Mike's recollection

  The Diamond Triangle, a history and observation By Mike Wladyka
 In 1967,  representatives from the governments  of Port Hope, Hope  Township, Cobourg and Hamilton  Township began a remarkable  collaboration that soon became  known as ?The Diamond Triangle? discussions.
Participants recognized  that the  quality of life each  munici-pality offered was jeopardized  by a lack of  co-ordination be-tween them .  It was necessary, in  the face of growing devel-opment  pressures, to lay out  a clear plan for  the future of the  area. It was obvious  to the committee that the individual communities  could not do this by themselves.

In a brief to the Minister of Municipal Affairs, the com-mittee stated: ?It was a grow-ing concern that an attempt to plan development in a single community without reference
to adjoining municipalities was futile. A larger profile with interrelated development was necessary. Without this under-standing and assured co-operation, the growth pattern
would create disharmony and instability.?

The ?triangle? designated an area formed by Port Hope, Hope Township, Cobourg, Hamilton Township, and a hoped-for relationship with the Rice Lake tourist area to the north.
The   ?diamond:   was  an   apt   symbol  of   what   the  participants   believed   was  the   essence  of   the   four  municipalities - a  jewel o with  many   facets. Zoning by-laws, economic development  and residential growth needed a single vision if  the horrors of ?strip devel-opment,? then creeping east-ward  from Toronto, were to be avoided. The Diamond Trian-gle  committee hoped to create an official plan that  would protect the unique identity of each community through wise use of land resources rather than submit to the ravages brought on by burgeoning land speculation. ôAmalgamationö could be part of that plan.

A workshop  was held in May  of 1968 at Cold  Springs, with the mayors, councillors, and  township reeves present. A guest was Mayor Ab  Campbell of Scarborough, an important
addition to help the local poli-ticians understand the rapid growth coming eastward at them from what was even then being called ?The Golden Horseshoe.? The workshop would be  one of many in the next few years that would lay out the raw data of ?all aspects of community life,?which the politicians were willing to share in an
at-tempt to find common  ground for organized and co-operative development. A report  on the Cold Springs workshop put in words the remarkable spirit of those involved in the
Diamond Triangle initiative: ?Self de-termination in local matters is deep-rooted in Ontario soil.?
The provincial  government of the day,  also a Conservative one,  would soon dig into that  soil... into that soul of co-operation...and help usher  in 30 years of hodgepodge devel-opment and confrontational politics.
 

In November  of 1968  the Diamond Triangle  planning group was  officially formed  with Cobourg councillor  Wilf Huskillson as  its first chair-man. By  1970, this grassroots
planning group  was facing its first  challenge in the form  of a new provincial  restructuring scheme based on the ?Toronto-Centred Region.ö In  a nutshell, the province was suggesting that Port Hope  and Cobourg belonged in plans to continue the  spread of the ?Golden Horseshoeö eastward. Re-structuring would include much of the Diamond Triangle in a Durham regional govern-ment. The proposal was hotly  re-jected by the members of the Triangle group,  and by most of the citizens they represented.  It was obvious to them that the ?Golden Horseshoe? was
more brass than gold.  The en-croaching strip development was there for anyone  to see. Communities were beginning to disappear under the burden of growth that was determined
 more by the whims  of real es-tate developers than by their city fathers. Urban sprawl was eating up prime agricultural land for the sake of private profit. In Oshawa , major river and water systems began to evaporate in the heat of devel-opment fever. The provincial government?s initiative would threaten the community life the Triangle group was trying to sustain. It became important then, more than ever, to find consensus and  offer an  alternative. Meetings  between provincial and  local officials were  held to  urge the province  to recog-nize the  Triangle group,  on the grounds  that local politicians represented  their communities  better than provincial consult-ants.  The province responded with  ?irrefutable? facts on traffic  surveys, employment patterns, shopping habits, and  - unbelievably  that Cobourg and Port Hope shared the same phone book with Oshawa. (No one knows what lurks in the heart, or head, of a bureaucrat.) The
public outcry was such  that the province retreated from its plan to  incorporate the Triangle in the Regional Mu-nicipality of Durham. This was a significant victory for the local governments and a sign they could work together effectively. After the rejection of  the Durham initiative in 1973, government and citizen groups began to debate the inevitable restructuring of Northumber-land county. It was the second phase in the history of the Diamond Triangle.

By 1974,  cracks began to show  in the unity that charac-terized the Triangle  group. With local politicians now fo-cusing on county  restructuring mandated by the provincial government,  the goal of  even-tual amalgamation  of the Port  Hope-Cobourg area ,  once fa-voured  by the group,  began to fade.  Squabbles began  to erupt, with  some local politicians re-fusing  to fund  any more amal-gamation  initiatives by the  Tri-angle group.

In  1976, the King report,  named for Donald King,  the provincial restruc-turing commissioner, laid out the fundamentals of the two-tier system we have today, with independent municipali-ties sending representatives to a county seat.

In 1977 the provincial  gov-ernment?s Whitelaw report did allow local planning groups  to continue, but by 1978 they were abolished and county governments were given over-all
responsibility for forming an official plan for the county. The Diamond Triangle con-cept limped into history, trans-formed into a shill for indus-trial growth, mainly in the Co-bourg area.

On the surface, the  Diamond Triangle, as originally envi-sioned, was a failure.  Its ulti-mate goal, amalgamation of the participating municipalities, lost out to county and provin-cial pressures.  It is not without  its successes, however. It  spearheaded opposition to the  Durham region plan, it  focused local politicians on  issues of land use beyond their munici-pal boundaries,  and it spawned some very effective local citi-zen groups. People were alerted to a future where strip growth might be averted by balanced industrial-residential-agri-belt growth. It is interesting in  1999 to note an option that was pre-sented in the King report on county restructuring. It called for the abolishment of county government altogether and di-viding Northumberland into three  sections û west, northeast and southeast. If this  had been adopted, each of the three mu-nicipality groups would have determined its own future. One can only  imagine the implica-tions for the hopes of the Tri-angle group. Certainly, the lo-cation of the area's hospital would have been debated with an entirely new set of criteria in place.

In their  book The  Age of In-security,  British authors Larry Elliot  and Dan Atkinson speak  volumes about the philosophy  that rules regional develop-ment  today and which
inspired the  Diamond Triangle fight against  it. ?The long with-drawing tide from small- and  medium-sized communities has left in its wake the  debris of closed schools and post of-fices,  axed railway lines and  bus routes and shrinking em-ployment opportunities, they  wrote. All the evidence is of a remorseless  drift into what the Americans have described as ?linear cities?, straggling sub-urban developments strung out along or near major motor-ways.?

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