Associate professor Meg Holden calls for regional approach to growth and equity

Associate professor Meg Holden published an op-ed in The Vancouver Sun today, calling for a regional approach to managing growth and equity:

Recognizing the value of our regional infrastructure and public space means a lot more than tallying up the usual suspects of bridges, farms, and shorelines. It also includes our streets, our public institutions, the pipes and other infrastructure that lies in between us and beneath our feet. We have mayors and other leaders in our region who recognize this and have assumed a new role as advocates for our regional interests, against those of the provincial and federal governments: against more tankers in Burrard Inlet, against a bigger pipeline for Kinder Morgan, against insufficient action to combat climate change. This kind of metropolitan activism strikes some of us as blustery, others as unbecoming. New federal leadership will surely help, but Ottawa and Victoria still have a long road to travel to develop a metropolitan vision of where good growth and development come from. This clash means that the more we hear from Ottawa that “x is good for Canada,” the less there may be in “x” for us, as a region.

Read the full op-ed here.