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Disappointed in Premier Ford

July 25, 2024   ·   0 Comments

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Sir:

I agree with Rob Strang (Citizen Letters, 18 July) that Premier Ford’s concept of “green energy” is strangely convoluted.

The 1973 reduction of speed limits (90 mph in the USA, and 100 km and no Sunday driving in Germany) was intended to save gas consumption. As a car’s speed increases above 90 km/h its per-km gas consumption rises significantly. But Premier Ford has just raised the speed limit on some 400-series highways to 110 km/h. And we know how consistently that limit will be respected, but it will also burn much more fuel per mile. Alberta will be pleased.

Premier Ford is busily destroying several hundred acres of rural landscape by constructing Highway 413, when a better Highway 407 exists and would be better used if only the tolls were removed. The land surrounding Highway 413’s intended route is already owned or optioned by developers and is being built upon now.

Ontario Place, needing major maintenance but otherwise an ideal park, has been granted to a corporation that intends to pave and otherwise convert the site to a vehicle park plus commercial area, paving one of the few remaining potential rain absorption sites in Toronto. His revisions of the Greenbelt to favour special real estate interests did not sit well with me, either.

Premier Ford has proven to be a right-wing socialist friend of PM Trudeau and a leftist corporate friend of developers, with an inclination to ignore the few environmental improvements he could make himself.  I’m disappointed.

One can be a Ford non-supporter while also favouring environmental improvement and simultaneously dismissing the UN’s false “global warming” claims. They are three distinct, separate issues.

Charles Hooker

East Garafraxa

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