Dear Don Valley West Candidates
Dear Don Valley West Candidates,
We commend you for running in this election and your desire to represent our community at Queen’s Park. We appreciate that it is not an easy job to protect and promote the interests of your future constituents during these turbulent times.
Our community in Thorncliffe Park needs help in lots of ways, as a dense, low-income community with a large population of newcomers that are trying to navigate their way into a new life, we face more challenges than most. As a result, we need stronger and better political representation and an MPP that will stand up and fight for the short term and long-term interest of our community.
On April 8th last year, our community was completely blindsided when Metrolinx announced on the lawn of 2 Thorncliffe Park Drive, that it had decided to dump the massive train yard needed for the Ontario Line in our community – instead of locating it in one of the low-density, low employment dirty industrial areas to the north away from our homes, stores and restaurants and other community amenities. This decision was an absolute surprise to residents and made without any consultation with community representatives or stakeholders; instead the choice to locate in Thorncliffe Park was made after Metrolinx met with a couple of corporate interests that would have been affected if Metrolinx had followed through on their preferred location in the Wicksteed area. It should be noted that one of those two employers (which takes up a huge footprint with 200 employees) has since sold their property to a a US private equity firm and signed a 4-year lease. As a result of this decision, Metrolinx is negatively impacting 30,000 residents by displacing our community hub, and permanently walling off our community from the ability to grow and develop and altering the community dynamic – something that Metrolinx planners could not learn from a flawed employment survey and their desktop review.
Not only was the decision to dump on Thorncliffe wrong because it is based on faulty employment assumptions, but removing 700,000 square feet of real estate adjacent to a new subway station is not only bad planning, it is contrary to the government’s own stated policies about Transit-Oriented Communities and the Growth Plan. Thorncliffe Park needs more affordable housing, community facilities (schools are severely overcrowded), jobs and community open spaces. We fully support the Ontario line, however, we don’t need or deserve a massive, walled-in train yard, when there is a perfectly viable alternative that will not impede the progress of the Ontario Line.
We need a representative at Queen’s Park that understands and champions our community. One that will challenge the unaccountable engineers and consultants that burrow away making plans for communities they know nothing about and didn’t even make the effort to understand how the train yard would impact the people and local businesses they are disrupting with this decision. Unfortunately, in an effort to shorten the Environmental Assessment process for transit projects, the Ontario Government removed the need for a social impact assessment when planning new transit projects. In other words, that process completely ignores the impacts associated with a major infrastructure project like the train yard on the people who live in the community. The TPAP as currently constituted addresses impacts on the environment, but not on people.
When Metrolinx announced this decision we collected 10,000 signatures in a petition and we are going to tell all of them about where each candidate stands with this simple survey.
Do you support the currently proposed location of the Train Yard in Thorncliffe Park?Yes/No
Will you demand that the site selection process be publicly re-evaluated with an aim to finding a less intrusive location with fewer community impacts? Yes/No
Would you urge the Government to conduct a Social Impact Assessment that reviews the impacts of the short-listed options for the train yard before the current plan to located it in Thorncliffe Park proceeds any further? Yes/No
Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions on this important issue, we will be sharing it widely with our community.