red hill dissertation: chapter 5
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5. Urban Sustainability, Neoliberalism and Public Ecology
Competing Visions of the Future
The proliferation of discourses of sustainable development and urban sustainability had
a significant affect upon the industrial imaginary that predominated in Hamilton politics
throughout the twentieth century. The prevailing assumption that urban development
can only occur at the expense of nature was challenged by growing awareness of the
inability to continue spatially segregating or otherwise externalizing the socio-
ecological impacts of development, and particularly development dependent upon
industrial manufacturing and transportation infrastructure. Faith in the vitality and
stability of industrial production as the backbone of the regional economy had been
undermined by the plant closures and layoffs of the 1980s and ecological
modernization, as outlined in the Vision 2020 plan, offered both a means of economic
revitalization and a new vision of a cleaner, greener city no longer defined by
smokestacks and industrial pollution. Realizing this vision, however, was another
matter. Despite the declining prominence of manufacturing, Hamilton remained
dependent upon patterns of urban development and strategies of economic growth
rooted in this earlier Fordist era.
Hamiltons urban form and infrastructural networks of roads, railways and
waterways has been shaped to a large degree by the prominence of industrial
manufacturing and its concentration along the Lake Ontario waterfront. The Red Hill
Expressway is a prime example of this path dependency and infrastructural inertia
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(Atkinson and Oleson 1996), having been proposed in the 1950s and promoted over the
following two decades as a crucial transportation corridor for sustaining and expanding
the local manufacturing sector by connecting the industrial waterfront to suburban
housing and neighbouring centres of growth. With the decline of manufacturing in the
1980s and 1990s, the project remained in place largely through the substantial financial
and political commitments that had already been made by politicians, planners, land
speculators and businesses. The shape of future growth had been predicated on the
expected completion of the road and its anticipated benefits for development at the
southern and eastern limits of the city. The cancellation of these plans presented serious
challenges for the various interests who had long staked their financial and/or political
future on the projects realization.
With the economic recession of the early 1990s and the growing pressures for
interurban competition, the development of greenfields on the escarpment continued
to unite the interests of developers, politicians and planners around the completion of
the road. The municipality, dependent more than ever upon the local tax base, continued
to concentrate on attracting manufacturing as well as service-based industries, but now
focused on the various industrial parks that had been established on the escarpment.
Further, the election of the Mike Harris provincial government in 1995 brought a
dramatic reduction in political and financial support for policies of ecological
modernization as environmental programs were quickly targeted by the cost-cutting
fervour and austerity measures of the so-called Common Sense Revolution (Krajnc
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2000).1 Thus, while pursuing ecological modernization through innovative planning
policies and guidelines and through support for restoration efforts such as the Remedial
Action Plan for Hamilton Harbour, the Region remained committed to neo-Fordist
development, with the expressway being the most prominent and pivotal example.
Proponents faced the difficult task of presenting the roadway and associated urban
expansion as compatible with the increasingly well-established, if vaguely understood,
principles of sustainable development.
The apparent contradictions between the goals of the expressway and the Vision
2020 plan increasingly became a target for criticism from a variety of environmental
organizations, including the well-respected Bay Area Restoration Council (BARC), the
multi-stakeholder group created to oversee implementation of the Hamilton Harbour
Remedial Action Plan. (RAP). In late 1995, BARC joined the Friends of Red Hill Valley
and other opposition groups2in calling for a full environmental assessment of the
modified highway route due to significant changes in design and concern over the
negative impacts for the Harbour, which had not been considered in the 1985 joint-
1 The Common Sense Revolution was presented as a response to the economic recession thatwould stimulate development by introducing strong medicine: opening up service provision tothe private sector, removing regulatory red tape and drastically reducing governmentspending. The provincial NDP had already cut environmental spending but the HarrisConservatives would cut further and deeper, eliminating one third of the Ministry of theEnvironments 2000 staff positions and introducing a series of bills that limited or removed
provincial responsibility for a wide range of environmental regulations (Krajnc 2000).
2 These groups included the Bay Area Restoration Council, Bruce Trail Association, BurlingtonConserver Society, Citizens for a Sustainable Community, the Conserver Society of Hamilton,Community Action for Parkdale East, the East Hamilton / Stoney Creek Health Association,Friends of Red Hill Valley, Greenpeace Hamilton, Hamilton Naturalists Club, Kings ForestOrienteering Club, Save the Valley and Watershed Action Towards EnvironmentalResponsibility (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, December 1995).
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board assessment. In late 1995, concern over future contaminant flows from the
highway and adjacent landfill sites was exacerbated by unprecedented flooding in the
valley following a severe thunderstorm (Hamilton Spectator, March 28, 1996).
Representatives of BARC argued that, the severe damage to the citys largest park and
natural area (and the last of the 14 streams that once flowed into the south shore of the
bay) flies in the face of the ecosystem rehabilitation and protection philosophy of the
Remedial Action Plan (quoted in the Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, December
1995). Further concern surrounded the revelation that the expressways connection to
the provincial Queen Elizabeth Way via an interchange in the sensitive wetland areas
near the waterfront had also not been considered in the original environmental
assessment (Hamilton Spectator, October 3, 1995).
Bolstered by the cancellation of provincial funding for the road under the NDP,
critics of the project were particularly vocal throughout the mid 1990s, with the Friends
of Red Hill Valley leading the charge. Numerous letters appeared inthe Hamilton
Spectator, often presenting the expressway debate as a battle between two competing
visions of the future: one based on the indefinite extension of the post-war pattern of
economic activity and land development, utterly dependent upon automobiles and
trucks and the other concerned with the livability of cities when the dreams of ever-
increasing prosperity have died (Hamilton Spectator, July 29, 1994). In response, some
expressway proponents insisted that measures such as public transit and intensification
would only be possible when and if supported by market demand and continued to
present environmental damage as an unfortunate but unavoidable cost of progress and
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economic growth (Mike Bryan inHamilton Spectator, March 9, 1998). This familiar
argument drew upon the industrial environmental imaginary and its representation of
nature as raw material for production or empty space for development. It also relied
upon popular conceptions of local pride in Hamiltons Steel City resilience and the
ability to survive tough social and environmental conditions a macho celebration of
the local capacity to weather the environmental costs of economic production and
growth, an ability that allegedly separated Hamilton from the more pristine and affluent
communities in the GTA.
Others struggled to present the expressway as itself an example of sustainable
development, highlighting the restoration of the valley and arguing that a more
environmentally sensitive four-lane expressway could improve air quality by
lessening congestion in the city core (Regional chairman Terry Cooke inHamilton
Spectator, July 25, 1997) and providing more efficient traffic flows than crowded city
streets (Jim Harvie inHamilton Spectator, October 9, 1997). Many expressway
supporters continued to suggest that environmentalists were taking a narrow view of
environmental problems by focusing on the protection of greenspace and wildlife
while neglecting to provide realistic solutions to inner city congestion and the safety
concerns surrounding truck traffic in the east end (Robert Williamson inHamilton
Spectator, September 24, 1997). In this way, critics of the expressway were represented
as promoting an environmentalism that protected greenspace at the expense of the
public desire for the security, health benefits, and convenience offered by less congested
city streets.
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It is clear, however, that the strategies utilized by opposition groups had advanced
considerably by this time. While critics still highlighted the impacts of the road on
human health, recreation and local ecosystems, the conservation ecology narrative
evident in the opposition of the 1970s and 1980s had broadened to include consideration
of the larger political economic dimensions of the expressway project, its uneven spatial
and socio-economic impacts, and the decision-making processes involved. A more
inclusive narrative ofpublic ecology was emerging, laying the foundations for a more
comprehensive critique of urban development that would gradually change popular
conceptions of urban nature, linking conservationist concerns with the broader issues of
democratization and environmental justice. This shift is most evident in the activities
and publications of the Friends of Red Hill Valley, who quickly established themselves
as the most prominent critics of the expressway during the 1990s. Following the partial
restoration of funding for the project by the Harris Conservatives, Friends and allied
groups focused public attention on the financial costs of the highway and the diversion
of spending away from other priorities such as the repair of aging infrastructure or the
protection of social services endangered by the cost-cutting measures of the provincial
government.
