Roads to Ruin

The Province is poised to build a highway that will arc across the Niagara Peninsula, threatening farm lands, headwaters, wetlands and wildlife with car-oriented sprawl. Now a determined coalition of conservation and citizens groups is fighting back, demanding that the government honour its pledges to combat the causes of climate change.

By Tim Tiner

Environmental Commissioner Gordon Miller, Ontario’s duly appointed ecological conscience, had some blunt advice in his annual state-ofthe- environment report last December. The provincial government, he said, must “avert any further plans for new highways and/or highway expansion projects” in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, reaching from Niagara to Peterborough, Midland and Kitchener-Waterloo. Current proposals for new and expanded roads and highways, predicted the commissioner, will destroy thousands of hectares of natural habitat and farmland in southern Ontario over the next 25 years. The province’s growth policies and car-use trends, he said, are outstripping the capacity of natural systems to support them.

“[Highways] are not the solution to the sustainable transportation future we need in Ontario and will undermine the necessary changes we need to make in development and the densities needed to support rail-based transit, which on a worldwide basis seems to be the viable way to go forward,” says Miller. “But if we remain car centred, we have no choice but to build new highways.”

Perhaps nowhere is the push for roads and growth more controversial than in the precious tender fruit lands, remnant Carolinian splendours and gritty industrial towns of the Niagara Peninsula. The province is contemplating an expressway, one of the biggest in recent years – as much as 130 kilometres long and at least four lanes wide – that could breach the Niagara Escarpment and cut through farms, wetlands, moraines, headwaters and some of the highest density of Carolinian forest left in southern Ontario.

The provincial Ministry of Transportation (MTO) predicts that traffic growth in Niagara over the next 25 years will require four new lanes, based on an anticipated addition of nearly four million people in the Greater Golden Horseshoe and a 3 to 6 percent annual rise in commercial trucking. But critics question the ministry’s assumptions, given the likelihood of escalating future oil prices. They also point out that another expressway, like others before it, will only spur more widespread auto-based commercial and residential development, committing the province to greater dependency on emissions-spewing vehicles, despite Premier Dalton McGuinty’s pledges to combat the causes of climate change.

“We have to stop extension of the 400 series highways if we are going to stop sprawl,” says Janet May, network director of the Ontario Smart Growth Network. Her organization has created a coalition of eight groups to date, including Transport 2000 Ontario and the Preservation of Agricultural Lands Society (PALS), to oppose urban sprawl and additional highway development. “Once you put in infrastructure, you increase the value of the land and accelerate development. In this province, we have a history of building subdivisions without looking at public transit needs, which leads to more pollution and harm to wildlife habitat.”

“It’s inappropriately timed, given the rising price of oil production,” echoes Jim Quinn, a biology professor at McMaster University and a board member of the citizens group Environment Hamilton. “Land-use planning should be pushing towards more transit rather than building new roads that lead to more traffic and contribute to global warming and [the release of] air-polluting contaminants.”

Since the 1970s, Niagara politicians have talked of building a new superhighway that would span the length of the peninsula, presenting the road as the solution to the region’s problems. Plagued by plant closings and downsizing in the auto, steel, paper and other manufacturing sectors, most of the Hamilton–Niagara area’s large centres have grown only marginally compared with the rest of Ontario over the past four decades. Indeed many city centres have hollowed out; along city outskirts, enormous shopping malls, big-box stores and industrial parks are built next to highways, and suburbs replace vineyards and orchards.

In the 1990s, the Conservative provincial government took up the cause of a new thoroughfare to accommodate rising volumes of traffic and commercial trucking between the Greater Toronto Area and the U.S. border. In 2001, the government proposed building the Mid-Peninsula Transportation Corridor, an expressway that would run through the centre of the region, from Burlington to Fort Erie. The route was trumpeted as a benign alternative to widening the clogged Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW) by sparing the tender fruit belt lying mostly below the Niagara Escarpment – public concern for this area had been widespread.

“The main impetus for the idea originally was to shift development pressure away from the Niagara fruit lands, to shift traffic and development to the south,” says Don Campbell, a planner with the Regional Municipality of Niagara.

The province, however, was forced to halt a fast-tracked, or “scoped,” environmental assessment (EA) for the Mid-Pen highway in June 2003 as a result of a court action that the City of Burlington and Halton Region launched. They charged that the process was too narrowly focused and therefore in contravention of the Environmental Assessment Act. When Dalton McGuinty and his Liberal government were elected a few months later, the Province promised to explore additional transportation options along the route now referred to as t he Niagara to GTA (NGTA) corridor in a broader EA, launched in December 2006.

“At this stage of the planning study, no decision has been made regarding the need for a new highway,” says Emna Dhahak of MTO’s communications branch. “All reasonable alternatives – that is, rail, road, transit and marine – to add capacity to the transportation corridor that links Niagara to the GTA are being examined.”

The ministry expects to announce its preferred option next summer. The EA will continue for another two to two-and-a-half years after that.

But many expressway opponents fear that the fix is in. “The MTO operates in a silo. They really should be called the ministry of highways because their history to date has been to not focus on other kinds of transport,” says May.

“No one is aware of any highway in the province that has been stopped by an environmental assessment process,” concurs John Bacher, a researcher with PALS. “You have to use diverse mechanisms to stop these things.”

Burlington’s objections to a new highway are based largely on concerns for a section of the Niagara Escarpment that dominates the city’s rural nongrowth area. The route MTO initially proposed would connect to Highway 407 around Walkers Line and ramp up a steep, well-forested section of the escarpment about three kilometres south of the commanding heights of the Mount Nemo Conservation Area. Despite the landscape’s protected status, highways deemed to be a necessary extension of infrastructure are exempt from the development restrictions attached to the Niagara Escarpment, the Greenbelt and other lands designated environmentally sensitive.

The Medad Valley, a narrow glacial spillway gorge that cuts deeply across the escarpment’s Mount Nemo bend, broadens into extensive forests and wetlands around tiny Lake Medad that would also be in the path of an expressway connecting to Highway 407. An Area of Natural and Scientific Interest (ANSI), the valley and its environs, covering more than 500 hectares, host an incredible diversity of plant communities. The black ash, silver maple and cedar swamps of this area mix with marshes, savannahs, meadows and a black spruce kettle bog. Deep, mature hardwood forests provide vital nesting habitat for many rare forest interior-nesting birds, including the threatened hooded warbler. The area also contains endangered butternut trees, the threatened eastern hognose snake and two dozen more regionally rare plants and dragonflies.

West of the Medad Valley, towards Cambridge, lies an even larger class 1 wetland complex, the 2,400-hectare Beverly Swamp. Several years ago, MTO was prodded into considering alternative western connections for the Mid- Pen highway. One would start at Highway 401 and pass through either the eastern edge of the Beverly Swamp or the continuous belt of forest that runs northeast from it to Milton. A second alternative route would connect to the junction of Highway 407 and the QEW via a widened Highway 403 through Hamilton and Burlington.

“There are all kinds of environmentally sensitive areas around here, so it will probably be difficult to draw out a route that misses them all,” says Jim Stollard, president of the Hamilton Naturalists Club, an Ontario Nature member group that has done extensive biological inventories of most of the sites.

“They are going to have to, by necessity, cut down trees, fill in wetlands and pave over moraines if they build a road,” warns Aline Tso, a member of the coordinating committee of Citizens Opposed to Paving the Escarpment. Her 1,000-member group, based in Burlington and Hamilton, was formed in 2002 to oppose the Mid-Pen highway. She adds hers to a chorus of voices that contends that money would be much better spent on public transit, freight rail and lake boat shipping to solve the region’s transportation problems.

A study done for MTO 14 years ago agrees. The Transfocus 2021 report, by planning and engineering consultants G.M. Sernas & Associates, estimated that a new highway from Hamilton to Fort Erie would cost $1.9 billion and claim more than 1,000 hectares of land. The report put the price of meeting the same transportation needs through expanded rail and bus service at $685 million.

The NGTA corridor now under consideration extends completely around Hamilton’s built-up areas, avoiding a traffic bottleneck east of the Burlington Skyway, says MTO’s Dhahak. Hamilton’s business community and politicians backed the route as a catalyst for boosting the city’s moribund economy, because the highway would swing near the beleaguered John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport south of the city and promote commercial development in the rural lands around it. The airport is a major air cargo hub, with international couriers UPS and Purolator based there, but overall flights have dropped by almost a third in recent years. The city wants to extend its urban boundaries to develop a massive 1,200-hectare industrial park on farmland beside the airport.

Tyler MacLeod, president of the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce, says he supports the expansion of rail and shipping, but the economic health of his city and the province depends on having an NGTA corridor. “We don’t envision this as just simply another highway,” he says. “We are talking about a new, modern, environmentally sensitive corridor.”

