The Editor,
Re. “Port Moody is not as densely populated as some would suggest” (Letters, The Tri-City News, Jan. 3).
With civic elections approaching this fall and protection of Port Moody’s Bert Flinn Park becoming a flashpoint for debate, letter writer Wilhelmina Martin purports to lecture us all on “why facts are important and how you can be misled by numbers.”
The writer made a good point and illustrated it perfectly… but not in the way she intended. Martin ridiculed as “glaringly inaccurate” the figures given at savebertflinnpark.ca that compare PoMo’s population density to Coquitlam’s, and to Metro Vancouver’s as a region, but she got her own statistics so mixed up that The Tri-City News had to print a correction.
She also argued that PoMo’s pending construction spree is no problem because it “has had the lowest population growth [in the Tri-Cities] since 2011.” But Ms. Martin artfully neglected to mention that, in the prior census period, Port Moody was the single-fastest growing area in Metro Vancouver and third fastest-growing area in the entire province.
She managed to get Port Moody’s density correct at 1,296 persons per square kilometre but fumed that it’s “deliberately misleading” for our website to compare PoMo with Metro Vancouver’s average overall density of 855/sq. km, even though the city’s parks and recreation plan highlighted this exact comparison.
The park’s defenders care about preserving Bert Flinn as an extraordinary city asset, not about quibbling over density stats. But we can agree with Ms. Martin that we need a serious discussion about Port Moody’s future density, for the sake of our parks and everything else.
Consider: If PoMo shoots past its OCP target of 50,000 residents in 2041 and reaches, say, 60,000 — which seems entirely possible — then our city will approach the density of Burnaby today. Is that what we want?
Make no mistake, getting the numbers right matters, not just to this debate but to our future quality of life.
Jeff Poste, Co-Organizer, savebertflinnpark.ca