The term public ecology refers to efforts to support both broad participation and
meaningful deliberation in environmental decision making (Hull and Robertson 2000:
113), based on the recognition that all environmental issues are inherently normative
and based upon differing experiences and valuations. Public ecology maintains that our
understanding of nature and environment are unavoidably shaped by the language
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and culture through which they are articulated. As a consequence, environmental
conflicts cannot simply be resolved by appealing to scientific authority or economic
necessity but requires democratic debate and deliberation that clarifies the values,
interests and assumptions that inform the words and actions of the different actors
involved. This chapter explores the emergence of this revitalized narrative of public
ecology in opposition to the efforts to recast the expressway project and associated
urban expansion as examples of sustainable development and to define urban
sustainability in ways that marginalized or obscured issues of democratization and
environmental justice.
Neoliberalizing the Steel City
The Common Sense Revolution launched by the provincial Conservative government
of Mike Harris represented a significant rightward shift in urban policy and discourse
within Ontario, introducing an austere program of neoliberal funding cutbacks,
deregulation and privatization, and contributing to a political climate in which economic
development and the creation of a good business environment was reasserted as the
first priority of urban governance (Keil 2002). The Harris Conservatives blamed the
economic recession of the early 1990s on Ontarios bloated public sector and the
impediments to economic growth presented by wasteful spending. excessive
taxation of the private sector and middle-class, and the bureaucratic red tape of
governmental regulation. This resurgence of faith in market forces and
entrepreneurial innovation was reinforced by the popularity of such ideas on an
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international and global scale during the mid 1990s (Harvey 2007). Echoing the militant
shock therapy honed by earlier advocates of neoliberal reform such as Milton
Friedman, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (Klein 2008), the Conservatives
proposed to reduce the size and cost of government with dramatic reforms that
included spending reductions in education, health-care, welfare and other social
programs; tax reductions and rebates; reductions in the number of provincial politicians
and staff; and the deregulation and/or privatization of many public services. These
rollbacks included a 42% funding reduction and the loss of 900 of 2400 front-line
positions in the Ministry of the Environment (Krajnc 2000). The Conservatives strongly
advocated the idea of voluntary self-regulation, allowing industries to regulate
themselves with respect to environmental pollution. These cutbacks and deregulatory
measures played a major role in the water contamination crisis in Walkerton, Ontario,
which claimed the lives of seven people and resulted in the poisoning of hundreds more
in 2000 (Prudham 2004).
Following the election of the Harris Conservatives, municipal governments faced
increased pressure to run cities like a business, cutting spending and increasing
efficiencies by introducing market competition, focusing on value for money for
taxpayers, and investing greater energy and funds in place promotion to attract new
private investment. As John Rennie Short writes, In the new representations, more is
said about the city as a place for business, for work, attractive to the senior executives
and the governing class of the business community, and much less is said about the city
as a place of democratic participation, the city as a place of social justice, the city as a
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place where all citizens can lead dignified and creative lives (1999: 53). The
introduction of roll back neoliberalization, which aimed to undue Keynesian welfare
state policies through funding reductions, deregulation and privatization of
governmental services (Brenner and Theodore 2002), brought a renewed emphasis on
middle-class security and the persecution of those social groups most directly affected
by spending cutbacks, such as the unemployed, street youth and homeless people (Keil
2002).
Divisions between citizens within the inner cities of Toronto and its satellites, and
those in the suburban and exurban periphery (on the whole, more affluent and less
culturally diverse) were exaggerated by this discourse of inner city threat and the
Conservatives emphasis on the transference of tax funds to outlying suburbs. This was
done through the reduction of public services and programs, the introduction of urban
amalgamations that in many cases increased the numbers and political influence of
suburban politicians on municipal councils, and the encouragement of accelerated
suburban and exurban expansion through the removal of regulatory constraints on
commercial, residential and infrastructural development.3 This socio-spatial division
between the inner cities and their suburban and exurban peripheries concentrates wealth
within the outlying areas and evokes the frontier imaginary outlined in Chapter 2,
representing inner city neighbourhoods as a moral and socio-economic wilderness in
need of redemption through gentrification (Smith 1996).
3 The gradual development of political divisions between the inner cities and suburbs of theGreater Toronto Area has been well documented by R. Alan Walks (2004) through his study ofprovincial and federal voting patterns.
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Many in Hamiltons business community and municipal government embraced this
rightward shift, as it provided further ideological support for representations of the
expressway and associated suburban development as the key to Hamiltons economic
recovery and pursuit of global competitiveness.4 However, the Conservative program
of funding cuts also meant that little money was made available for municipal spending,
even for road infrastructure. The Tories endorsed the road and restored funding but
rejected the original cost-sharing formula in favour of a lump sum of $100 million over
five years. This deal left the Region scrambling to make up the difference, estimated at
$100 to $140 million, for the completion of the Mountain expressway and the
construction of the Red Hill route (Hamilton Spectator, December 19, 1995). The
Friends of Red Hill Valley quickly began raising concern about the financial burden this
would place on the Region and predicting significant tax increases and spiralling
municipal debt (ibid, December 13, 1995). They emphasized the costs of road for
individual taxpayers and called for greater democratic accountability and
transparency on the part of the municipal government. Over the following years, the
group produced a number of humorous posters and press releases to illustrate these
concerns (Figure 5.1). In this way, the group both responded to and adopted neoliberal
rhetoric, shaping their discursive strategies in the attempt to appeal to a wider cross-
section of people.
4 In 1995, the Region became the first municipality in Canada to privatize its water andwastewater system, opening up a revolving door of ownership, technical accidents and politicalcontroversies before reverting back to public ownership in 2004 (Buckley 2003). The Regionsoon began adopting public-private partnerships for waste management as well.
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Figure 5.1: 1000 Expressway Dollars depicting Regional Chairman Terry
Cooke (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, February, 1996)
The province soon began downloading responsibility for various services to
municipalities, including public transit, health services, affordable housing and the
administration of social assistance. This restructuring only increased the financial
pressures on the Region of Hamilton-Wentworth and the expressway itself was soon
subjected to neoliberal logic in the search for possible ways of continuing to fund its
completion. The Region began considering tolls but this was rejected by then provincial
Transportation Minister Al Palladini, who suggested that the Region consider more
innovative means of soliciting private funding sources, such as selling billboard
advertising space along the roadway. The Region also considered private-public
partnerships in which funding for the road would be gradually repaid to private
construction firms through a kind of lease payment (Hamilton Spectator, September
5, 1996). This reflected the Conservatives move away from the well-established
modernist conception of highway infrastructure as a government-funded public good
and toward what Graham and Marvin (2001) describe as splintering urbanism a
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privatized vision of infrastructural networks that are determined solely by the demands
of the market and thereby link together the residential and recreational enclaves of more
affluent citizens with the premium network spaces that facilitate economic growth.5
In Hamilton, during the late 1990s, financial pressures increased due to the
provincial cutbacks, earlier expenditures on the servicing of new and proposed housing
developments on the escarpment (estimated to $53.4 million between 1989 and 1994),
and long-neglected maintenance costs for the citys existing infrastructure of aging
water pipes, sewers and roadways. Regional staff recommended tax increases to address
these escalating costs, along with alterations in funding allocations to avoid the
channelling of maintenance funds towards special projects such as the expressway
(Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, February 1997). The private funding plans for
the highway were soon abandoned in favour of cutting a number of expenditures from
the project, including the scaling back of flood protection plans and the elimination of a
bridge designed to elevate the expressway over a portion of the creek. This leaner and
meaner expressway (language that clearly echoed the neoliberal rhetoric of the times)
was met with grave concern from many environmentalists because a portion would now
run along the valley bed and require re-routing of over seven kilometres of the creek
(Hamilton Spectator, March 14, 1997).
