The Province is poised to build a highway that will arc across the Niagara Peninsula, threatening farm lands, headwaters, wetlands and wildlife with car-oriented sprawl. Now a determined coalition of conservation and citizens groups is fighting back, demanding that the government honour its pledges to combat the causes of climate change.

Environmental Commissioner Gordon Miller, Ontario’s duly appointed ecological conscience, had some blunt advice in his annual state-ofthe- environment report last December. The provincial government, he said, must “avert any further plans for new highways and/or highway expansion projects” in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, reaching from Niagara to Peterborough, Midland and Kitchener-Waterloo. Current proposals for new and expanded roads and highways, predicted the commissioner, will destroy thousands of hectares of natural habitat and farmland in southern Ontario over the next 25 years. The province’s growth policies and car-use trends, he said, are outstripping the capacity of natural systems to support them.

“[Highways] are not the solution to the sustainable transportation future we need in Ontario and will undermine the necessary changes we need to make in development and the densities needed to support rail-based transit, which on a worldwide basis seems to be the viable way to go forward,” says Miller. “But if we remain car centred, we have no choice but to build new highways.”