Steve McGuinness
Special to Niagara Now/The Lake Report

The Boxing Week sales have ended. It’s time to return our unwanted gifts. That includes most of the presents Santa Ford recently delivered to Niagara, with our lord mayor standing dutifully and silently among his supporting elf entourage.

Let’s unpack the Ontario Premier’s Destination Niagara tourism plan. The centrepiece is upsized casino gambling, blindly ignoring Las Vegas’s recent tourism downturn, posting an 11 per cent decline in international traveller arrivals year-on-year, according to data from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

For families he promises a new theme park, without first rehoming the belugas still languishing at the recently shuttered old amusement park, Marineland.

Will he replicate his experience remodelling Ontario Place here? All Ontarians truly wanted there was more landscaped waterfront trails to walk, run and bike along. Instead he’s jamming in a larger foreign operated concert venue, a foreign controlled spa, a relocated science museum and a hulking multi-storey above-ground parking garage, blocking the lake views.

Excuse us if visions of similar designs rising along our Niagara River banks fails to impress us much.  

How realistically achievable and sustainable is his stated goal to double both tourist visits and the length of overnight stays, particularly here in the Town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, where many residents believe we’ve already broken through the barrier into the realm of over-tourism?

Two new major hotels are already under construction — the Clayfield Hyatt and the Two Sisters Parliament Oak — with the latter engulfed in continuous controversy. 

Meanwhile, town council repeatedly squanders chances to control the runaway number of un-hosted short-term rental units, ignoring escalating noise complaints flooding in to our bylaw enforcement officers. 

Converting residential properties over to short-term rental use depletes pre-existing housing stock. We lose homes formerly occupied by permanent residents, while town planners simultaneously approve new zoning to turn vacant fields into new subdivisions.  

Employees in lower-paying tourism sector jobs cannot lease affordable units here precisely because it’s more lucrative for landlords to rent to tourists on a short-term basis. So employers here must hire non-residents, who commute longer distances, inevitably in private vehicles (given the sad state of our public transit), magnifying environmental damage.  

Doug Ford is the same premier who presided over our COVID public health shutdowns and cast himself as “Captain Canada” in his re-election campaign last year. Now he is ignoring the lessons learned about the vulnerability of tourism to trade wars and pandemics. 

Why would we want to put more eggs in this same economic basket? Wouldn’t our provincial government be wiser to support economic diversification? NOTL may aspire to be Napa North, but we lack their nearby Silicon Valley.  

Mr. Ford also foresees Niagara as a year-round travel destination. But students that normally take these jobs during summer school breaks will be unavailable as staff in other seasons. Hospitality jobs do not pay well enough to lure workers away to better paying jobs in other sectors.

This means we will need to import more labour from outside of Canada. We already rely on foreign workers in our agricultural sector to produce our food. Will they now be serving that same food to tourists as well? Did our premier miss the recent federal directive reducing temporary foreign worker visas?

The most alarming part of his plan is to upsize the Niagara District Airport to handle regularly scheduled commercial jetliner flights. While landing closer to the new Niagara Falls casinos may be more convenient than using larger nearby airports in Hamilton, Buffalo or Toronto, this will impose a huge new environmental toll resting solely on our town to bear, as the gateway to attractions located outside of it.  

The airport’s recent master plan update proposed a runway lengthening to 7,500 feet from 5,000 feet to handle narrow-bodied jets. Premier Ford suggested increasing it further, by between 3,000 to 5,000 feet.

Comparatively, the runway length at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport (our country’s ninth-busiest) is less than 4,000 feet. A 10,000-foot-long runway could handle wide-body intercontinental jet flights.

The noise pollution impacts on approach routes over Glendale and Virgil would be intolerable, not only to residents but also to ecotourists here sampling wine in our naturally scenic Niagara Peninsula.

Steve McGuinness, CPA, is retired from a career in financial management on Bay Street. He holds degrees in political science and business administration. He offers reflections on public policy issues within our community. stevemcguinness94@gmail.com