With $41 million trimmed from the project, the provincial government agreed to
provide additional funding for the interchange connecting to the QEW (Hamilton
5 This vision is illustrated by provincial Highway 407, which became a toll route after theConservatives sold the road to a private consortium in 1999.
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Spectator, July 11, 1997). As anticipated, the province also approved the Regions
request for exemption from further environmental assessment, despite the changes in
design since the joint-board approval in 1985. However, expressway critics had already
begun focusing their attention on the federal government and soon began lobbying the
Federal Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans and Environment Canada to launch an
environmental assessment on the basis of anticipated impacts for the creek, wetlands
and harbour. The completion of a biological inventory by the Hamilton Regional
Conservation Authority (HRCA) in 1995 provided further support for their arguments in
favour of the areas ecological significance. The study confirmed the valleys
importance as an important migratory corridor for birds and documented a wide variety
of flora and fauna, including 600 plant species, 24 species of mammal, 24 species of
fish, and 177 bird species. Five rare species of plants and birds were noted. In almost all
cases, the diversity of plant and animal life was significantly higher than previous
assessments in 1991 and 1985 (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, September 1996).
Public use of the valley was also increasing at this time, encouraged by the opening
on an end to end recreational trail and guided walks organized by the Friends of Red
Hill Valley and the HRCA. While the provincial government had withdrawn funding for
the rehabilitation plan introduced by the NDP, the HRCA organized a volunteer group to
continue these restoration efforts. Members of Friends were also becoming heavily
involved in participatory ecological monitoring programs that provided local citizens
with opportunities to learn about the flora, fauna and ecological conditions of the valley
while actively gathering data that was potentially useful for its protection. These efforts
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were also an explicit response to the provincial rollback of environmental regulations,
which sparked similar programs throughout Ontario in the late 1990s (Sharpe et al.
2000). One of the most successful and long running programs in the Hamilton area is
Watershed Action Toward Environmental Responsibility (WATER). Initiated by Dr.
George Sorger, a biologist from McMaster University, WATER has trained local high
school students to monitor pollutant levels in local waterways, including various points
along the Red Hill Creek (Sorger, June 27, 2005). Other academics from McMaster
began conducting assessments of the ecological impacts of the expressway, including
Dr. Joe Minors widely reported calculation that up to 47,000 trees would likely be
removed by highway construction (Hamilton Spectator, April 25, 1997).
Through numerous articles and press releases published by chairperson and veteran
environmental activist Don McLean, the Friends of Red Hill Valley continued to
question the ecological and financial costs of the road, insisting that the Region had
failed to provide any up-to-date empirical evidence of the traffic demands that
necessitated the expressway or the economic benefits that would allegedly follow
construction. McLean noted that the levels of traffic moving across the escarpment
predicted in the Regions last estimation, from 1982, had failed to materialize and
argued that this earlier assessment had falsely assumed continual employment growth
along the industrial waterfront. Earlier estimations of the economic benefits of the
highway were also put into question. McLean argued that, unlike the 1970s, Hamilton
now had a surplus of vacant business parks and that the primary reason for the absence
of investment was not lack of highway access but Hamiltons outdated image as a
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polluted industrial city (Hamilton Spectator, October 15, 1997). Friends and their
supporters argued that Hamilton should concentrate on the transformation of that image
and the regional economy itself by prioritizing urban intensification, downtown
revitalization, environmental protection and quality of life, in many ways anticipating
a discourse of urban renewal and an alternative environmental imaginary that would
become increasing prominent by the turn of the century.6
Issues of global trade also became more prominent in the debate at this time, with
critics of the project arguing that the growth and acceleration of cross-border trade
under the North American Free Trade Agreement would ensure that the expressway
would become a shortcut for truck traffic heading to and from the United States border
at Niagara. While trucking companies paid fuel taxes for the maintenance of provincial
roads, maintenance of the expressway would remain the sole responsibility of the
Region a situation that one letter writer described as another form of downloading.
Critics maintained that the road would simply serve as a means for traffic to bypass the
city, while burdening the surrounding area with increased pollution, congestion and
noise (Hamilton Spectator, January 20, 1998). However, for many proponents of the
expressway, particularly within the business community, linking the city to these cross-
border and global flows of goods and services was viewed as the key to future profits
and sustained economic growth. From this perspective, Hamiltons survival depended
6 This call for an alternative urban future was reinforced by local environmental disasters suchas the Plastimet fire of July 1997, a blaze at a plastics and vinyl recycling site in downtownHamilton that burned for four days and cast a massive cloud of smoke and soot over the city.The materials burning at the site included highly toxic polyvinyl chlorides or PVC. The fire wasimplicated in the subsequent illness and death of a number of local firefighters by cancer.
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upon taking advantage of its geographical location between the economic nodal points
of Toronto and the US border crossings, expanding its ground transportation network in
the effort to attract commercial and industrial business.
The Red Hill Expressway was increasingly regarded as part of this larger
revitalization vision one piece of a larger road network whose purpose was no longer
to support steel manufacturing on the waterfront but rather to encourage new industrial
and commercial development on the escarpment and further south towards the John C.
Munro International Airport, building a larger multi-modal transportation network in the
process. This vision of the future re-imagined Hamilton as a transportation hub and
goods distribution centre for just-in-time delivery goods and services, building upon
its historical strengths in manufacturing and expanding the existing multi-modal
infrastructure (the port, airport, roadways and railways) to attract companies
specializing in value-added products for export.7In the words of Hamilton Chamber of
7 One of the key promoters of this vision was TradePort International, a developmentconsortium that took over operation of the Hamilton International Airport under a controversialprivatization agreement with the Region in 1996. The TradePort consortium was composed ofYVR Airport Services, a subsidiary of the Vancouver Airport Authority, Local 837 of theLabourers International Union of North America (LIUNA), and WestparkDevelopments, alocal real-estate and land development company. Both LIUNA and Westpark were involved innumerous commercial and residential developments in the Hamilton area. TradePort founderand president Tony Battaglia was also president of Westpark Developments and a formerpresident of the Hamilton-Halton Homebuilders Association. TradePorts Board of Directorsalso included Ron Foxcroft, founder of Fox 40 International and CEO of the Fluke
Transportation Group a major proponent of the expressway. Prior to leaving his position asRegional Chairman, Terry Cooke began working for Fluke Transportation and later served asCEO. In 2007, YVR Airport Services took over complete ownership of the airport in a $13million deal. Controversy continues to surround Hamiltons private lease agreement withTradePort, under which financial, shareholder and management information remains private.Particular concern has been generated by the large sums of money that Hamilton has spent onairport-related developments ($12 million between 1996 and 2006) in contrast to the smallamounts of money that the city has received through its revenue sharing agreement (HamiltonSpectator, April 8, 2006).
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Commerce CEO John Dolbec (November 18, 2005), one of the most vocal proponents
of the expressway, Hamilton is a natural hub as a goods distribution centre and so
Hamilton almost cant help but succeed in spite of itself. But to play in that game you
have to have some pieces of infrastructure that are just absolutely essential. The
opening of the east-west expressway, dubbed the Lincoln Alexander Parkway, in
October 1997 was widely celebrated as the first step in completing the larger
transportation network and increased the pressure to complete the Red Hill link.
