CELPIP Reading Part 4 Practice Test: Neighbourhood Pools Or One Aquatic Centre Debate

Two of Ashgrove’s four outdoor pools opened a month behind schedule last June, their cracked basins patched for the third consecutive summer. Council is now deliberating over a plan to close all four by 2029 and channel the savings, supplemented by a provincial grant, into a single indoor aquatic centre beside the new transit hub on Garrison Road.

“The arithmetic leaves scant room for nostalgia,” says Councillor Brenda Yeung, who chairs the parks committee. Restoring the four pools, all constructed in the 1960s, to current safety standards would cost an estimated $14 million, and they would still sit idle ten months annually. The centre, comprising lap, teaching and warm-water therapy pools, would operate year-round. Families losing a pool within walking distance would receive a complimentary summer shuttle.

Kofi Mensah of the Eastview Community Association dismisses that shuttle as “a bandage on a wound the city inflicted on itself.” “Decades of trimmed maintenance budgets produced the very deterioration now presented as an unavoidable crisis,” he contends. “Neighbourhood pools are where children learn to swim and strangers become neighbours.” Nevertheless, he grants that a year-round facility is long overdue, provided it is not financed by shuttering every local pool.

Urban health researcher Dr. Samir Haddad finds that the evidence vindicates Mensah’s instinct, if not all his reasoning. Children living within a short walk of a pool swim considerably more often, whereas centralized facilities draw predominantly on families with cars. Haddad nonetheless declines to romanticize the existing pools. “A ten-week season’s too brief to teach a child properly.” His compromise would renovate the two busiest pools and add a more modest indoor centre.

For Lorraine Bouchard, who leads a seniors’ aquafit group, the therapy pool is decisive. Since the city’s only warm-water pool disappeared with the Marlow Street community centre, her members have driven forty minutes to a neighbouring town weekly, hardly an indulgence for arthritis sufferers. Her enthusiasm carries a caveat, however: should admission resemble private-club rates, the city will have erected “a beautiful building for the people who needed it least.”

A decision is expected in March.

Having grown up three blocks from the Eastview pool, I can hardly claim neutrality, but I can’t accept Councillor Yeung’s view that this is purely a matter of 6. Choose…budget arithmeticpublic safetyprovincial grant moneycivic pride. Mr. Mensah is right that the city is now paying for 7. Choose…years of heavy usea shrinking provincial granta fashion for big facilitiesits own false economies, and no free bus replaces 8. Choose…a dedicated therapy poolstrolling to the poola year-long seasonaffordable admission; try herding three children onto a shuttle with towels and snacks.

Still, Dr. Haddad has a point about 9. Choose…families who driverunning costshow long a season lastswhere the new centre is built: my children took lessons for three summers and still cannot swim a length. And if the new centre turns out to be 10. Choose…open only part of the yearsmaller than first promisedfar from the transit huba club in all but name, the residents with the most to gain will simply stay home. My advice: build smaller, and keep the two busiest pools open.