I’m coming to this one late, I know, but I’m surprised by the thinking I’m seeing here. The idea of the Link and the Red Hill, when they were conceived in the 60s, was to eventually open the Mountain up for commerce. There’s only so much room downtown, and if you’ve seen the street congestion down there, you’ll know why no one’s seriously suggesting placing it there.
No one's doing this for the sh*ts and grins; they're doing it because they need to. The city’s spent close to 25 years now fighting in court, getting the province to keep its commitments, getting the feds off their backs, meeting the challenges of people who seem to think you can eat scenery. I love nature too, believe me; I’m out there every weekend. But this is Canada. We’ve got lots of it. What we don’t have nowadays is tertiary industrial jobs falling out of the trees; they’re all going to China. This is an advantage that we were on the verge of squandering... as we have before.
Folks, Hamilton’s dying. The steel mills don’t guarantee your son a job just cause you had one like they did 30 years ago. Stelco’s been on the ropes for years. Dofasco’s future is unclear. The city’s not what it was even when I lived there, but it could be again. What Hamilton’s trying, quietly, desperately, and, I would say, with some glimmerings of success to do is to inaugurate light industry up in the vicinity of Mt. Hope Airport. It’s a regional hub for FedEx; you can fly straight to Heathrow out of there these days, and there’s nothing around it... yet. It’s golden. The trick is, you have to get to it. You have to get supplies to the area in a timely fashion, and you have to be able to get your product back out again. A few miles away, down there off the Mountain (the Ditch?) is the QEW, which is your quickest route to the States. To get to and from it right now means driving past where the RHC will soon join it, all the way through downtown on the Chedoke Expressway, up the escarpment, then doubling back again half the distance (and then the reverse). That’s needlessly expensive and it’s enough to make people look elsewhere... Burlington, or other places on the Niagara Escarpment. Naturally, people in Hamilton want that industry and those jobs. They managed to build the Link... it ate up a good chunk of what was my backyard when I was a kid... but it’s just about useless without that second leg. And thank God, they’re getting it. I don’t know whether 75% of Hamiltonians want it, but I would hardly be surprised if those who did were in the clear majority. Anything else is like a drowning man bitching about the lifeline thrown to him being made of nylon instead of organic hemp.
