Dear Editor,
My family and I are very fortunate to live in the beautiful rural community of South Bruce, where we are facing the important decision of whether to host Canada’s Deep Geological Repository (DGR) for Canada’s spent nuclear fuel. We are also fortunate to have family in the beautiful Northern Ontario community of Sudbury, where we faithfully visit each summer, to visit relatives, pick wild blueberries, and enjoy the local parks and restaurants.
Why do I mention Sudbury? We’ve recently noticed the Sudbury streets falling into progressive disrepair, and a bit of research reveals the difficulty their Council is having maintaining the city’s basic infrastructure. Besides the notoriously bad streets, signs of aging and groaning infrastructure are everywhere, including 14 arenas ranging in age from 30 to 73 years, swimming pools over 40 years old, and aging emergency service stations. Faced with a huge funding gap, city leaders are desperately trying to attract more people to the city, to increase the tax base, providing more infrastructure funding. But opportunities are scarce.
The city of Sudbury was built on mining jobs, but many of those jobs have dried up, as mining has become more automated. More troubling than the crumbling infrastructure are the numerous families who have now seen a generation of their young people move “Down South” to get jobs.
What does this have to do with South Bruce? Well, our little community was built on agriculture, which used to be fairly labour-intensive. When I grew up in Bruce County, nearly every 100-acre lot supported a farm family. Most of my classmates came from farms, and the local villages were growing and thriving. The town of Teeswater had a thriving little retail sector, where my Mom used to take me Christmas shopping – imagine that! But agriculture has become much more automated and consolidated, with bigger machinery and far fewer farmers required, and now we often see our young people moving away to the city to find good jobs.
Unlike Sudbury, our little municipality is now looking at the economic opportunity of a lifetime – the DGR. This fully-funded, multi-generational project promises to bring hundreds of high-paying, high-tech jobs to our area, with a government mandate to build, operate and maintain the facility decades into the future. In addition to the resulting, sustained increases in tax revenue, the municipality has negotiated a Hosting Agreement that will see direct payments to offset any new infrastructure costs. Money isn’t everything, but when it comes to building and maintaining roads, swimming pools, fire stations, arenas and medical clinics, more money is better. In my opinion, this is the sort of deal other communities can only dream of.
Now our community has an important decision to make, whether to reject the deal, or embrace the future possibilities, job opportunities for our kids, and funding for our municipal infrastructure. The referendum happens October 21st through 28th.
Tony Zettel, Mildmay
