I live in St.Catharines and they just recently built a brand new facility housing both a competitive swimming pool, as well as a recreational pool, a branch of the local library and a community centre, at the expense of people in my neighbourhood who will now be losing their only pool, and possibly their only high school.

In its development, there was plenty of room for parking. I learned that there is no evening or weekend bus service by the aquatics centre. When I wrote to the city about it, they referred to bus service half a mile to a nearby cross-street. I wrote back, saying “I have an idea. Let’s place the parking lot over half a mile to the next cross-street and let the buses run directly by the centre.” They obviously (and as usual) did not consider bus riders in their multi-million dollar plans to build this expansion which mostly serves a middle class/upper middle class section of my community.

Where I live, there are no community centres, no recreational centres, etc. It will literally be gutted once the pool and the high school are gone.