Sir: Like his name, our mayor is constantly filled with hope and exuberance for grandiose plans for the future. Convinced he is that given a sufficient number of trips to China we will automagically see a natural gas fuel fertilizer plant pop up near Wallaceburg with hundreds of jobs.
Regarding the future of high-speed rail, hope and exuberance he has aplenty, but methinks he is coming out considerably short on reality. I’m glad he actually rode on a high-speed train in China, so now he knows they go really, really fast.
In the course of my career, I had occasion to travel multiple times on the French TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse) from Paris to Marseille. It too goes really, really fast, but I noticed something very important other than its speed. From Paris to Marseille, a distance of just less than 800km, about 120km less than the distance from Windsor to Montreal, the TGV makes TWO stops – one in Avignon and one in Aix-en-Provence.
The reality of high-speed trains is that they travel very fast and make very few stops. Stops are what consume time on the Windsor to Quebec corridor. There is no point of creating a “high-speed” train and then slowing it down by stopping at all of the current VIA rail pickup locations.
A viable high-speed train from Windsor to Montreal could possibly make stops in London, Toronto and Kingston. That’s it. Using the timing from the TGV, each of those stops would add about 10 minutes to the trip.
As Mayor Hope dreams, it would be lovely to commute from Chatham to the GTA as long as one is prepared to drive either to Windsor or London to catch the train.
Speaking of being a little light in reality, I also noticed in the same article that our mayor says Ontario is “over-producing electricity and selling it at a loss.” Why then is Chatham-Kent a willing host for wind farm development, to add even more of the money-losing turbines? Is it because of the corporate baksheesh – oh excuse me, the community grants – in the millions of dollars from the likes of Samsung? Is our council that tied to instant gratification?
Maybe our mayor and council did not notice, but in June alone, Ontario taxpayers (including those in Chatham-Kent) $2 billion, just in one month, selling electricity below its cost of production.
Time for a really heavy dose of reality if you ask me.
David Goldsmith
Chatham
