Residents who might be impacted by the route, like Ben Hammond, are pushing back, saying this project does nothing for them and may very well threaten their way of life.
“I feel that there is a divide between the urban and the rural people now, the urban people just don’t understand. It’s nice to hop on a train and go to Toronto and be back at supper time but the environment, the ecosystems that they destroy, the communities they destroy, the family businesses — it’s not worth it,” Hammond said. “I don’t want to see it, quite honestly. I’ll fight tooth and nail to keep it off.”
[…]
Elisabeth Arbaud who helped organize the protest says this project is not worth the cost.
“Saving a couple of hours at max by ruining people’s lives this is not progress,” Arbaud said.
Alto high-speed rail: Protesters in Hawkesbury oppose train
Standing on the ice along the shoreline of her property, Heather Coulson Levy pondered what the addition of a high-speed rail track would look like at Varty Lake, a 600-hectare water body ringed by seasonal houses. In the summer, it is a busy recreational spot, with residents and visitors boating, fishing and just enjoying their days by the lake.
But Varty Lake also straddles the study corridor for the southern route of a proposed high-speed rail project that would run from Toronto to Quebec City. If the southern option is selected as the final route, the track would likely cross the lake.
Trains travelling 300 km/h between Peterborough and Ottawa would cross the lake every 20 minutes or so.
“Devastation is the word that comes to mind,” Levy said.
Levy acknowledged her property likely wouldn’t be expropriated for the project, but she would be left with a lake with a high-speed rail line.
Her plans to spend her retirement gardening have been set aside as she founded Save Stone Mills to organize community opposition to the rail project.
“I’m not an expert. I’m not a politician. I’m not a train builder and I’m not an economist. But now I’ve lived, slept and breathed high-speed trains,” she said, and plans to host public information meetings against the project in townships where Alto is not planning any open house.
[…]
“This is the Great Wall of Ontario,” said Lanark County resident Kim Davis, who is trying to inform residents living along the northern route. “If it gets built, it’s essentially going to sever eastern Ontario in half, north to south. If they build it where they want to build it, whether it’s the northern or southern route, eastern Ontario is going to be cut in half.
“I really don’t think most people from Central Frontenac north even know about it,” Davis said. “I don’t think there’s enough information coming from Alto for people to get a realistic and rational understanding of what it is.”
[…]
In mid-January Alto, the Crown corporation tasked with developing the high-speed rail line, unveiled the study corridor and launched a public consultation period.
The company is, until the end of March, collecting public input about the project, including comments about the eastern Ontario route options.
That process includes 70 open houses and 10 online sessions in communities along the route. Additional open house have been planned along the route after public demand.
[…]
Emerging from the public consultations has been a divide between urban and rural residents in surrounding communities about how the government would manage to protect farmland versus overarching support for the high-speed rail project, saying it will be an economic boon for the next generation.
Toronto-based transportation expert, Stephen Wickens, told CBC Radio’s Ontario Morning show that these debates mirror the discussions that occurred in France in the 1970s calling the discussions “remarkably similar.”
“The public opinion was actually generally quite against it, and a lot of the opposition, certainly in the rural areas, came from that fear of the barriers to high-speed rail will and can create,” Wickens said. “They mitigated it significantly with a lot of underpasses in France.”
But when the high-speed rail service opened in 1981, Wickens said, the support was overwhelming.
Rural residents seek to derail Canada's high-speed rail project | The Kingston Whig Standard
