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Letter: ‘Reject this foolish folly of the Kingsway Entertainment District’

Project would contribute to the further decentralization of the city
KED-sign1Sized
(File)

The World Climate Emergency could not be graver, and we witness its effects up close in Northern Ontario, where our lakes are now ice-free fully two months more than was the case a few decades ago, quite probably heralding an irreversible chain reaction.

We cannot find solutions by burying our heads in the sand. We urgently need to embrace good design, good planning, sensible growth and a strategic plan for economic development more urgently now than ever. 

This needs to be a green sustainable solution not one that further exacerbates the underlying problem. But instead we are considering contributing to the further decentralization of the city, accelerating its undoing while fueling climate change. 

The Kingsway Entertainment District proposal is unconscionable, unacceptable and irresponsible. Are we illiterate hicks dooming our city to suburban irrelevance while disregarding our responsibility to each other, our children and the future?

At the community level we need to remember that people who do not own motor vehicles also pay taxes and deserve to have good access to public facilities and resources. 

This includes not just children, students, the poor, handicapped, an increasingly large urban non-driving population and the very elderly but people who just do not want to be obliged to drive many kilometres to pick up a bag of milk. 

The so-called Kingsway Entertainment District, which does not include a plan for a reliable, regular rapid transit system to get the public there and home again, is therefore unethical and contemptuous of a large portion of our population. 

This self-interested proposal of wealthy families eager to profit from the sale of their commercial property and services located next to the landfill where the highway peters out on the road to nowhere is a terrible plan.

Do we have no vision or public pride? You may say that we cannot afford such luxuries but look at a comparable Canadian city: Kelowna, BC is about the same size as Sudbury, and is similarly located about 400 kilometres from its metropolis in a lakeland setting with adjacent agriculture, a university, tourism and even a film industry. 

Apart from Kelowna’s overheated real estate, Sudbury is actually a much more economically significant urban area. Yet Kelowna has a thriving historic urban downtown - one that is attracting investment - a huge new arena, condos, hotels and restaurants. 

These are not unachievable things. The key is that the downtown with its amenities is also the transit hub. This city should provide inspiration for our development - not a diffused widening of the highway like Scarborough or Mississauga.

Sudbury’s historic city centre is the metaphorical and real heart of the city. Any efforts to relocate common public assets outside the actual city centre will only serve to accelerate the city's disintegration and marginalization. 

Look at the great things we have achieved in Sudbury since the forecast end of the mining industry decades ago prophesied a ghost town. 

The city has actually expanded, new industries have risen up and our scarred landscape has been remediated, thousands of years ahead of schedule. We have led by example and can do so again but we need a coherent, sustainable vision for our future, not an ethical jalopy like the KED perpetrated by self-interested hucksters like the ones behind the useless Springfield monorail from the Simpsons animated TV series.

I urge you to reject this foolish folly of the Kingsway Entertainment District.

Patrick Crowe

Sudbury