Opponents of Wilmot land assembly call for ‘immediate end’ now that Trump is coming back

Opponents of the controversial Wilmot land assembly are calling for an “immediate end” to the project because Donald Trump is going to be sworn in as U.S. president.

A statement from Fight for Farmland said in part, “Trump’s intentions to roll back subsidies for electric vehicle battery plants have cast serious doubt over the need for any large-scale industrial project in Wilmot.”

According to reporting by The Associated Press, Trump has summed up his energy policy as “drill, baby, drill” and pledged to dismantle what he calls Democrats’ “green new scam” in favour of boosting production of fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal, the main causes of climate change.

In Waterloo Region, advocates against the land assembly believe the “misguided project” is a waste of time if Canada’s biggest trading partner has a president against electric vehicles (EV).

In that statement, Kevin Thomason, vice-chair of the Grand River Environmental Network, argued the land assembly “simply needs to be abandoned particularly now in light of Trump’s election, the ensuing fallout across the EV industry, and every manufacturing plant dependent on trade potentially facing massive tariffs.”

Spokesperson Alfred Lowrick said “Citizens deserve an end to this misguided project, not years of uncertainty and rapidly mounting costs.”

He adds the assembly should be “abandoned immediately” and needs to include communication and accountability for the residents who have been seeking understanding for almost a year, not “more secrecy and speculation.”

Fight for Farmland also argued the assembly is “another potential financial disaster waiting to happen,” comparing it to Waterloo’s RIM Park financing scandal.

In the fall of 2000, Waterloo council unanimously approved a lease-style loan with Mississauga’s MFP Financial Services. That loan — $ 48.3 million — was to be paid back over 30 years at an interest rate of 4.73 per cent. Instead, under what was later described by a judge as a “bait-and-switch scheme,” the real interest rate turned out to be 9.2 per cent and the total cost of the deal for the city almost doubled.

After an out-of-court settlement, Waterloo still faced a tab of nearly $33 million more than it thought it had agreed to and subsequently launched a series of lawsuits to recover $47 million in losses, damages and fees stemming from the scandal.

The statement from Fight for Farmland ends with a promise to make the land assembly project a key issue in upcoming Canadian elections.