By Kevin Powers
March 27th, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
The Hamilton Spectator chose not to publish this opinion piece.
Something as important as the mining of aggregate in rural Burlington deserves all the view points it can get.
No Need for New Quarries? Tell That to the Free Market
Across southern Ontario, the battle over new quarries rages on. Local opponents—armed with “No Quarry” signs and cries of “No Need”—paint aggregate operators as reckless profiteers tearing up the land for no reason. They argue the province has more than enough gravel, sand, and stone to go around, so why approve more pits?
Here’s the flaw in their logic: they don’t understand the basic laws of supply and demand. No operator in their right mind spends millions chasing a new license and risking rejection, unless demand is there—and it is.
The Jefferson slamander was the major obstacle when the first application for an aggregate license was turned down.
If there were an oversupply, you’d see it—prices crashing, pits shuttering, companies bailing. That’s not happening. The Ontario Stone, Sand & Gravel Association pegs annual consumption at 164 million tonnes, and the number of licenses has dropped by 28 since 2013. Operators aren’t flooding the market; they’re scrambling to keep up. The free market doesn’t lie—businesses don’t risk millions on a hunch when gravel’s piling up unsold.
Opponents might mean well, worried about dust, noise, or nature. Fair enough—nobody wants a quarry next door. But crying “no need” defies economic sense and assumes operators are either dumb or masochistic. They’re neither. They’re businesses, not charities, and they’ve got data—construction forecasts, infrastructure plans, population trends—telling them the juice is worth the squeeze. If they see demand drying up, they’re not going to risk millions of dollars trying to bring on new supply.
The irony? By stalling new quarries, critics could choke the very growth they take for granted—roads they drive, homes they live in. The Greater Golden Horseshoe is not swimming in aggregate; it’s rationing a shrinking stash.
The Aggregate Resources Act doesn’t ask for a “market need” test because it trusts the market to sort itself out. Maybe it’s time opponents did too. Operators aren’t the enemy here—they’re just reading the room. If there’s no need, they won’t dig. But the numbers say otherwise, and the free market’s already placing its bets.
The province’s own data acknowledged there is 6.2 billion tonnes of aggregate reserves in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, a 38 year supply.
There are many pits and quarries across Ontario where licences are held on hundreds of hectares where no extraction has occurred. If the market is so hot why are there so many unopened licenced properties.
Can anyone think why massive multinational companies would want to land bank?
Probably the same crowd that do not want pipelines to move oil and gas from Alberta to the East coast
NIMBY to the extreme.The quarry was there long before them.
And Nature was there long before the quarry