Rural wind revolt wonÂ’t blow away

Ontario Wind Turbine Backlash intensifies as rural communities challenge the Green Energy Act, industrial turbines, and land-use policy, demanding local control, environmental safeguards, and balanced renewable energy planning near the Niagara Escarpment.

Employees of the wind industry and Ontario Liberal politicians are scratching their heads. Why the fuss about wind turbines?

Some of them still think the furor will blow over. It’s just the griping of a few malcontents and health quacks — people who wear tinfoil helmets in their living rooms to ward off spy beams. The march of progress can’t be stopped. The Green Energy Act is law, and Ontario is fast-tracking wind projects so turbines are coming to the countryside and that’s it.

Here’s a tip, from the hinterland. This is incorrect. The furor is building, not waning. Premier Dalton McGuinty, who earlier vowed to curb wind farm NIMBYs over siting, was already a long shot for a third term. With wind in the mix and barring a radical re-do of the Green Energy Act, he is positioned to lose every rural and small-town seat.

People who live in the country do so by choice. Some stay because we wish to raise our children close to family. Others leave to pursue a career and then eventually come home. And others still, mainly boomers, retire to a small town or a farm because they’re tired of city life.

People who live in small towns or on farms are connected to the countryside in a way that most city people are not. We hunt, fish, cycle, hike, walk or drive through it all the time, while small communities howl over wind turbines nearby. Many residents of small towns are linked through family to a farm or plot of land.

For 30 years now, people who live on or near the Niagara Escarpment, a UNESCO World Biosphere Preserve, have lived within the strictures of the Niagara Escarpment Commission. This appointed body tells rural people what they can or cannot build on their property.

There are many rules. They do not account for family circumstances or in many cases for common sense. For example, the NEC won’t permit a landowner to build a second home on a 100-acre plot of land to house an ailing parent. Yet it does permit the Blue Mountain ski resort in Collingwood, Ont.

Despite these seeming contradictions, farmers and landowners have grudgingly learned to live with the NEC. But now along comes Big Wind, backed by environmental groups and propelled by the vision of former Ontario deputy premier George Smitherman.

The vision is one in which the Ontario landscape, including land directly proximate to the Escarpment, is festooned with massive industrial turbines. Suddenly, preserving our agricultural and geographic heritage is less important. Indeed, such values don’t even seem to figure in the debate, even as wind farm opponents turn up the heat in rural Ontario. Nor has there yet been a serious effort to expand nuclear — still the only way to produce huge quantities of energy without emitting carbon.

An irony about current-day Ontario: We have a government that says it is deeply committed to environmental protection, arguing that green energy is our best shot at cutting emissions. If a rare species of dung beetle is unearthed in a marsh, chances are no building will be allowed there. But disrupting the ecosystem of thousands of rural people? Not a problem. Disrupt away.

There was a good way to bring in wind energy.

The good way would have respected the wishes of communities that chose not to allow industrial-scale projects. It would have induced industry to offer small, farm-sized wind turbines at a reasonable price. It would have made it much easier for people to use wind or solar to satisfy their own energy needs, and sell any excess back to the grid. It would have been a local-first movement.

Instead McGuinty chose big industry, in a strange move on wind farms backed by big government. In doing so he trampled on the most important political idea to hit rural Canada in modern times: Greater local control of the food supply and stewardship of the land.

No, this revolt will not go away.

Related News

• Electricity Forum News

• Renewable Energy News