Now is not the time to pave over Morrow Park

Let us recover from the pandemic before making a decision like this

On Thursday, city council will meet to ratify the decision to move forward with Morrow Park as the proposed site for a twin-pad hockey arena and accompanying parking lot. This vote was delayed when Monday’s meeting went over time. I spoke as a delegate at that session, and implored counsel to hold off on ratifying this project.

The community has already rejected using a different green space as a site for construction. I believe council has moved this through during the pandemic lockdowns as a way to get traction they haven’t gotten in over 10 years. The community needs more time to respond to this proposal, post-lockdown.

Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that it is only because of the legacy of colonial violence, and the disregard for legal agreements made between Indigenous peoples and colonizers, that we are having this conversation today in this forum, about land and how it should be used. Since I relocated to Nogojiwanong/Peterborough, just around the corner from Morrow Park, I have heard about a number of plans for the city to use park space for the construction of new buildings and parking lots.

As we speak, hundreds of forest fires are burning, and temperatures in various parts of Canada have reached historical highs. The heat and the smoke has made the air for those who are older or with lung conditions difficult to breathe. Speaking of lungs, did you know that there is a sign in Jackson park stating that Jackson Park along with Nicholls Oval and Inverlea Park were meant to be “urban lungs” for the city?

Apparently they were thinking about “urban lungs”— protecting and cultivating green spaces in the city as a way of ensuring the air is good for us to breathe — many years ago. We know that natural green spaces in and around urban areas are an important tool for CO2 sequestration.

Morrow Park could be one of those places. Or it could be a hockey arena and a 1,227 car parking lot depending on whether you ratify that decision today.

The City of Peterborough rightly declared a climate emergency in 2019. How is this project at all compatible with our city’s own declaration? How has that declaration changed your decisions about city planning? How could you not change your minds when you know that recent heat storms have caused cities to burn and people to suddenly die? In Canada. It’s here. And, we urgently need to pivot together to take care of one another.

As stewards of the land, rightfully or otherwise, can you really support spending $61.5 million on building ice rinks that we may not even be able to keep cool enough to freeze in a few decades if we don’t start to do things differently now? If we don’t change, this project will only be a few years old when we cross the threshold for climate warming; the point of no return.

Making it, or doing things differently, would mean honouring the original intent of the land bestowed to the city by Harold Morrow, who wanted the land to continue to be a place where agriculture, our culture of growing food, continued to be celebrated and nurtured. How are hockey rinks and paved parking lots at all respectful of that condition?

I don’t believe that ratifying the decision would be ethical considering this latest iteration of the plan has been pushed through during lockdown. If you won’t change your minds, at least consider giving the community more time to respond. Developments at the Fleming College site were only terminated in 2020 due to the pandemic. I think it’s unethical for you to permanently destroy this precious resource during a time when it has been hard to safely organize, protest, and spread the word about this plan because of COVID-19 precautions.

I believe if we weren’t just coming out of lockdowns, you would hear loudly and clearly once again, this is not how our community wants to use precious green space. Whose priority is this and why?

If long-term growth is your goal, remember, this plan was hatched over a decade ago. Long before we had really accepted the climate emergency. If the goal is tourist dollars and population growth, keep in mind that very soon, people are going to prioritize visiting, living, and working in places where the air is clean and the temperatures are tolerable. By the time this project is finished will it still be what you think we need?

If you ratify this project, I have absolutely no doubt that our ancestors, maybe even the very next generation, will be the ones to regret it. Once we pave it over, it’s gone.