When we launched On The Bay 12 years ago, editor Janet Lees and I were clear that we wanted to tackle the issues that affect our communities and our way of life in Southern Georgian Bay. And if in our opinion they posed a threat, we would take an advocacy position to protect what we all hold dear.
We’ve covered a number of high-profile issues over the years, but no subject has gotten more attention over a longer period of time than the looming onslaught of industrial wind turbines into our community. Our first article about wind turbines goes back to our very first issue in the summer of 2004. We knew little about the wind turbines then and our opening paragraph of the piece read: “Graceful structures that enhance an area’s natural beauty while harnessing the wind to produce good, clean energy … or ugly concrete giants that belong in an industrial park?”
From that innocent, open-minded position 12 years ago, we have learned the reality of what turbines will bring to Southern Georgian Bay. In 2009, our cover line was “Windmills, Friend or Foe?” as we began to write about the damage turbines could do to the rolling hills and prime farmland of our community. We learned that there were negative health impacts for people living even several kilometers away from the turbines. We wrote about the results of a public health study in Sweden on wind turbines that concluded: “Sleep disturbance and psychological and physiological stress-related symptoms have been associated with noise exposure.” And we wrote about the then-new Green Energy Act, which “strips local municipalities of any power to zone or require site plan approvals for any wind turbine projects.”
A year later, in 2010, we reported that citizens’ groups were taking on local and provincial governments and turbine developers in an attempt to keep the “behemoths” from taking over our rural communities. And we began to learn about the staggering impact on real estate values for homes within even a five-to 10-kilometre radius of wind turbines. We reported that 20 communities had attempted to pass bylaws to control the placement of turbines in their communities but with no success, as their concerns fell on the deaf ears of Ontario’s Liberal government who politically didn’t need Conservative rural Ontario to stay in power.
In the summer of 2011 in our feature article entitled “Not Here, Not Now, Not Ever!”, we wrote about the politics of wind turbines and captured in dramatic pictures a rare parade of local Clearview residents riding on hundreds of tractors, trucks and hay wagons in opposition to the Green Energy Act. Soon after we also had the opportunity for an exclusive interview by our editor at our offices with then-Conservative leader Tim Hudak, who said that if he was elected Premier, he would cancel the Liberals’ feed-in-tariff program that was subsidizing the wind developers to the tune of billions of dollars and driving hydro costs through the roof.
By 2012, our summer issue article titled “Wind Wars” reported on 15 landowners filing suits, claiming damage to the value of their homes and property. They would eventually lose since the court ruled that damage cannot be proved until after the turbines are built. Talk about locking the barn after the horse has been stolen!
Last month, the Ontario government announced that the WPD turbine project, just south of the Collingwood Airport and north of Creemore, had been approved. This decision to proceed was in spite of the airport’s plans to bring jobs and aviation training to an expanded airport facility and the serious threat to the safety of pilots and passengers in building 50-storey structures within a few kilometres of the runways. But local residents have not given up. Six legal appeals have been lodged against the Liberal government’s decision, based on a number of environmental and aviation issues.
Private citizens’ groups have filed three of the appeals, while the municipalities of Collingwood, Clearview and Simcoe County are behind the other three.
The next few months will tell the tale of this one wind project, but there will be many more to come. We have argued time after time in the pages of On The Bay that turbines are not “green.” They work less than half the time, require additional gas-fired electric plants to offset their unreliable value, and have cranked up our electricity costs to the highest in North America. There is an argument that if turbines are only placed in remote locations, the damage to people and communities is limited, but this does not address the broader issue that turbine wind power is simply not a long-term, economically sound solution to help solve climate change and in the near-term, has caused electric power to become unaffordable for consumers and industry.
There are 7,700 turbines either built or approved in Ontario. Where will they strike next? Be assured that when they do, we will be joining the fight, even if it takes another 12 years. ❧
Publisher Jeffrey Shearer
P.S. Don’t miss the letters section in this issue for more details, facts and opinions about the turbine issue.
