On Monday, Mark Calzavara, Regional Organizer for the Council of Canadians, and I visited the Melancthon Township near the Niagara escarpment. We visited the site of the proposed Highlands Quarry, which will be the second biggest quarry in North America. Melancthon is the potato capital of Ontario. This area is the headwaters for several important water systems like the Grand River that flows into Lake Erie.
The Highlands Company began buying up land telling local farmers that they wanted to be the biggest potato producer in the province. When the community discovered that the real intention was to excavate a massive quarry 200 feet below the water table, they began to fight back.
We visited the Horning's Mills Community Hall, the proposed hall for the public meeting on the issue. The hall holds about 120 people. However, the last community meeting that Mark attended had over 300 people in attendance.
The unique type of limestone from the quarry will supposedly be sent to Panama to rebuild the Panama Canal. The Highlands Company, owned by a Boston hedgefund, expects to make billions in revenue. The massive construction will threaten the vulnerable headwaters and destroy the agricultural community that has relied on the land for generations.
Maybe not the potato capital of Ontario, but "Potato farming is the central industry in Melancthon".
And what better way to stop urbanization than to keep the potato farms going?
As for windmill farms, they don't destroy underground water quality the way a quarry 200 feet deeper than the water table would.
No one wants a quarry but everyone wants streets , roads and sidewalks all of which take lime stone. So what do you do? I worked on construction for nearly 30 years and I can tell you that everyone bitchs but everyone wants the streets and sidewalks. There is more than a bit of hypocrisy in people's thinking , including a certain singer who complain about a quarry near her home. Until we perfect a teleportation machine we will need the quarries and stone they provide.
This article can not be taken seriously, Melancthon Township is not the potato capital of Ontario, and the nearest section Niagara escarpment is well over 30kms away.
The windmill farms in the area likely would have the same geographical foot print as the quarry would have thus the same amount of farmland has been lost already.
I am against the large scale quarries and corporate farms. I would like to family farms take root in this area again. I would like to see the urbanization of Dufferin County stopped, because too much farmland has been lost already.
I think the authors of this article should have take a different approach to this story.