Longtime political groupie and Glendale resident Derek Insley suggests we should talk about 15-minute cities.
I’m game. The conspiracy whackadoodles certainly are.
Some people believe our little lovenest of a town is lurching toward surveillance, confinement and control. Look at the official, shiny new draft official plan, they say. Released a few weeks ago the following directive is spelled out clearly as the No.1 goal of “Community Design”:
“Encourage a compact, walkable and well-connected community.”
That may sound benign to you, but they’re fightin’ words for the many among us who believe, ardently, there’s a war on between freedom-living souls and the elitist cabal of lefty, climate-change zealot wokester, WEF radicals who seek political and social dominance. Seriously.
They think COVID was the dress rehearsal. The pandemic created a great opportunity to impose jackboot restrictions on all of us, shut down the economy, curtail travel, force vaccine mandates, block the border, make workers dependent on government dole and prompt leaders to plan a post-pandemic “great reset.”
Remember the truckers? The “Freedom Convoy”?
It was not about vaccines, the organizers said, but about fighting the World Economic Forum’s plans for social change that would throttle our way of life for the ultimate goal of environmental rescue. This was the antithesis of the supposed leftist mantra of, “you will own nothing and be happy.”
Guess what happened next?
Yup, Ottawa froze individual bank accounts of the protesters, validating their fears. Then Trump and MAGA stormed back to power. Conspiracy theorists were actually placed in the U.S. president’s cabinet.
Vaccines are now restricted. Federal structures being dismantled. In fact, the whole American government has been shut down for a month. Climate change is refuted. Universities are being targeted for leftyism and DEI programs. Political opponents are being indicted as criminals.
And, yes, words like, “encourage a compact, walkable and well-connected community” are at the centre of a theory that has already led to other Ontario municipalities turning into little war zones.
So what is a 15-minute city? Are we one? Is it bad?
French egghead Carlos Moreno (University of Paris) coined the phrase to mean a place where residents could access almost everything they need to be happy by walking or biking, within 15 minutes of their homes. Work, bank, groceries, post office, health care, school, retail, recreation.
Simply put, a life where commuting, cars and the QEW is replaced based on hoofing or riding to a job, the doctor, the liquor store or to buy lettuce.
Yes, like here in Old Town.
The anti-WEF crew — who have stormed local council meetings in southwestern Ontario and the GTA — claim this is about enslavement and control. By keeping people corralled in a 15-minute radius they’re restricting freedom of movement, choice and mobility. This lockdown, they say, will be mated with digital currency and surveillance. Every action monitored. Any boundary breach punished.
None of this has been helped by the Bank of Canada’s plans for a digital currency (which is inevitable) or the federal government’s move toward a stablecoin. It’s all more gas heaped on the still smouldering convoy fire. Remember that column I wrote about the Second Sons and their Brock Monument bivouac? This is real.
“The 15-minute city is yet another way in which the self-described elites in places like the UN and WEF plan to tell the rest of us how to live, for our own good of course,” writes Catherine Swift. She’s a conservative economist (TD Bank, then the Canadian Federation of Independent Business) who penned a local Niagara column. Yikes.
“As long as the climate and other societal goals are achieved,” she says, “it’s irrelevant if anyone even wants to live this way.”
But wait. I do. NOTL rocks.
(Shhh. It’s a conspiracy.)
Garth Turner is a NOTL resident, journalist, author, wealth manager and former federal MP and minister. garth@garth.ca
