Dear Editor,
Richmond city council’s Robert Ford moment:
How to understand a majority decision by Richmond city councillors not to reduce house size which will have, as a first consequence, the paving over of farmland?
John Ibbitson’s opinion column in Saturday’s Globe and Mail (May 12, 2018) on Doug Ford’s popularity in Ontario brought new light for me on how to understand why some of the competing values and social responsibilities underpinning the debates in Richmond on farmland policy have fallen on deaf ears.
While council’s majority vote not to control the proliferation of huge houses is rationalized as “giving farmer’s what they need,” I would argue that a visionary, community sensitive public policy, with ears wide open, would be striving to balance competing interests.
In practice, this would mean “give farmers what they need, not necessarily what they want. And equally “give environmentally concerned citizens and young farmers what they need, but not necessarily what they want.”
Farmland owners and the developers to whom they will sell are the complete winners. Council abdicated its role to adjudicate among competing interests by showing its populist and conservative values: individual freedom of choice and ownership rights over installing regulatory protections for the conservation and rational stewardship of the ALR; promotion of displays of wealth over zoning standards for reasonable and adaquate house size; apathy on a plan to enable young farmers to rent land. Council has opted for a “pave it” not “plant it” position.
Equally, council’s own methods have fuelled an us/them mentality.
Why?
What Ibbitson writes of Ford’s Ontario may apply to an as yet unnoticed wave in Richmond: Ford “appears to be popular with many immigrant voters, specifically those who are doing well and living in suburban communities. People who decry Mr. Ford as a Canadian version of Donald Trump fail to reckon with the fact that Ford populism is not nativist. It embraces the more socially and economically conservative attitudes of people who came to Ontario from India, the Philippines, China and other developing countries.”
You don’t have to come from outside Canada to hold as your values: lower taxes, smaller government, fewer regulations, continuing commitments to public health care and education, but little interest in environmental issues.
The consequence of the deafness of the majority of Richmond city councillors has been to push Richmond out of the zone of reasoned public policy debate with respect to the values driving the design of our community, and has handed Richmond’s future over to developers.
Karin Holland Biggs
RICHMOND