Increasingly, the expressway was seen as crucial to this vision of economic renewal
through transportation infrastructure and new commercial and industrial investment on
the periphery of the city a vision that remained very attractive to real-estate
developers, residential homebuilders, construction, trucking and transportation
companies.
While expressway supporters continued to emphasize the anticipated benefits of the
highway for economic development, they were also forced to respond more
substantially to the sustained criticism of the projects ecological impacts and charges of
its inconsistency with the conception of sustainable urban development presented in
Vision 2020. To this end, proponents pointed to the promises of environmental
mitigation and restoration made by the Region and the alleged health and security
benefits of shifting commuter and truck traffic from arterial roads to the valley route.
The expressway was increasingly represented as a green highway that could reconcile
the need for the preservation of greenspace with the need for more efficient flows of car
and truck traffic. Furthermore, many proponents struggled to describe the road as an
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example of precisely the kind of sustainable development advocated by Vision 2020.
Using the plans familiar representation of sustainability as a three-legged stool,
connecting economic, social and environmental goals, pro-business groups such as the
Chamber of Commerce argued that expressway opponents were focusing narrowly upon
the environmental leg while downplaying or ignoring Hamiltons need for economic
sustainability. In the words of Chamber CEO John Dolbec (interview, November 18,
2005), the whole system has gotten out of balance in terms of the economic
development aspect of sustainability.8 Because its not sustainable for this city to keep
growing in population and not have employment growth keeping pace.
The relative decline of commercial and industrial contributions to the municipal tax
base and the corresponding increase in residential contributions was frequently cited as
evidence of Hamiltons need to attract more investment and avoid becoming a
bedroom community for the GTA (Ed Fothergill inHamilton Spectator, October 26,
2003). From this perspective, the expressway was a key contributor to that growth and a
means of achieving a balance between economic, social and environmental
sustainability. In contrast, opponents of the project were frequently represented as
advocating an unbalanced view of sustainability, calling for environmental protection
while advocating little or no economic development (Dolbec, November 18, 2005). In
the effort to reconcile the continuation of Fordist-style development, heavily dependant
8
This comment is very curious, as it implies that there was a balance between economic, socialand environmental sustainability in the first place! In fact, it is precisely the lack of balance andthe privileging of narrow economic concerns over social and ecological well-being thatprecipitated the discourse of sustainable development and sustainability more broadly.
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upon road infrastructure, suburban expansion and a historical specialization in
manufacturing, with growing public support for intensification, public transit and
environmental protection, the notion of balance became an important rhetorical tool.
Advocates of the expressway and the larger transportation hub plan argued that these
goals were not mutually exclusive and that Hamilton could and should pursue all of
them simultaneously. As discussed below, these ideas would be further developed as
public environmental concern began to increase again, spurred by the acceleration of
urban growth in Southern Ontario and the global concern with the impacts of climate
change.
Multiplying Paths of Resistance: Justice, Development and Democracy
Networks of resistance to the project were also expanding and diversifying during the
late 1990s, with local social justice, peace and animal rights groups joining the more
prominent environmentalist organizations in opposition. Many of these groups were
loosely connected to the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) at McMaster
University, which began publishing information about the Red Hill debate in its
newsletter and established a working group on the issue in 1998. Through these
channels, those involved in resistance to the highway connected with other OPIRG
groups around the province, as well as local groups such as Hamilton Action for Social
Change, which approached environmental issues from a perspective grounded in
concern for social justice, poverty and militarism. These groups injected more radical
notions of environmental justice and democratization into the debate, drawing on
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anarchist, socialist and feminist critiques of capitalism that were becoming increasingly
influential within the emergent global justice movement (popularly but often
erroneously referred to as anti-globalization).
A strong narrative of environmental justice was now being articulated through
resistance to the expressway, countering the representation of the city as a unified whole
by pointing to the socially and spatially uneven distribution of the projects impacts.
Critics argued that the highway would chiefly benefit suburban and exurban land
speculators, real-estate developers and cross-border truck transportation, helping to
subsidize growth on the upper east mountain while forcing low-income neighbourhoods
in the lower east end of the city to absorb the environmental costs of increased air, water
and noise pollution. As many noted, this section of the city, with its close proximity to
the industrial waterfront, already faced a concentration of polluting manufacturing sites,
brownfields, landfills, and waste processing sites such as the sewage treatment plant and
the SWARU incinerator (Hamilton Spectator, March 23, 1998). In many ways, this
could be seen as a continuation of Hamiltons historical practice of displacing the
negative environmental impacts of development, encouraging development in one
region while allowing the socio-ecological costs to be absorbed in another.
The Friends of Red Hill Valley remained the dominant voice of opposition and while
environmental justice was a prominent theme within their publications it tended to be
framed in terms of the financial costs of the road for taxpayers and the lack of funds
available for the maintenance of existing infrastructure. Further emphasis was placed on
the question of democracy and the exclusion of public participation in decision-making
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for major development projects such as the expressway. Friends and their supporters
continually advocated public dialogue on the project through their letters, articles and
press releases, and were continually searching for new avenues of influence over the
decision-making processes of planners and politicians. Again, this dialogue was framed
primarily in terms of democratic reform and public accountability rather than the
more radical notions of decentralized decision-making and community empowerment
advocated by student groups and others affiliated with the McMaster OPIRG. Stronger
connections began to take shape between environmentalists, labour organizations and
social justice groups, with the later becoming particularly active in their opposition to
the Mike Harris agenda of social spending cuts, deregulation and downloading. Some
expressed their opposition to the expressway as a drain on other areas for municipal
spending and all shared a common interest in the fate of the inner city with
environmental groups.
Many expressway proponents, including Regional chairman Terry Cooke, publicly
responded to the surge of criticism by claiming that the need for the project had already
been well established and its impacts thoroughly studied, and by asserting that the
decisions made reflected the will of a silent majority that had expressed their support
for the project by electing political representatives in favour (Hamilton Spectator, July
25, 1997). From this perspective, public participation was welcome but only within the
context of consultation over the design of the highway, not debate over alternatives.
This kind of consultation was the stated aim of the Community Stakeholder Committee
(CSC) established by the Region in 1997, as agreed to in the provincial environmental
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impact assessment exemption order. The CSC was a short-lived and volatile exercise as
these differing views of the democratic process came into confrontation.
Representatives of Friends participated in the process only to withdraw nine months
later, claiming that the committee had been stacked with representatives of pro-
expressway groups and that the CSC should have been willing to address the question
of the need for expressway after this request was repeatedly made by members of the
public at a series of committee meetings (Friends of Red Hill newsletter, March 1998).
For those in favour of the project, expressway critics appeared unwilling to negotiate,
compromise or listen to reason. Further, they were regarded as anti-democratic in
their unwillingness to accept a decision that many expressway supporters viewed as the
product of a democratic process that had included regular elections, an environmental
assessment hearing, and a number of consultation opportunities for citizens to express
their opinions and concerns (Centennial Parkway Ratepayers Association, April 10,
2006). Expressway proponents largely refused to enter into debate over the merits of the
highway or the broader issues of urban form raised by critics, insisting that the
decision has been made (president of the Hamilton Construction Association in
Hamilton Spectator, April 11, 1998) and that the will of the majority should prevail
over fanatical opposition (former mayor Jack MacDonald inHamilton Spectator, June
2, 1998). The efforts of expressway critics to involve other levels of government were
decried as unjustified attempts at interference with a project whose need had already
been determined and which was already underway, with the Lincoln Alexander Parkway
complete and further construction ready to begin in the valley. Thus, the announcement
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in May 1998 of a screening process for a federal environmental assessment was met
with predictable expressions of outrage and disappointment (Hamilton Spectator, June
9, 1998).
