Young people deserve university close to home

YorkRegion.com (opinion)
April 23, 2014

The towns of Newmarket and Aurora have joined forces in an impressive and exciting bid to bring a York University campus to the area.

This visionary strategy has merit and is long overdue.

York Region has more than one million citizens, with about 40 per cent of those being younger than 24 — a good many of whom desire and deserve a close-to-home, quality post-secondary education option without being forced to travel to study.

The Newmarket-Aurora partnership team — including mayors Tony Van Bynen and Geoff Dawe, Southlake Regional Health Centre president and CEO Dr. Dave Williams and Newmarket Regional Councillor John Taylor — made their pitch last week to the university’s expansion selection committee.

It’s a solid bid.

As part of the proposal, the campus would be built on a 240-acre property near the Yonge Street and St. John’s Sideroad intersection, a location chosen for its close proximity to the border between the municipalities. The site also features 60 acres of forested parkland, rivers and streams.

This facility would be a coup for the northern part of York Region, makes financial and social sense and has far-reaching benefits for the towns of Georgina, East Gwillimbury, King and Bradford West Gwillimbury.

“Aurora-Newmarket is unmatched in York Region as a thriving, stable and sustainable community that is ideally suited to host a post-secondary institution,” Mr. Taylor said. “Let us move forward together and create an educational legacy for (the) region and university. This is our time.”

We wholeheartedly agree.

The bid has the support of Georgina and King Township, which sees an opportunity to incorporate an already approved $130-million expansion of the municipality’s Seneca College campus into the Aurora-Newmarket proposal.

As our story pointed out last week, an Aurora-Newmarket campus offers a wealth of partnering opportunities.

The municipalities already host headquarters for Magna International, the region, York Regional Police, the York Region District School Board and the York Catholic District School Board. Newmarket’s Southlake Regional Health Centre has also partnered with York on several initiatives in recent years.

Look at just one example of what the University of Waterloo has done for that area. Waterloo, with just more than 100,000 people, is similar to Newmarket and Aurora. Its three colleges and federated university have a huge economic impact — $1.1 billion annually — on the local community and created 23,000 full-time jobs, a study shows.

As northern York’s economy evolves from traditional manufacturing to one focused on information/communication technologies, this York university campus could be the engine that drives the local economy and beautifully complements our teaching hospital and myriad government services and agencies.

As a comparison, the University of Waterloo today fuels the growth in that area and has been said to be the most significant factor contributing to the creation, retention and attraction of world-class, new economic activity in Canada’s technology hub.

York Region youth deserve a top-notch learning facility close to home that will help keep education costs down, fuel the housing industry, pump funds into the local economy and create more jobs.

Let’s just hope the university sees it that way.

BOTTOM LINE: University could be boon for area with far-reaching spin-off benefits