Dear editor:

The solution to the ongoing anti-development crying is education.

All the opposition to any new developments is being voiced by people who have little if any knowledge or experience in land use planning and what are the rules and policies that govern our local evolution.

The official plan is a living breathing policy document, always designed to never be stagnant and thank heavens for that or we would all be living in chuck wagons.

The repetition of the same old complaint that the elected and hired and appointed officials “do not listen to us” has become nauseating and unbearable.

“We moved here because …” Oh wow, so go move somewhere else and complain.

It should be mandatory for everybody who is obligated to pay property taxes in Niagara-on-the-Lake to take a seminar on: private property rights; an overview of governing land use policies; basic principles of development from the construction of a single-family residence to the building of a gorgeous new hotel where there are weeds  growing around a decaying unused ugly institutional structure; the importance of a healthy property assessment tax base; and the unresponsible and costly actions of those that continue with the “unbridled at no cost” fight against everything.

I would support a law that prohibits chronic and loud resistance to the development of a free community and positive economic growth, unless the NIMBY activists open their chequebooks to pay for their actions, because I am not willing to pay higher taxes just because somebody doesn’t like something.

That is their problem, not mine.

Sign up for a course and then seek to have your gratuitous grievances paraded. I simply don’t understand how somebody who occupies a property that once was a forest or an orchard or part of an Indigenous territory, can stand there proudly and cry foul.

Basic education would go a long way in tempering this type of repressive climate.

Peter Rusin
St. Davids