At the beginning of that year, a request for a federal environmental assessment had
been submitted to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) by the Friends of Red
Hill Valley and the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA), highlighting the
impact of the expressway on the creek, wetlands and harbour, and expressing concern
that the Region would proceed with construction before obtaining authorization under
the Fisheries Act (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, January 1998). The Region had
been in contact with the DFO in the effort to develop a mitigation plan that addressed
federal concerns with the disturbance of fish habitat, expecting that these concerns
would be met with no need for a federal assessment. However, federal interests in the
project also included relocation of a trans-provincial pipeline; the impacts on a
Canadian National Railways line and possible application of the Migratory Birds
Convention Act. This later issue attracted the interest of Environment Minister Christine
Stewart in the Red Hill case, along with the request from CELA and approximately 80
letters from local citizens (Hamilton Spectator, May 3, 2000). Over the course of 1998,
around 800 people submitted letters calling for a federal environmental assessment and
this prompted the government to create a formal process for public input into the
assessments terms of reference.
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While this process began, activists were increasing the pressure at the local level. A
large rally at Hamilton City Hall on May 5, 1998, attracted 600 to 1500 people,9
following the release of a capital budget in April that contained warnings about the level
of debt generated by capital expansion projects such as the expressway. The
connections that had been established between environmentalists, social justice
activists, labour groups and other community organizations around the issue of
municipal financing were particularly evident at this event, linking together various
criticisms of the expressway project (Figure 5.2).10The budget had highlighted the lack
of funds available for maintenance of existing infrastructure and advised Regional
council, consideration of delaying or eliminating some of the projects may be in order
(quoted in Regional Municipality of Hamilton Wentworth 1998b: 3). The Friends of
Red Hill Valley and allied groups used this political opportunity to try to invigorate and
expand public opposition to the expressway. Under their influence, the popular debate
that played out in the pages of theHamilton Spectatorand other local media surrounded
municipal spending priorities and air quality.
Figure 5.2: Illustrating the Pro-Expressway Vision (Friends of Red Hill Valley
2004)
9 TheHamilton Spectator(May 6, 1998) estimated 600 people while the Friends of Red HillValley estimated 1500, a significant discrepancy.
10 In addition to the Friends of Red Hill Valley, the groups represented at this rally included theCentral and North End Neighbourhood Committee, Concerned Citizens of Ward 5, theConserver Society (formerly Clear Hamilton of Pollution), Hamilton Action for Social Change,Hamilton Against Poverty, the Hamilton Coalition for Social Justice, the Hamilton NaturalistsClub, the Social Planning and Research Council, and the United Steelworkers Local 1005.
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The debate surrounding the later issue was intensified by the release of a Draft
Summary Report in June, which outlined the Regions plans for relocation of the creek
and associated restoration work. A section on air quality claimed that, with the
completion of the expressway, overall vehicle emissions in the Region are expected to
decline 3 16% during the next 20 years. This conclusion was allegedly based on a
study conducted by researchers at McMaster University for the Hamilton Air Quality
Initiative11 but these researchers soon announced that the Region had misinterpreted the
results of their study, which had predicted an overall increase in vehicle emissions and
concluded that vehicle emissions could be most successfully controlled or reduced by
increasing the use of public transit and by technological improvements to vehicles
(quoted in Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, June, 1998). Despite this criticism, this
11 The Hamilton Air Quality Initiative is a long-running collaborative project, arising from theVision 2020 plan, involving researchers and various levels of government in efforts to quantifyair pollution problems and promote effective ways of addressing those problems.
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assertion was often used by expressway proponents throughout the remaining years of
the debate in the effort to cast the road in a green light. Critics made much of this public
disavowal of the Regions statements on air quality, accusing proponents of deliberately
misleading the public.12
Other air quality studies suggested more troublesome impacts. A federal ranking of
air quality in 25 of Canadas largest cities placed Hamilton third from the bottom and a
subsequent prediction of PM10 (harmful airborne particulate matter created by
automobile traffic) levels generated by the expressway concluded that the young and
elderly should be encouraged to limit their exposures, and not frequent the Red Hill
Valley once the expressway has been completed (quoted in Friends of Red Hill Valley
newsletter, September 1998).13 The Friends of Red Hill Valley also directed attention
towards a newly released study of the highways anticipated ecological impacts, which
raised concerns about the substantial permanent loss of habitat and species within the
valley and cautioned that the proposed ecological restoration efforts would be unlikely
to sustain the biodiversity, structure and integrity of existing habitat (quoted in Friends
of Red Hill Valley newsletter, November 1998). In contrast to these reports of
12 Similar accusations were made after Regional Chairman Terry Cooke announced the results ofa new poll demonstrating 80% public support for the highway, only to have the conductors ofthe poll, Decima Research, state that this interpretation was premature and misleading(Hamilton Spectator, June 13, 1998). The wording of the questions in this poll had presented the
Lincoln Alexander Expressway and the Red Hill Creek Expressway as a single project, makingit impossible to distinguish between support for the two roadways. An earlier poll, conductedbefore 1997 municipal election, found approximately 40% of respondents in favour of thevalley route and another 40% of favour of an alternative north-south route.
13 Expressway proponents countered by noting that this study was based on predictivemathematical modelling that, according to the authors of the study, could over or under-estimatepollution levels by up to 400% (Get Hamilton Moving Task Force 2000).
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ecological concern, many expressway supporters continued to represent the valley as a
degraded wasteland (Figure 5.3).
Figure 5.3: Valley of Vermin (Hamilton Spectator, May 9, 1999)
A bus strike in late 1998 also provided an opportunity to link together concerns over
the highways drain on municipal funding with issues of social justice, framed within a
wider critique of the citys future development and urban form. The Friends of Red Hill
Valley noted that transit use had been declining across southern Ontario but particularly
rapidly in Hamilton, falling from 29.3 million passengers in 1985 to 19.7 million in
1997. During this period, funding also declined and Friends declared their opposition to
further cuts on the basis of the detrimental impacts for low-income citizens as well as
the need for strengthening transit connections in order to support more compact urban
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development. Contrary to expressway proponents, the Friends of Red Hill Valley argued
that further expansion of highways and development to the south of the city could not
be pursued in tandem with public transit, as investment in roadway expansion
encouraged further use of the private automobile and supported an urban form based
around highway linkages, diverting both limited funds and public preferences away
from transit (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, January 1999).
While development expanded on the mountain, based upon further roadway
expansion, public transit remained concentrated within the lower city, an area with a
declining population and higher concentrations of unemployment and low-income
communities. From the 1980s onwards, public transit came to be regarded by many as a
transportation mode of last resort and associated with middle-class fears and
stigmatization of the poor within a decaying inner city. These negative associations
towards public transit and persistent positive associations of the private automobile with
affluence and freedom of mobility presented significant challenges as activists struggled
to present viable alternatives to the larger urban development model represented by the
expressway.
Expanding Networks: The Federal Environmental Assessment
The1999 federal environmental assessment provided new opportunities for raising more
comprehensive questions over the form, quality and long-term consequences of urban
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development in Hamilton. Friends of Red Hill Valley and other expressway opponents
urged the federal assessment to allow space for studying the need for the expressway
and possible alternatives, while proponents lobbied for a much narrower and speedier
assessment that would concentrate on the mitigation of social and ecological impacts
(Hamilton Spectator, January 30, 1999). The Spectatorwas flooded with letters and
articles for and against the project. Business interests in support of the highway became
more vocal through the formation of a new coalition, the Get Hamilton Moving Task
Force, created in April 1999 to counter local anti-expressway efforts and drum up
resistance to the intrusion of the federal environmental assessment (Figure 5.4). The
Task Force was created by members of the Chamber of Commerce but soon expanded
to include representatives from various real-estate, transportation and construction
companies, as well as former mayor Jack MacDonald and members of neighbourhood
groups such as the Centennial Parkway Ratepayers. With a core group of 12 to 15
members, the group launched a coordinated campaign of letter-writing for local print
media and its own website, and also began networking with sympathetic politicians and
planners at all three levels of government, including Regional employees and federal
Liberal politicians such as Stoney Creek MP Toni Valeri (John Best, December 20,
2005).
