against neighbour in this sparsely populated corner of the County. Some were eager for the payday promised by the developer; others simply wanted to believe the promises of free, clean energy powered by the wind. Wightman and others who resisted the developer faced anger and recrimination at every turn—some of it stoked by the developer. In a 2005 story an energy industry publication quoted then-County Planning Chief Brian McComb saying that councillors were “very pro wind” and that he believed residents were also overwhelmingly in favour of the project.

More than 1,500 signatures were gathered on a petition in favour of the Royal Road industrial wind project.

Some of those opposed to wind simply abandoned the County rather than live amid the rancour and hard feelings that emerged in this fight.

Wightman and his coterie plugged on. They lost the battle at County council. Two years after it had rejected Vision Quest’s project at Hillier, council approved its 22- megawatt project at Royal Road.

Wightman and a handful of other individuals and groups, faced with a shrinking number of options, launched an appeal to the Ontario Municipal Board in a last-ditch effort to force the developer out into the open. Up until that point Vision Quest hadn’t been compelled to answer any real questions—either from the community or from council.

Wightman eagerly anticipated asking Vision Quest officials these hard questions, to compel it to substantiate its claims—under oath. But his chance never came. In 2004—before the hearing took place—Vision Quest asked for, and received, an adjournment to the proceedings.

Vision Quest project lead Jason Edworthy put on a brave face, telling a reporter the appeal would only slow the project down. But Vision Quest never moved to revive the OMB appeal. The project has traded hands several times since then. The appeal languishes on the OMB docket nearly a decade after it was stalled by the developer.

Then in 2009, the McGuinty government upped the ante by ramming through heavy handed legislation called the Green Energy Act. Despite its pleasing name, the Green Energy Act was created to crush regulatory and environmental safeguards and strip decision-making from local communities (thereby eliminating OMB appeals) to enable industrial wind energy development to sail more easily and with less scrutiny through the approvals process.

Yet the County, so far, has resisted industrial wind turbines. Much of the energy for the provincial fight is centred in Prince Edward County.

Many others have come to take up the fight Wightman began. Last year a survey of residents by the South Marysburgh Mirror found 90 per cent opposed the wind development in their community.

Bill Wightman has diligently and patiently gathered grass roots political support to push back against a government that no longer listens to its citizens. He believes only political action will reverse the course of the tax-dollar-hemorrhaging, environment-destroying and community-wrecking wind energy policies in this province and elsewhere.

He has used every manner of argument, reason and legal challenge over the past 13 years. He has used his own resources to support every effort to slow the developers down. Yet he is convinced that only when the government sees public support slipping away will it reverse this disastrous policy.

He sees the cracks beginning to form. There are hopeful signs.

Success in this struggle is hard to measure—but the fact that 13 years later the County remains unspoiled by this misguided policy is something Bill can look back upon with pride.

It should give the rest of us hope.

The Alliance to Protect Prince Edward County is hosting a tribute dinner to Bill Wightman at the Grange of Prince Edward Winery on Saturday, June 15. Tickets are $100 each and proceeds will be used to fund the health phase of the Environmental Review Tribunal appeal of an industrial wind turbine project at Ostrander Point.

This tribute is long overdue.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca