Skip to content

Letter: Laurentian process ‘like shooting one’s foot off hoping to save the rest of the body’

‘Can you believe that we will lose this jewel due to the incompetence and malfeasance of all the actors in this tragedy?’
Laurentian20201Sized
Laurentian University. (File)

Can you just imagine that the land that many Sudburians hold dear and has been the source of many hours of enjoyment while hiking and skiing the trails or simply taking in the natural beauty with which we have been blessed with for many years. 

Can you believe that we will lose this jewel due to the incompetence and malfeasance of all the actors in this tragedy?  

Imagine again this same property being purchased by a developer who builds a condo or worse, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and connecting roads, the runoff that will work its way down to an overladen with salt Lake Ramsey, another environmental disaster for this city. 

A city that has been well praised, due to the involvement of many, including the expertise of scientists from Laurentian University, for its regreening

This regreening being necessary because of the environmental damage due to the industrial processes of the past. We know better now. 

The physical and mental health of our city is dependent upon its green spaces, the greatest of all being the combination of the conservation area and the adjoining Laurentian University lands.

We are truly blessed to be living in this city, once maligned by those who didn’t know us. Folks that identified Greater Sudbury as a place of slag heaps and dead trees, we cannot allow ourselves to go back to that.

Not now when we are on the verge of becoming a more sustainable city, I’m hoping that the council will do all it can to reverse this current process that seems to want to become solvent by selling off a key component that attracts students to it in the first place. 

A bit like shooting one’s foot off hoping to save the rest of the body.

Call in all the favours you can muster, convince the provincial government that saving Laurentian University and its valuable programs is far more important than building more roads in Southern Ontario, building more fossil fueled electricity generating plants, and preventing conservation folks from saving us from a loss of wetlands and other important green spaces.

Look ahead to the coming generations, encourage our young people to stay here in Greater Sudbury, to get their education here, find suitable and rewarding employment and raise their families in a green and healthy community.

With fingers crossed, I am yours truly,

Glenn Murray
Val Caron