Figure 5.4: Get Hamilton Moving Task Force logo (2007)
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Despite this surge of pro-expressway activism, the federal government announced in
May 1999, that a full panel hearing environmental assessment would be conducted by
the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. The Region had hoped that the
assessment would take the form of a screening that would consider and possibly
expand upon their mitigation efforts but a panel hearing was much more wide ranging
in scope, requring a board of appointed environmental experts and extensive public
involvement. In the letter requesting this panel review, the Fisheries Minister stated
"that the Regional Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth has been less than forthcoming
with information necessary, at least from a fish habitat standpoint, to complete the
screening" and earlier federal documents complained about the Regions failure or
refusal to provide details concerning their proposal to re-align the Creek (quoted in
Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, September 2000).
The Region, Get Hamilton Moving, the editorial board of theHamilton Spectator,
and other expressway proponents insisted that the environmental assessment was a
bureaucratic redundancy that would address issues already covered by the provincial
assessment of 1985, unnecessarily intruding into the jurisdiction of the province and the
municipality and needlessly postponing the restoration of the valley, which was still
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popularly represented as a space of neglect and degradation (insert editorial cartoon -
Hamilton Spectator, May 7, 1999). Receiving no favourable responses from
Environment Canada and the DFO, the Region soon announced that it would be
launching a legal challenge against the entire process (ibid, July 7, 1999). While this
challenge was being prepared, the assessment hearing moved ahead, beginning with
public presentations to assist the panel in determining the scope and terms of reference
for the process.
United in their opposition to this process, expressway proponents accused the federal
government of backroom politics and pointed to apparent conflicts of interest on the
part of panel members. It was revealed that the panel chair was still registered as a
public lobbyist to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA), despite the
fact that they now employed him (Hamilton Spectator, November 5, 1999). Another
panel member was accused of being biased against the project due to her association
with various environmental organizations and the fact that she had served on the
supervisory committee for a Masters thesis completed by Don McLean, the outspoken
environmental activist and former chairperson of the Friends of Red Hill Valley (ibid,
August 6, 1999). Through access to information laws, Get Hamilton Moving acquired
email correspondence between members of Environment Canada (EC) and the DFO that
demonstrated local employees of EC had been pushing hard for a full panel hearing. Get
Hamilton Moving argued that these employees, based out of the Canadian Centre for
Inland Waters in Hamilton, had very close ties to local environmental groups, including
Friends of the Red Hill Valley, and that these connections unduly biased them against
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the project from the very beginning (Get Hamilton Moving Task Force 2000).14 Many
expressway proponents, particularly local politicians, also accused Hamilton East MP
Sheila Copps, Minister of Heritage and former Minister of the Environment, of having
worked behind the scenes to trigger a full hearing. Indeed, Copps put her support in
writing to the Environment Minister in April 1999 but there is little doubt that the letters
from local citizens had a much more substantial influence.
Casting the objectivity and impartiality of the panel hearing into doubt, Get
Hamilton Moving and other expressway proponents defended the Regions legalistic
response and presented the entire process as an abuse of power, orchestrated by a small
minority of local environmentalists (Get Hamilton Moving Task Force 2000). They
noted that a new provincial highway, the privatized and much-maligned Highway 407,
had not been subjected to federal scrutiny, despite the fact that construction was built
across large tracts of rural land and numerous streams. Get Hamilton Moving had also
delivered a petition of 5000 signatures to the federal government in support of the
highway but argued that these voices were being ignored. In the effort to demonstrate
that the majority of Hamiltonians wanted the valley route, Get Hamilton Moving
commissioned a telephone poll that found 60.3% in favour of the construction of the
north-south extension of the Red Hill Creek Expressway (Hamilton Spectator, May 21,
1999).
14 This evidence is quite compelling, demonstrating that local Environment Canada employeesdid indeed work diligently in advocating a full panel hearing, based on their assessment of thehighways ecological impacts and particularly the impacts on habitat for migratory birds. It iscertainly likely that some of these individuals were in communication with localenvironmentalist organizations opposed to the expressway.
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The Region continued to abstain from participation in the panel hearing, ignoring
CEAAs requests for detailed information on the project required for the environmental
assessment to proceed (Hamilton Spectator, January 12, 2000). A number of further
studies on the ecological impacts of the highway were also withheld from the public,
including a July 1999 study of southern flying squirrels, a nationally endangered species
discovered in the valley (ibid, January 18, 2000). In their press release and submissions
to the panel hearing, the Friends of Red Hill Valley publicly denounced the Regions
secrecy and also directed criticism at the history of municipal neglect of the valley,
noting that the ecological restoration efforts and stormwater sewer repairs now
incorporated into the expressway proposal could have been undertaken at any point
rather than postponed until road construction began. Instead, pollution and erosion from
excessive sewer flows into the creek had been allowed to continue unabated.
These accusations were given further weight in November 1999, when charges were
laid against the City of Hamilton under the provincial Environmental Protection Act for
allowing toxic leachate to flow into the creek from the adjacent Rennie Street landfill
(Hamilton Spectator, November 10, 1999). This problem had been noted in at least two
studies conducted by consultants for the Region, but no action had been taken. Lynda
Lukasik, a prominent member of Friends of the Red Hill Valley, had conducted tests
with Dr. George Sorger15 and consulted reports from the Region to demonstrate that
15 Working with the Bay Area Restoration Council and, later, Environment Hamilton, Dr. Sorgerhad been training local high school students to conduct tests of local waterways since the late1980s. In the Red Hill Creek they found that just about every pipe that flows into Red Hill wascontaminated, some of them very heavily contaminated, with e-coli, phosphate, ammonium,low-dissolve oxygen and all the typical things. And we also looked into leachate coming out ofthe Upper Ottawa dump that was pouring into the creek and was very toxic. It was oozing out of
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PCBs were flowing from the landfill into the creek at levels 40,000 times above the
provincial water quality objective (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, December
1999).16 The City was forced to install a leachate collection system but the Region faced
the further challenge of dealing with the clean-up of this highly toxic site, which lay in
the path of the future expressway yet had not been considered in the 1985 provincial
environmental assessment. Councillor Chad Collins responded that this was one of the
many remediation efforts that would be undertaken when expressway construction
resumed (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, October 2000). The Region soon
revealed the existence of another landfill site, the third such site adjacent to the creek
and the second lying in the path of the road (Hamilton Spectator, October 11, 2000).
Political pressure also continued to mount from the Regions rising debt and the lack of
funds available for infrastructure maintenance and repair (Friends of Red Hill Valley
newsletter, September 2000).
Further controversy surrounded Regional Councils decision in June 2000 to expand
the urban boundary, against the advice of Regional staff and in violation of the fixed
the barrier and into the creek. Dr. Sorger claims that the City of Hamilton initially responded tohis findings at the Upper Ottawa, Rennie Street and Taro dumps by attempting to discredit hisability as a scientist, apparently going so far as to challenge his methodology for toxicity tests(June 27, 2005).
16 Lukasik received a $150,000 award as a result of this case and used this money to create anenvironmental justice fund for further advocacy work. This was the starting point forEnvironment Hamilton (EH), a non-profit environmental advocacy group created the followingyear by Lukasik and fellow environmental activists Don McLean and Brian McHattie. Asdiscussed in the following chapters, EH soon established itself as a more formally structuredadvocacy group specializing in providing local citizens with scientific and legal tools to identifyand challenge environmental problems in their local communities (Lynda Lukasik, June 30,2005).