MacLeod, a stockbroker by trade, is confident that the ongoing EA will ensure that the impacts of new infrastructure will be minimal, pointing as an example to the Red Hill Valley Parkway, which was built along the thickly wooded Red Hill Creek to connect the QEW with the Lincoln M. Alexander Parkway above the escarpment in the city’s east end. The eight-kilometre expressway was completed last autumn after years of bitter opposition by environmentalists and community groups. “Because of the gridlock we see, we don’t see much alternative,” says MacLeod. “Cars and trucks are not going to go away in the next 10 to 15 years.”

Hamilton’s airport, however, and the land that the NGTA corridor would pass through, sit on uplands where the Niagara Falls, Fort Erie and Vinemount Kame moraines meet. Numerous ponds throughout the area of gently rolling farmland, tree nurseries and woodlots form the headwaters of four different watersheds, including the Welland River and a tributary of the Grand River. Another major stream, Twenty Mile Creek, flows 40 kilometres east before plunging over the escarpment at Ball’s Falls and into the Jordan Valley, together recognized as one of Carolinian Canada’s signature sites of critical natural areas.

“It’s a pretty ecologically sensitive area,” says Don McLean, co-founder of the citizens group Environment Hamilton, of the headwaters landscape. “All of Hamilton’s farmland is class 1 and class 2. So all new development [around the city] is into prime agricultural land.”

From Hamilton, the Welland River winds through flat farmland up the centre of the rest of the NGTA corridor. The slow, shallow, deeply meandering stream drains Niagara Region’s biggest watershed, a broad, heavy-clay basin lying between the Niagara Escarpment on the north and the lower Onondaga Escarpment along Lake Erie. Just south of the river, northwest of Dunnville, the Caistor- Canborough Slough Forest is a large remnant of the vast wooded wetlands that once covered much of the area. A series of connected woodlots covering almost 2,000 hectares, the forest contains slough ponds, marshes and silver maple-white elm swamps – mixed with stretches of hardwood forest on higher ground – that feed more than 20 local creeks and streams.

Many of the green spaces that could lie in or near the path of a future highway remain in private hands. Rodney Wright has a seven-hectare woodlot with a wetland at the head of Fifteen Mile Creek on his farm near Fenwick, northwest of Welland. “I’ve been looking after it all my life,” says Wright, 72, of his woods, designated a regional ANSI, in which grow endangered cucumber trees and other Carolinian species.

Wright fears that a new expressway will compound the pressure his area is already experiencing from expanding subdivisions in nearby Fonthill. Cutting through good farmland, disrupting drainage, creating salt runoff and other pollution, a superhighway, he says “would be hard on the environment and affect the wildlife. It takes away the pathways for endangered species.”

One of the most widely forested districts in Ontario’s Carolinian zone, the rural Willoughby area of southern Niagara Falls lies across most of the last stretch of the proposed NGTA corridor. About a third of the area is still tree covered, much of it by swamp forests of silver maple, red ash, black gum and swamp white oak, where the endangered prothonotary warbler nests. Willoughby also contains rare pin oak forests and savannah, as well as upland woods with other Carolinian species such as pignut and shagbark hickory, blue-beech and bur oak.

Niagara Region’s Campbell says a recently completed set of regional environmental policies will ensure that the impacts on natural heritage in such areas will be carefully considered. “It is a natural heritage system approach, with key core natural areas connected by natural corridors, preserving their significant features and functions,” he says. “We still have quite a bit of land within our urban boundaries that can contain growth. So I don’t think [a Mid-Pen corridor] necessarily means more sprawl.”

Others, however, note that the region’s new policy plan specifically permits any future route of the NGTA corridor to pass through its designated core natural heritage areas. Many people dismiss talk of smart growth by Niagara politicians and business interests as lip service. Jane Hanlon, executive director of the citizens group St. Catharines Climate Action Now, points to the new subdivisions, big-box stores, a multi-arena complex and a hospital built or underway on prime fruit lands in the west end of her city. “It’s this kind of planning that means everybody has to have cars,” she says, noting that St. Catharines – home to two huge General Motors plants – has only a limited bus service, used by just 2 percent of daily commuters, most of them students.

At the same time, average QEW traffic volumes on the peninsula have risen much more slowly – by just over 10 percent between 1990 and 2006 – than in the GTA. And the number of trucks, which comprise about 15 percent of the vehicles on the highway, has even begun to decrease, dropping from about 2.5 million crossing the border at Niagara in 2000 to about 2.2 million in 2006.

A new highway, says Hanlon, “is really just another excuse for more sprawl. It just really doesn’t make sense if you look at the numbers.”