Creature of the province

The province doesn’t trust local government. According to those who wield power in the hallways of Queen’s Park,local goernment lacks the expertise, the resources or the discipline to make decisions beyond fixing potholes or clearing snow from sidewalks .

Municipal governments are not really governments at all. They aren’t recognized by the constitution, but rather are considered creatures of the province. Their function, financing and governing structure all depend on provincial authorization.

Without constitutional grounding, local governments are entirely subject to the whims of provincial government; wielded like a pawns on a chess board—to be used, sacrificed or ignored.

Then-premier Mike Harris believed he could wring millions of dollars in savings by dismantling local government and reassembling it into larger regional organizations. Inspired by the promise of his amalgamation scheme, he moved on to gut decision-making in local community hospitals and school boards too—arbitrarily centralizing authority away from those it served and those whom it relied upon for fundraising and capital.

He was wrong. It didn’t work. Instead, we got bloated, ineffective bureaucracies that were increasingly unresponsive and insensitive to the concerns of local citizens. Decision- making was moved further away from the people and the payoff—lower costs— never materialized. Meanwhile, fundraising and volunteering dropped like a stone.

But in many ways, what Dalton McGuinty did to local government was much worse. While Mike Harris sought efficiency of government— McGuinty’s ambition was personal. After five years in office, millions of dollars wasted and bureaucracies expanded, McGuinty’s government still wasn’t getting anywhere with wind and solar development in the province. The economics didn’t make sense. The technology didn’t work. And investors weren’t interested, despite gobs of taxpayer-funded subsidies thrust in their faces.

Meanwhile, green lobby groups such as the Ontario Sustainabile Energy Association, who had helped elect him, were becoming impatient. Desperate to accelerate his agenda, McGuinty gathered a small group of folks together in 2008. They advised him that he would never reach his goals unless the province took local government out of the equation. They said the same thing about several of the province’s own ministries—environment, natural resources and energy. The development process was simply too hard and time consuming.

McGuinty knew it would be a tough sell, so he marshalled experienced lobbyists including the David Suzuki Foundation, the Pembina Institute and Environmental Defence to form the Green Energy Act Alliance. Their job was to run ahead and make the pitch that the path to Ontario’s green future required tough action. What they didn’t say was that to do this it was necessary to decimate long established environmental safeguards, remove the checks and balances that govern industrial development, and eliminate local government from the process altogether.

Action was required immediately, and local governments could not be counted upon to act expediently. Certainly not fast enough to meet McGuinty’s targets. Nor could the protectors of fish, fowl, trees and their habitat. They, too, were obstacles to McGuinty’s ambitions.

The next year the Act was passed. The Ministries of Environment, Natural Resources and Energy were neutralized and transformed into McGuinty’s renewable energy machine—sent out to pock the horizon with industrial wind turbines made in Europe and cover the land, hundreds of acres at time, with solar panels made in China.

So far, PrinceEdwardCounty has managed, through the efforts of brave and communityminded organizations and individuals, to resist the scourge of industrial wind turbines. Who knows for how much longer? However, this community has seen about 300 acres of the County covered in solar panels so far. Another 200 acres are under construction.

We, and our local government, are seemingly powerless to govern these developers and to ensure they don’t diminish our communities and the infrastructure we fund and maintain. The Green Energy Act has made us and our local government bystanders in our own community.

We have become dependent on the kindness of developers, operated by numbered companies, to compensate our communities for the impact their projects have on our roads, bridges and environment.

On Black River, a project developer ignored the provisions of its provincially granted Renewable Energy Approval to enter into a road use agreement with the municipality in a timely manner. The project was substantially built before the developer got around to signing the road use agreement. It appears the same method is unfolding on Chuckery Hill right now (See story here).

So we are left, along with our local government and protectors of the natural environment, to simply watch developers obliterate natural habitat for the sake of profit and the province’s green ambition. We are, however, obligated to pay the bill for this expensive and needless energy source through our electricity charges and taxes.

As creatures of the province, local government is as powerless as the birds migrating across LakeOntario, the Blanding’s turtle searching for a nesting spot or the child whose inner ear function is disrupted by the presence of a nearby industrial wind turbine.

How long must we endure this powerlessness? How long before we demand that local government end its servitude to the province and begin working for its citizens?

rick@wellingtontimes.ca