One of the weirdest aspects of this craze is that we’re all environmentalists now. Yet we’re determined to create urban environments where a tree is a novelty. And this approach shares the desperado quality of so much public policy in Canada today, from deficits to inflation.
Wudrick says “Forward-thinking municipal politicians have an opportunity to get more housing built and help their communities grow and prosper.” But this distorted vision of prosperity echoes the infamous WEF “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” with “You’ll own more and you’ll be happy.” What about having nice stuff and being happy? If money could buy happiness, would it not have done so by now?
As for mass immigration, it’s designed to fix the demographic crisis without changing our ways. But it can’t work, because even fecund immigrants who become Canadian quickly go through the same demographic transition and we need yet more newcomers to fund their social programs. And if 40 million can’t make us “prosper,” what hope is there for 300 million?
As the child of one immigrant and grandchild of three I welcome individuals to this great land of opportunity and natural beauty from all over the world. (Except the small minority who regard Canada as a soft touch for organized crime, the disorganized kind, or terror.) But I ask you, with Toronto already stretching all the way to Guelph and Barrie, is our goal really a combined parking lot, mall, and high-rise from sea to shining tenement? Is it what immigrants want?
You know it’s not. Remember the teary character in “It’s a Wonderful Life” declaring in wonder, “Me, Giuseppe Martini, I own my own house.” Complete with yard for children, goats, and chickens. The American, and Canadian, dream.
Perhaps goats and chickens are de trop. Or wolves. But instead of chemical monoculture lawn, consider allowing some native plants that attract pollinators, and grass long enough for crickets and critters to nest in.
Oh, wait. You can’t. We dug up the lawn and squeezed three houses onto the lot. What’s a plant?
Wudrick hopes stuffing human units into ergonomic concrete boxes would “set off a cycle of healthy competition, encouraging other municipalities to get their acts together or miss out on attracting Canadians looking for a place to build a future for their families.” But what sort of future? Who, other than Soviet citizens or people in refugee camps, dreams of an apartment of their own, complete with tiny balcony and hallway trash chute?
I doubt the densificators’ public transit can cope with the grim Galactic Metropoles they envision. Cycling everywhere is unrealistic, especially with our natural and demographic winters. And a housing price crisis caused by cramming people into our cities won’t be solved by cramming more in. But the worst part is it’s an inhumane environment created by unnatural people.
Even the 20-something condo crowd partying high above the glittering sea of glass and cement will one day realize the social whirl ain’t restful, and long for something more bucolic. And if professors and planners love skyscrapers, they’re free to live in one. But don’t force it on us.
Here I must again quote Chesterton that self-government doesn’t mean asking “the ordinary citizen … a lot of fancy questions.” It means “He and his fellows are to be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives. … But in modern England neither the men nor the women have any influence at all. In the primary matter, the moulding of the landscape, the creation of a mode of life, the people are utterly impotent.”
At least back then there was a landscape. Now there’s a moonscape of sidewalks, roads, potholes, and rigid, unlovely walls past which the exhausted anti-hero in Mickey Spillane’s “My Gun is Quick” “headed north to my own private cave in the massive cliff I called home.” Is that really the Canadian dream?
No. So I say proudly, “Not In My Back Yard.” Don’t you dare pave it over and order me to smile.