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urban boundary advocated by the Vision 2020 plan. The extension added 450 acres in
the Glanbrook area, just south of the Red Hill Valley and adjacent to the Heritage Green
development in Stoney Creek. The Conserver Society, Citizens for a Sustainable
Community, and Action 2020 all field appeals to the Ontario Municipal Board but were
ultimately unsuccessful in overturning this decision.17 OMB challenges were also
launched by land and real-estate developers who wished to have the boundary extended
still further, but developers within the expanded area greeted this decision
enthusiastically and enjoyed rapid increases in their parcels of land. For example, Aldo
DeSantis of real-estate and housing company Multi-Area Developments owned 180
acres in this area and still more just outside the new boundary. DeSantis had purchased
this land for $5,600 per acre from the Ontario Realty Corporation just two years earlier
and its value now skyrocketed to approximately $40,000 per acre. Other prominent
developers, such as Al Frisina of 100 Main Street East Limited, realized less dramatic
but still substantial increases in large parcels of land within the area. Real estate and
housing experts estimated that the value of this land would rise to around $100,000 per
acre once approval was given for new residential development and water and sewer
servicing supplied by the municipality (Hamilton Spectator, August 9, 2000). DeSantis,
Frisina and other developers owning land in this area were active members of the
17 Citizens for a Sustainable Community was created by members of the original Task Force onSustainable Development to encourage community adoption and implementation of the goals ofVision 2020. Action 2020 was created in 1999 with a similar mandate but was also intended as ameans of preserving Vision 2020 during the difficult transition promised by amalgamation,described below. The decision of Action 2020 members to launch an OMB challenge against theexpansion of the urban boundary was not well received by Regional staff and politicians, whosoon cancelled the funding for Action 2020 (Harvey, February 12, 2003).
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Hamilton-Halton Homebuilders Association, one of the key proponents of the
expressway, and provided financial support for pro-expressway councillors (see Chapter
7).
Expressway critics argued that these developers would be the primary beneficiaries
of the highway. Further, they noted that many of the developers holding land in this area
were residential developers interested in building new subdivisions near the valley,
rather than filling Hamiltons empty business parks with new commercial and industrial
activity. Many activists maintained that Hamilton politics was constrained by the
demand for continuous economic growth and guided to a large extent by the needs and
wants of an urban elite that had united behind the expressway as a stimulus for new
growth opportunities (Ken Stone, July 7, 2005; Buddy Martin, December 27, 2005; Don
McLean, February 18, 2007). This urban elite frame drew attention to the close
relationships between politicians and business interests (particularly those related to
property development, construction and transportation) as an urban regime united by a
shared interest in growing the municipal tax base, stimulating new investment and
facilitating more fluid movements of goods, people and services via the regional road
network. The analysis of political economic relationships and municipal spending
priorities became vital tools in the effort to demonstrate these shared interests.
Friends, along with allied groups more closely connected to peace and social justice
movements such as Hamilton Action for Social Change (HASC), situated this political
economic approach in the larger context of the socio-economic disparities exacerbated
by neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization, the downsizing of public
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services, and/or the downloading of responsibility for those services to lower levels of
government (Friends of Red Hill Valley 1998). Members of HASC explicitly linked the
expressway to trade liberalization and neoliberal models of economic development,
describing the road as the NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] highway.
According to HASC member, Andrew Loucks,
this is the kind of development that this model of economic development encourages.You know, just-in-time delivery and the fact that Red Hill will be a short cut fortransport trucks moving to and from the border. So we can have more of our factoryinventories moving on fossil-fuel burning trucks. Its funny, as soon as this ideabecomes popular its already looking like a pipe dream because warehouses aregoing to look pretty cheap when the price of oil goes through the roof. And theresalso the big-box stores and sprawl development that it will encourage. These are thekinds of things that tend to happen when you foster ultra-competitive, profit-driveneconomic environments. People have to put certain values at the forefront of theirchoices and I think we can see how that relates to Vision 2020 and how the Cityargues that its hands are tied. We have half of the things that we use in this citycoming from thousands of miles away and that has something to do with the modelof trade liberalization thats developed (interview, July 20, 2005).
Indeed, as I discuss in more detail in the following chapters, it is clear that the
expressway came to be regarded as a vital means of situating Hamilton as a distribution
and processing node within regional and cross-border transportation networks,
including both a proposed mid-peninsula corridor and a larger NAFTA superhighway
network running from Quebec City to Monterrey, Mexico (The Globe and Mail2004).
Public Ecology and the Urban Ecological Imaginary
Resistance to the expressway during the 1990s marked a significant shift in the political
narrative uniting this opposition, moving from an emphasis on the conservation of
urban nature to the democratization of public control over urban nature. This shift has
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been described elsewhere as a shift towards a public ecology (Luke 2003), an urban
political ecology (Desfor and Keil 2004), or as a politics of the urban metabolism
(Heynen et al. 2006). As Huber and Currie (2007: 725) state, a politics of the urban
metabolism would not only privilege the maintenance and protection of green
naturalized spaces threatened by urbanization but also seek to contest and reform the
socioecological constitution of the urban itself in order to address the root causes of
urban environmental injustice. As discussed in Chapter 1, nature and environment
are understood here as hybrids or cyborgs of social relations and biophysical
phenomena that are always invested with cultural meanings and shaped by language and
relationships of power (Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003). From this perspective, urban
spaces and environments are not simply physical spaces but are produced by interwoven
social and ecological relationships flows of matter, energy, money, information and
symbols (Swyngedouw 1996, 2006; Gandy 2004, 2005). This approach implies a
public ecology in so far as it recognizes that our experiences and understandings of
nature are always meditated through culture, language and relations of power and that
all environmental knowledge is normative or value laden (Hull and Robertson
2000: 110).
Accordingly, this suggests the need for an environmental politics that does not leave
socio-ecological relationships to be governed primarily by technocratic control or the
vagaries of the market private ecologies that can all too easily curtail or eliminate
control over land, air, water, food and other basic necessities of life for the majority of
the worlds people, concentrating access to wealth and healthy environments in the
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hands of the few (Luke 2003, 2005). Rather, this is a politics that struggles to produce
more and better spaces for democratic deliberation over access to and utilization of
urban nature. Public ecology promotes the multiscalar integration of a vast array of
environmental knowledge across disciplines and a diverse public (Hull and Robertson
2000: 112) clarifying the values, norms and methodological assumptions that inform
knowledge and action, and working to establishing dialogue between different language
communities particularly between the physical and life sciences, social science and
public policy (Forsyth 2003; Latour 2004). These efforts are guided by concern with
understanding how social and biophysical phenomena are co-produced (Haraway
1991; Forsyth 2003), supporting health and sustainability for some while undermining
the life chances of other regions and communities (Harvey 1996; Swyngedouw 2004;
White 2006).
While still relying upon appeals to the ecological and aesthetic significance of the
valley, prominent characteristics of the early conservationist narrative, the new wave of
resistance exemplified by the Friends of Red Hill Valley and their supporters displayed
a greater sensitivity to the diverse ways in which nature is experienced, understood,
valued and represented. This is reflected in the array of discursive strategies utilized,
which framed the protection of the valley not simply in terms of the conservation of
nature but also in terms of local history, social and environmental justice, municipal
spending and taxation, democratic transparency and accountability, animal welfare, and
resistance to neoliberal globalization. This mixture of approaches was a response to
changing political opportunities and political economic conditions, greater
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communication between disparate activist groups, and a deliberate attempt to engage
more people in the expressway debate.18
We can conceptualize this shift from a narrative of urban conservation to one of
public ecology in terms of the gradual development of core political frames. Firstly, the
narrative gradually moved from an urban conservation frame a vision of urban
renewal based on limiting the negative ecological impacts of development, particularly
within natural spaces to an urban ecology frame that suggested the need to consider
all aspects of urbanization in terms of the interconnections between ecological health,
socio-spatial justice and economic development, and to design forms of development
that address these problems simultaneously rather than sacrificing one for the other.
