The problem is how many people advocating this are doing so in good faith? How many people are actually concerned about the natural area, rather than just using this issue as a launchpad for what is actually just NIMBYism. This is in a similar vein to Save Jimmie Simpson where the locals are using a local park as a focus to dump them not wanting to have more training running behind their houses.
The stages of change - first denial, then anger, then....
In all of these issues (East Harbour, Davenport, Don Valley layover being other examples) it seems to take a long time to get past the disbelief that the expansion was needed at all. Resident groups seem to start with "just go away". I don't know if that's what their advisors suggest as a first line of defense, or if it's just human nature. I would not single out this residents' group response as extreme, but certainly they may have raised arguments that were either red herrings or unreasonable - as many resident groups do. At the end of the day, the need for GO expansion outweighs the impacts on individual neighbourhoods, but there is often a wide range of options for how to mitigate and soften the impacts.
We seem to have a design process (this goes beyond ML, but they are front and centre as a guilty party) of taking an initial solution that meets engineering standards but not broader quality of life standards, and trying to ram it through - instead of an iterative process that accepts and looks for ways to address concerns raised in good faith. It's a win-lose process which encourages extreme positions and seems to get bogged down in not meeting in the middle. I don't have any illusion that the answer will always be "yes", but it is unnecessarily unresponsive. ML sure seems to like working this way.
Also, in this case, the levels of government that might have logically been asked to contribute money to the "improved" design were caught blindsided. One can understand how they, in turn, would fend off involvement - who needs the headache of going back to Council and asking for money that wasn't foreseen and justified in the most recent budget exercise.
- Paul
