‘Catastrophe’

Dear Editor:

When one person feels they have the right to take over someone’s home place or to utterly change that home place’s nature so only the rich and entitled have access, it is indeed a catastrophe. It is, in fact, a wound ready to erupt. 

When the previous mayor and split council of Centre Wellington opened that door to a condo development that took over, overwhelmed and changed the whole scale and landscape of Elora, it was an issue loaded with centuries of ancestral history. The Tooth of Time is obscured, the whole southern bank, all under treaty and sacred to Six Nations, is now taken over. 

Changing whole relational infrastructure, without any benefits to the local community, was more than an error. It should never have happened. I suggested at the planning stage that the development could have been geothermally powered, have ground floor small market-price rental units for seniors, a community clinic, a permanent farmers’ market, community gallery, chain grocery store and yoga/quiqong studio, even its own waste recycling centre and community wading pool! 

Instead, it is a huge private enclosure for the rich that dominates the village, the Grand River and, let’s face it, all of Elora’s long-term continuous residents. 

Then there’s the SLAPP lawsuit against vocal residents.

Please have a full town hall meeting to talk about this, not in factions, not waving money and the media influence that increases that money flow, but as all those sharing a home place and waters in a time of severe climate change and income disparity. 

We are an artful, funny, creative lot, we residents of the Elora-Fergus area. We listen. We admire conservation of heritage, not its further exploitation.

Eimear O’Neill,
Fergus