Placing the valley in the context of the city as a whole, environmental activists had
challenged the prevailing tendency towards the conceptual, legal and literal
compartmentalization of urban space, which had separated the city into exclusive zones
and entertained the fiction that ecological processes and pollutants could be similarly
contained. Through various sustainability efforts and education, the city of the grid, first
18 According to activist Lynda Lukasik (June 30, 2005), the Friends of Red Hill Valley made adeliberate attempt to extend the boundaries of the discussion beyond narrowly conceived issuesof environmentalism and to attract other groups and interests to their cause. According toLukasik, the core members of the group asked themselves, What do we need to do to engagethe public in this discussion? Our perspective changed because over time we realized that notonly was it important for us to understand the implications of this project from every angle but
also to get that information out there, because we realized that this is how you engage thecommunity in the discussion and the debate. Because if you think about it from your own pointof view, you get involved with something because theres some element there thats of interestand concern to you. I guess its a matter of establishing some level of comfort with appealing towhat I call peoples enlightened self-interest. I think there are a lot of environmentalists outthere who are more purist than that and are very uncomfortable with that approach. But myattitude is why would you be uncomfortable with that? Is it because you have a false sensethat humans arent capable of learning and evolving?
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promoted by colonial surveyors, was gradually being challenged by the vision of a city
of ecological flows in which attention was directed to the movement of pollutants across
space, their concentration in particular areas and the need for forms of development that
integrated with natural processes rather than simply extracting energy and profit from
them (Oddie 2008).
Drawing upon visions of the green city promoted by earlier environmental groups
and more recent sustainability initiatives, such as Vision 2020 and the Hamilton
Harbour Remedial Action Plan, activists struggled to challenge the established binary
between development and the environment that was so central to Hamiltons
industrial imaginary. In this established vision of urban nature, the environment was
understood as a realm of non-human life separate from human beings that presented
both opportunities and obstacles to development (equated with economic growth,
population and employment growth) and a progress defined primarily in terms of
technological innovation, the convenience and acceleration of mobility, and the
accumulation of wealth. In contrast, environmentalists insisted that nature should not be
understood as an unlimited input and waste sink for economic production but rather as
the very foundation of development and economic growth. While the earlier
conservationist narrative highlighted the need for environmental protection and the
limits to growth and waste presented by dwindling resources and mounting ecological
degradation, many activists during the 1990s emphasized the regenerative abilities of
nature for urban life and insisted that Hamilton could renew its image, economy and
overall quality of life by pursuing forms of development designed to enhance and
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protect urban nature, and supporting businesses that attempted to limit their
environmental impacts and/or specialized in green products and services. Articulating
this alternative approach to urban development would prove to be one of the most
difficult challenges for expressway opponents.
Activists challenged the vision of a unitary and united city suggested by the
industrial imaginary and the Ambitious City narrative of growth and progress with an
alternative vision of urban space as differentiated and unequal, with some areas (the
mountain and west-end) receiving the direct benefits of development and others (the
north and east-end of the lower city) forced to absorb its negative environmental and
socio-economic impacts. In this way, the earlier framing of the valley as vital to human
and non-human health was developed into a more nuanced vision ofenvironmental
injustice, highlighting the concentration of pollution within the lower city and the
subsidization of more affluent suburban communities on the escarpment.
Thirdly, the Friends of Red Hill Valley and supporters placed great emphasis on
ecological citizenship and the democratization of urban nature. Friends employed
familiar and well-established techniques such as sustained letter-writing campaigns,
lobbying of political representatives, press conferences, public protests, and the
publishing of press releases, articles and newsletters, but also placed great emphasis on
engaging the public directly in different activities related to the valley, such as clean-up
walks, guided hikes, outdoor festivals and ecological monitoring. While earlier
environmentalist groups such as Clear Hamilton of Pollution and Save the Valley
advocated stewardship or care for nature as a vital component of citizenship and called
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for greater public participation in municipal decision-making, the Friends of Red Hill
Valley actively encouraged this ecological citizenship by offering a variety of
opportunities for people to learn about and care for the flora and fauna of the valley
(Lukasik, June 30, 2005). Further, these activists worked with allied groups to expose
and challenge the influence of particular business interests over urban development and
municipal politics, advocating both the democratization of municipal planning
alongside ongoing community engagement and mobilization.
Environment Hamilton extended this same approach to numerous projects that
monitor ecological conditions across the city, such as Stackwatch, which teaches
citizens to identify troublesome emissions from manufacturing sites, and Trees Count, a
program that trains volunteers to monitor the quantity and health of urban forests in
their local community. This same emphasis on ecological civic engagement was evident
in the efforts that the Friends of Red Hill Valley made to closely monitor and report on
the activities of both municipal planners and politicians. Newsletters from the group
would routinely include detailed critical analysis of reports from Regional staff and
their consultants, as well as updates on the latest decisions made by council and issues
indirectly related to the expressway, such as harbour rehabilitation efforts, public transit
and cuts to local social programs. In this way, Friends encouraged citizens to participate
in local environments and communities rather than focusing exclusively on lobbying the
local state, while placing the expressway struggle in the larger context of a struggle over
the future of the city. However, as discussed in the following chapter, this framing of
citizenship and democracy was limited in significant ways by an uncritical acceptance
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of liberal political principles that would soon be challenged by changing political
circumstances and alliances.
Whereas the growth and progress narrative had presented the use of land and natural
processes as largely a technical matter to be administered by the expertise of planners
and business people, environmentalists contributed to a view of urban nature as deeply
politicized, placing issues of land-use and environmental health squarely in the realm of
democratic debate. The representation of the local state as unduly influenced by the
interests of business suggested the need for democratic reform and the opening up of
new avenues for public participation in municipal decision-making. This vision of the
city situated democratic citizenship both within and outside of the walls of government,
suggesting the need for governmental reform andactive public education and
community mobilization. Self-organization, coalition-building, and public engagement
in knowledge production were valorized as key democratic activities for empowering
communities, decentring the state as the primary locus of political activity. This view
was based upon the belief that government should be guided by citizens through
participatory decision-making structures, and the hope that an informed public with the
ability to participate will make choices in the public good, supporting environmental
protection and more equitable distribution of wealth.19
19 This notion of participatory democracy drew upon earlier critiques of liberal democracy andthe expert management of the welfare state, as well as a resurgent interest in more radicalsocialist and anarchist organizing principles amongst student organizations, peace groups andothers coalescing around resistance to neoliberal globalization (Wainwright 1994; Conway2004).
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Engagement with a wide variety of regulatory, legal and consultation processes, and
the ultimate failure of those processes to stop the expressway, contributed to this more
critical view of democracy and motivated activists to place greater emphasis on both
community organizing and the democratization of municipal politics. The Vision 2020
plan was particularly important in this respect, as it presented a new model of
participatory environmental governance and suggested a new economic strategy of
ecological modernization that many activists saw as the starting point for a new urban
future that remained unrealized. Debate over the meaning and implementation of the
plan created deeper divisions between supporters and critics of the expressway,
reducing opportunities for the kind of collaborative and reform civic
environmentalism exemplified by cities like Toronto (Keil and Boudreau 2006) and
further radicalizing groups that had traditionally been grounded in a social democratic
approach to environmental politics. With a sense of growing opposition between
community activists and the municipality, these groups invested more time and energy
in networking with like-minded organizations, sharing knowledge an
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