Tobique
Narrows bridge closing will create varicose veins
by
Robert LaFrance
When our provincial Department of
Transportation and Infrastructure decided to close Tobique Narrows dam bridge
for eight to ten weeks this summer – and not have an alternate means of getting
across that river there - they were obviously under the influence of some
substance that renders its user unable to access (1) vision, (2) compassion,
and (3) what it would be like to make a 90 km round trip when you can actually
look out your living room window to see your destination. Parts of Tobique
First Nation are 3 or 4 km away from parts of Perth-Andover.
Has anyone who had a part in that
decision ever spoken to someone in Tobique First Nation, Tilley, Rowena,
Perth-Andover or the area around there to see just what it would be like to
live on that side of the Tobique River and be cut off from travelling either
way? People from Tobique work in Perth-Andover and vice versa. It must be
interesting to sit in an office in Fredericton and snap your fingers: “I have
just inconvenienced five thousand people, too bad.”
Let’s go back a ways and look at the
new bridge put in a few years ago about halfway between Perth and Tobique
Narrows. A ‘stream’ that pretty well dries up in the summer runs down through
Hanson’s Gulch whose bridge was replaced although a large culvert would have
done the job. Some obscure environmental rule dictated that it couldn’t be a
culvert because, apparently, sockeye salmon and beluga whales migrate there to
spawn.
I have spoken to several engineers
about that job and they said it could have been done perfectly well for half a
million dollars. The official cost, including the building of a temporary
bridge around the site, was around a million, but I have it from a ‘reliable
source’ that the total cost of the project was close to $3 million. Keep in
mind, the transportation minister has said that NB can’t put a temporary bridge
at or near Tobique Narrows because it would cost a million dollars and, added
to the project itself, this would be $3.5 million.
Over the past few years and decades,
I have often wondered if someone in Fredericton has a grudge against the whole
Perth-Andover area including Tobique First Nation, Tilley, etc. Every possible
government office has been ripped out of the area and we wouldn’t have to think
long to name some of them: the Carlingford jail, Department of Agriculture, the
Provincial Court, the ranger station, and so on. You can even go back to the installation
of the lovely Beechwood Dam which forced merchants on the Perth riverbank to
move to the other side of the street. And when Bernard Lord’s band of merry
minions built a hospital out in a field in Waterville that was about it for
Hotel Dieu hospital in Perth, or so the minions thought.
A show of hands, please - who really
thinks that Perth-Andover will get a $17 million hospital on the Andover side
of the river? Although I have heard from another reliable source that $4
million would reinstate the present hospital to a flood-proofed facility
including the building up of access roads to Waterville, the government decided
to mollify people with the $17 million fantasy figure. Another thing that no
one has mentioned is that if a hospital did happen to be built on the Andover
side, it would isolate people in Perth from access to it. Remember, you heard
it here.
While I ain’t no good at ‘rithmetic,
I can tell you that the difference between $4 million and $17 million is $13
million. How much was that temporary bridge around Tobique Narrows again?
While I was doing research for this
column, I tried to think of analogies for what the provincial government has
planned for us this summer. I thought of Stompin’ Tom and his plywood – with
Tobique First Nation and Perth-Andover being the plywood – but that didn’t say
it well enough. Then I looked up the definition of ‘varicose veins’.
With varicose veins the blood is
allowed to flow backwards; this causes the veins to swell. The flowing
backwards is traffic going to Tobique Narrows and finding they have to turn
around and go somewhere else, and the swelling represents a lot of people who
are as mad as a cat dropped in a mud puddle. Varicose roads – what a concept.
Here’s my idea: how about if Tobique
First Nations residents invite the transportation minister and several high
mucky-mucks from his department to the parking lot of St. Ann’s Church. Look
down the river and you can see part of Perth-Andover. Then what if the minister
got a call that he was needed urgently in Perth-Andover? But the Tobique
Narrows dam is blocked by vehicles, so they would they have to drive all the
way to Arthurette and down Highway 109.
Would it then sink in, just a little bit, why people
are so upset at the idea of doing the same thing every day or every week?
-end-
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