Construction starting on new Port Lands river valley

Thestar.com
Novemebr 29, 2018
David Rider

“This is a river we’re sitting on,” Stacey LaForme, chief of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, told fellow guests shivering in a drab Commissioners St. parking lot in industrial Toronto.

Several people smiled, looking around the bleak lot with big yellow diggers set to break ground and carve out a lush new river valley, “renaturalizing” the mouth of the Don River and creating Villiers Island that will be home to a Port Lands neighbourhood just east of downtown.

Federal, municipal and Waterfront Toronto officials gathered Thursday to toast the latest milestone in a $1.25 billion, multi-year project to flood-proof east downtown Toronto and unlock a former wetland, later solidified with construction waste, for development with homes, parks and more.

“This is going to change the face of Toronto for the better and for the future,” declared federal Infrastructure Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne whose government is equally sharing redevelopment costs with the Ontario and City of Toronto governments.

Artists’ conception drawings of the kilometre-long meandering valley promise a six-year transformation from industrial blight to meandering green-banked waterway where canoeists and kayakers can land at parks connected by pedestrian and cycling paths.

More than 1.2 million native species seeds will be planted in 183,000 tonnes of new shoreline earth.

Villiers Island is to become a 35.5-hectare “climate-positive” community bisected by Cherry St., home to as many as 10,700 people. Plans include affordable and market-priced housing plus parks and other public spaces. The earth is coming from a Front St. condominium construction site.

Missing from Thursday’s event was Ontario Infrastructure Minister Monte McNaughton, who was scheduled to attend but cancelled, his office said, to instead go to a Grimsby hospital redevelopment announcement with Premier Doug Ford.

“Minister McNaughton believes today’s (river valley) groundbreaking is a significant step in the right direction,” his communications director Lee Greenberg told the Star. “Investing in and protecting the Port Lands means the creation of new jobs and a transformed waterfront community, which will help make Ontario open for business again.”

While Mayor John Tory heralded government co-operation remaking the Port Lands, he didn’t hold back when asked about province-owned Ontario Power Generation’s recent $16-million sale of the 16-hectare waterfront Hearn generating site to longtime tenant Studios of America.

“The whole transaction has been done in a bit of a cloudy manner and I’m not happy about that,” Tory said, referring to the fact that OPG negotiated only with Studios of America, which had a right of first refusal in its lease, and did not inform the city that the sale was imminent.

“The city and the partnership of Waterfront Toronto should have been consulted because it has always been contemplated that in some way or other the Hearn generating station would be part of this overall precinct,” he said. The Hearn site is east of the river valley which was the subject of Thursday’s event.

“I think how this whole thing has been handled has had far too much mystery associated with it,” the mayor said, adding he hopes the site’s new owner will co-operate with Waterfront Toronto on redevelopment plans.

Studios of America president Paul Vaughan told the Star last week that the company plans no immediate changes for the site, now used primarily for film sets and special events, with the grounds open to the public. OPG says the new owner is not allowed to resell the land for three years and can’t put “sensitive uses” including housing on the polluted former coal plant site for 15 years.