THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2017
THE PICTON
Gazette
5
Volume 187, Week 42
Canada’s oldest non-daily newspaper
GIVING
Bicycle tour raises money to help Camp Trillium
9
bring their biggest GIANTS Growers to Wellington Pumpkinfest
Wind opponents march with message for Wynne Liberals Rally urges province to step in and put stop to White Pines project ADAM BRAMBURGER STAFF WRITER
More than 300 people marched a kilometre and a half down Main Street Sunday waving signs, singing Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Going to Take It”, and chanting about stopping Premier Kathleen Wynne. With Oct. 15 the date that wpd is allowed to begin full-blown site work for the White Pines Wind Project on the county’s south shore, local wind opponents decided they’d stage a protest and informational rally in hopes that the province will make a decision to stop the installation of nine 500foot turbines dead in its tracks. Following a two-and-a-half hour rally at the Regent Theatre featuring a range of speeches on health impacts, endangered species, water, the law, and local implications, winemaker Norm Hardie delivered a plea to the majority of people who remained that Prince Edward County should not give up its fight. “Going forward, we have to let this government know that this is not going to happen. It is simply not going to happen,” he said. “The government is in position to cancel this project for a half a million dollars. It’s going to cost us $100 million over the next 20 years. We don’t need to spend $100 million on energy we don’t need. We have a chance to cancel these contracts and with all these other reasons, we put these together and the government has
MAKING A STATEMENT More than 300 people marched on Main Street from Cold Storage Road to the Regent Theatre Sunday afternoon to express their displeasure with the Green Energy Act and the impending construction of the nine-turbine White Pines Wind Project.(Adam Bramburger/Gazette staff)
no choice — it has to change.” Hardie said he chose to locate his winery in the county for its incredible climate and soils. Since he arrived in 2001, the industry has grown from hosting two wineries to more than 50. He noted how many prominent magazines and newspapers are featuring articles about the municipality
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but it will all stop if turbines go up. “This expansion will not continue when we lost the soils down in the southern part of the county. We’re all farmers. We farm land. We listen to the experts and the growth will be stymied significantly if these turbines go up,” he said. “No one is going to write
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See RALLY, page 31
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controversial Green Energy Act and restore respect for rural communities. It hasn’t happened. “Kathleen Wynne paid lip service to it. She said she needed to change, she realized she had no hope in rural Ontario if she didn’t make some changes,” Smith said. Despite that promise, projects are still going ahead in non-will-
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about us when we have 54-storey towers slinging away down in South Bay.” Prince Edward-Hastings MPP Todd Smith told the audience he expected that when former premier Dalton McGuinty resigned five years ago to the day, there were expectations the Liberals would change their tune on the
ing host communities like Prince Edward County. After hearing the experts gathered for the rally — people like Dr. Robert McMurtry, an Order of Canada inductee and former medical dean at the University of Western Ontario; Les Stanfield, a former Ministry of Natural Resources ecologist who authored the province’s streams protocol; and John Hirsch and Cheryl Anderson, appellants in successful, underdog Environmental Review Tribunal (ERT) hearings — Smith said it “should be obvious to anyone with common sense” the project should be cancelled, but yet it continues. The reason, he said, is simply politics. He noted that after both the ERT that quashed the nine-turbine Ostrander Point Wind Project and the ERT that reduced the White Pines Wind Project from 27 turbines to nine, most thought local opponents had won on environmental grounds. Then, Smith said, the government buckled as the Independent Electricity Systems Operator amended its contract to allow White Pines proponent wpd to produce much less power. “The government bent over backwards to accommodate a Germany company to allow them to go ahead, changing the contract so they could set up and operate in Prince Edward County, an unwilling host community when I don’t think any community in Ontario has put up such a fight.” Smith called the decision to abdicate the project “an easy one” clouded by politics and by people misunderstanding the impact industrial wind projects have on the energy system.
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