OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to a column about gas prices, published June 13.
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A critique of what you wrote:
You note that the price is only high to us Canadians, but you fail to realize, like any business, household finances are planned and based on what is the constant price. If that price changes, and changes by more than 10 per cent as food and gas prices have, that is problematic for households, especially for those living paycheque to paycheque, as about half of Canadian households do.
You note that few Europeans would buy a home far from their workplace; however, our ridiculous housing prices in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and lack of public transit does not give us that option.
Canada is the only nation in the G7 not to have high-speed rail. It can take one as long as four hours to go a distance of 55 kilometres in the GTA between two cities/towns using public transit. It is not fair to fault where we purchase our housing when GTA consumers really do not have that many options due to housing prices.
Few small vehicles exist that fit six or more people, forcing Canadians to have to buy SUVs or minivans. Furthermore, with the new terms of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), CNBC has noted that the age of the small car is dead anyhow.
On top of this, all-wheel drive is necessary in Barrie, especially with climate change causing this region to get more precipitation in the future, including snow in the winter.
I congratulate you on referring to yourself as not needing an SUV. A family in Canada that has more than five members really has no other choice — and before you chastise me for having too many kids, our in-laws live with us instead of being sent off to old age homes.
It is not just about being towed. Getting stuck on the 400 when there is an accident once a week during rush hour in the winter means exiting onto gravel sideroads to make it to work on time. Glad you do not have to worry about that, seeing that you drove once to Toronto a few weeks ago, but many Canadian commuters do.
Do we need to improve how we build our cities? Of course. I campaigned back in 2014 for council in Barrie, arguing that council should look into a bus line or rail corridor along the middle of the 400 to the new Vaughan subway station. (Highway 400 where they are building all those bridges now.) I am familiar with what works in the world in terms of infrastructure, having studied infrastructure in European to South American cities.
That said, because of our lack of focus on proper infrastructure, Canadians living paycheque to paycheque are handcuffed by high gas prices and high food prices, due to trucks paying those high gas prices. They will continue to be handcuffed as well until our society starts placing more emphasis on proper infrastructure in this province, which will take years, decades.
Lincoln Bayda
Barrie
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