Milton — a snapshot of a region struggling with growth
In communities such as Milton, the province’s growth plan has neglected to align population increases with transit and other infrastructure needs, critics say.

TheStar.com
Dec. 21, 2015
San Grewal

No community in Canada is growing faster than Milton. And there’s probably no place in the country where the stresses of daily life, for residents like Zeeshan Hamid, are so closely tied with the inevitable growth.

Two of Hamid’s three children learn inside portables at their elementary school, which opened just four years ago. That’s not rare. Most schools in Milton are far beyond capacity. Hamid even feels lucky that his youngest actually gets to stay inside the building.

Hours before his children leave for school, Hamid’s own workday commute begins with one purpose in mind: finding a parking spot at Milton’s only GO Train station.

It was opened in 1981, after a decade of startling growth that saw the municipality’s population soar, from 7,018 residents in 1971 to 28,067 a decade later, a 300 per cent increase. Flash forward to today, and that figure is a mind-boggling 1,600 per cent, with Milton’s estimated population at the end of this year projected to be around 120,000.

With the GTA’s population set to rise by almost 3 million people over the next 25 years, the vast majority in the 905 area code, the provincial agency responsible for implementing the growth strategy is facing sharp criticism about desperately needed infrastructure that’s nowhere in sight.

“Our forecasts are suggesting that there’ll be approximately 13.5 million people in the Greater Golden Horseshoe by 2041,” says Larry Clay, assistant deputy minister of the Ontario Growth Secretariat, which operates under the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. “The growth is coming, this is likely where it’s going to grow, and we need to plan better for it, going forward . . . it’s a very fast growing region.”

On Dec. 7, his government released a report on its growth plan. It mentions the need for better co-ordination with the provincial 25-year master plan for regional transportation, the Big Move. But it doesn’t include detailed plans for improving the growing infrastructure gap, and doesn’t mention what to do about schools, hospitals and other specific pieces of key infrastructure needed in high-growth areas.

Asked to respond to Milton residents frustrated by the lack of infrastructure co-ordination, Clay says, “In Milton and Halton Region and in areas across the GTA there are efforts to invest in infrastructure . . . a lot of that investment is starting to happen.”

Not fast enough for Hamid.

“If I don’t get to the (GO Train) parking lot before 7:30, forget it, I have to drive into work,” he says.

That means getting on to the backed-up Highway 401 for a trek to downtown Toronto, where he’s employed in the IT industry.

Commiserating over their daily GO Train commute has become something of a social media obsession for Milton residents. Hamid represents many of them in another way, in his other job as a Town of Milton councillor.

“It’s not just the GO Train parking and the lack of train service,” he says. “It’s having to go to Peel or Oakville for a hospital bed in the maternity ward when babies are delivered; kids in portables because schools are way over capacity right from the day they open; waiting for the university campus we’ve been trying to get for years; overburdened libraries, roads and highways that we’re waiting to get widened. I’m not sure if the province realizes the kind of growth Milton has seen, and will continue to see in the future.”

Under the province’s Places To Grow Act, which came into effect about a decade ago, municipalities were required to plan future development according to population-density formulas designed to hinder sprawl. Since the 1970s, places like Mississauga, with 50- and 60-foot-wide lots for detached homes in vast subdivisions, had set a trend that was pushing the population ever outward. As commute times became the worst in North America, the region’s economy was losing billions of dollars annually in productivity, while municipalities struggled to build service infrastructure out to far-flung neighbourhoods.

Milton was quick to comply with the province’s growth plan. It’s still waiting for its fair share in return.

“Back in the daym there was not that much volume on the (GO) train,” says Giles vanderHolt, who has lived in Milton for 35 years. “But nowadays the parking over in the Milton parking lot is absolutely jam-packed.

“There’s a huge need for more GO transit parking and better train service to Milton.”

In communities such as Milton, the province’s growth plan has neglected to align population increases with transit and other infrastructure needs, critics say.

Paul Smetanin, CEO of the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis, says it appears that Places To Grow “is not capturing the implicit contract between the provincial government and municipalities.”

“The implicit contract is that there is co-ordination — that the province will show up with the infrastructure that is part of their mandate and their domain, and will work hand in hand with the municipalities,” says Smetanin, whose organization just released a critique of the province’s growth plan.

In exchange for accepting the growth densities mandated under the legislation, Smetanin says, the “municipalities say back to the province, ‘You put in the provincial infrastructure that is required.’”

Currently Milton only has train service during the morning and afternoon rush, with no service in the middle of the day, after 7 p.m. or on the weekends (the station is open less than 15 hours a week, only in the morning Monday to Friday rush). The lack of service makes Milton residents, “dependent on the only service we have. A lot of people get stranded if they don’t make their train in or out,” vanderHolt says.

A drive through the massive paved parking lot at 2 p.m. on a recent weekday afternoon offers a glimpse of what desperate commuters deal with every day. Not one spot is available. The tiny station is dwarfed by the sprawling expanse of its parking lot, with more than 1,000 spaces and many cars double-parked. Signs recently posted around the lot instructing commuters who can’t find parking to drive to the next station in Mississauga “are insulting,” says vanderHolt.

He says that with Milton’s population projected to double again in less than 20 years, growth pressures will only put more stress on residents.

Milton Councillor Colin Best and his colleagues on Halton Region council have for years considered abandoning the province’s mandated growth plan.

“How are you supposed to plan long term when you don’t know what (infrastructure) you’re going to get next year? Basically, we have no provincial infrastructure being proposed for this area.”

Best mentions Milton’s current hospital expansion as one bright spot, but he isn’t even convinced that will meet the growing demand in a town expected to double in less than 20 years.

He says residents are already starting to leave Milton, as schools, the hospital, its two libraries, and lone GO Train station fail to keep up with the rapid growth.

“We’ve grown so fast because people wanted to live here and because we’ve complied with the province’s strategy for much denser growth. The province is basically saying: ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’”