Niagara Falls: Some things never change

The falls are still marvellous, and the city is still a tacky mess.

Skyline Tower beyond a sea of parking

In 1882 Oscar Wilde noted that “Niagara will survive any criticism of mine. I must say this, however, that it is the first disappointment in the married life of many Americans who spend their honeymoon there.” (Calling it the second disappointment is a misquote) I recently visited with my daughter Emma’s family, and not much has changed since 1882, or at least since my kids were little. There is this- a vast no-mans-land of parking separating the modern casino hotels and the Clifton Hill tackiness. It seems that half the city is a parking lot.

This is also new- the Niagara Parks Power Station, magnificently restored and presented.

Inside the vast hall, you learn how more than half the water that used to go over Niagara Falls is diverted to generate the electricity that made Ontario what it is.

I visited the day after the Federal Leader of the Opposition, Pierre Poilievre, actually said that the House of Commons is powered by lightning from the sky. This, in a province that is powered by the giant socialist project that was Ontario Hydro. In 1905, the Conservative premier James Whitney, declared "the waterpowers of Niagara Falls should be as free as air and available...to every citizen." Historian H.V. Nelles wrote "Public power was a classic radical democratic cause, a defensive measure against one of the more obvious abuses of capitalism.” Poilievre should visit Niagara Falls; there is much to learn about electricity and true conservatism.

Poilievre could walk through the incredible tunnel that used to carry the water back to the Niagara River after it had been run through the giant turbines and marvel at the technical sophistication of it all, that this was built 120 years ago by people with vision.* As James Marsh wrote:

At the turn of the twentieth century the hopes of a prosperous future in Ontario focussed on the awesome wonder of Niagara Falls. Waterpower was the "white coal" that would fuel the new economy. Toronto journalist Hector Charlesworth remembered the exhilaration of learning that "a source of energy as vast as the entire soft coal deposits of Pennsylvania had by some miraculous process been transferred to Canadian soil."

Some things are the same; even the handrails, definitely illegal under any code for being climbable by a 4-year-old in two seconds, are still there and still a great background for photos.

I had also never been on the White Water Walk, where you drop 70 meters to the bottom of the gorge and walk almost at river level; it’s spectacular.

Getting there was half the fun

For this trip, getting there was half the fun. I had agreed to go without checking my calendar, and I had previously agreed to do a lecture about my book in Cobourg, Ontario, which is in the opposite direction. So while Kelly and the kids took the cars, I got on a street car at 7:30 and a train at 8:51, did the talk in Cobourg and got back on the train at 11:51, caught the GO train from Union Station at 13:45,

Switched to the GO bus in Burlington at 14:54, and checked in to the hotel at 16:00. Six different trips, four different modes of transport, and three different networks, and they all ran on time with seamless connections.

I do not think I could have done this trip a year ago when I was working full-time for Treehugger; I had no patience and wouldn’t take the time to admire the topiary at the Butterfly Conservatory when I had two posts a day to crank out. I certainly would have chartered an airplane before I spent most of a day sitting on buses and trains.

I would have railed at the tackiness and the parking lots and the IHOP signs everywhere. Instead, I relaxed and just took this strange landscape in stride; in ten minutes, you can walk from the tacky to the moonscape to the pretend Vegas to the glorious falls. Where else can you do that?

And my granddaughter now knows more about electricity than Pierre Poilievre.