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Stand up
It doesn’t change anything. It was always an impossibility that 12,000 County taxpayers were expected to maintain the 1,047 kilometres of roads that criss-cross this place. It remains a futile job description. Beyond our capability. It is especially so for County roads 49 and 33 (Loyalist Parkway). These roads should never have been downloaded onto this sparsely populated municipality without the means to care for them.
That the province has, at last, stepped up to fund the rehabilitation of the former Highway 49 is an unalloyed good thing. Perhaps even a sheepish acknowledgement of the mess it left behind when it walked away 28 years ago.
But we will be here again one day. Not you and me, mind you, we will have likely shuffled off to another plane by the time this road needs to be rebuilt again—but the problem will be the same. The County can’t afford these roads. It never could. And this funding announcement doesn’t change that arithmetic fact.
It would have come across as churlish to have pressed this point at the press conference last week. Besides, until the money has been transferred and the contractors paid, it is best to plaster on a smile and just say thank you.
But it doesn’t fix the problem—it merely pushes it down the road. And soon we will have to talk about the Loyalist Parkway (County Road 33).
Have you ever noticed how well Highway 62—from Bloomfield to Rossmore—is maintained and managed? Have you ever asked yourself why that is? Highway 62 is a wide, smooth and comfortable drive. Always wellmaintained in the winter
It is owned and operated by the province, with all the resources available to it.
Now, compare Highway 62 to County Road 49. Consider the last trip you made on each road. Both are arteries linking a bridge to the County’s economic and commercial heart. Both are well-travelled routes carrying thousands of vehicles each day. Both facilitate the transport of millions of dollars of goods each week. Both are used by ambulances carrying loved ones to specialty care.
But one of these things is not like the other.
One is a motoring dream, the other a crumbling nightmare.
It’s not a comment on municipal works; it is, instead, an illustration of just how wildly inequitable and astonishingly ludicrous our roads are funded.
The province taxes 13 million residents and benefits from an array of revenue sources to fund Highway 62. The County has its property taxpayers, of which there are simply too few. Rebuilding 49 alone would require an average levy of $4,358 per household if the province hadn’t stepped up.
We can, and should, be grateful—but it ought not dull our awareness of the impossibility of our circumstance. Rather, it should remind us who did the walking away in 1998.
We can be simultaneously thankful the province has finally shown up with some support and bitter that it has been absent for a quarter century. We can also hold healthy skepticism that they will be around for the next 25 years.
It is you, dear readers, who must carry this burden. Politicians, by job description, are short-sighted. There will be much back- slapping and gladhanding to celebrate the return of the parent who walked away from their responsibility. Those on the receiving end of the money won’t belabour the context. The absence. The abandonment.
So it is up to you. We must continuously remind those seeking your vote that they can’t simply walk away from their obligations. That arterial routes and the linking bridges must be cared for by the level of government that can afford to do so.
And finally, we might ask ourselves: Where was the federal government in this story? Elected just over a year ago, the talk has been Building Canada Strong. That message has been wall-to-wall. We elected a Liberal member to the government. It should have been an easy win for the new member. For the cost of an ArriveCan app, the federal government could have funded the rebuild of the entire 49.
Its absence is notable.
So thank you, Queen’s Park, for finally showing up. And thank you for your support cheque. But never forget that Highways 49 and 33 remain your responsibility. The property taxpayers of Prince Edward County didn’t run away. We didn’t hide. We did the best we could, with what we had.
Stand up, Queen’s Park, and take these provincial highways back.
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