Government releases plan for Rouge National Urban Park

Thestar.com
Jan 17, 2019
Marco Vigliotti

Environment Canada on Thursday released the first management plan for the proposed Rouge National Urban Park, promising new visitor learning facilities, an expansive trail network, and improved shuttle service for residents of the Greater Toronto Area.

But the area’s watershed protection group says it wasn’t informed of the sweeping planning document, and accused the Trudeau Liberals of disregarding decades of local guidance on managing the park.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna has tabled the first-ever management plan for the Rouge National Urban Park.

Jim Robb, general manager of the Friends of the Rouge Watershed (FRW), said he didn’t know the plan had been tabled in Parliament until he was contacted by iPolitics on Thursday morning.

“It’s not a good sign,” he said. “We’ve been heavily involved in this (managing the park) for the past 40 years.”

He said the Liberals have not kept the commitments described in the draft management plan that was devised under the Harper government in 2014, despite promising on the campaign trail to improve environmental protections for the park. Specifically, Robb wants the Trudeau government to implement recommendations from Environment Canada in 2013 to restore forest and wetland cover, and preserve “water quality and natural biodiversity.”

Parks Canada spokesperson Jeffery Sinibaldi, though, told iPolitics the agency has worked closely with the FRW on “all aspects of the management plan over many years.” The plan, he said, acknowledges the contributions of the group, and Parks Canada is “appreciative of their support to strengthen and improve the plan, in keeping with ecological integrity as the first priority in the management of the park.”

“Key stakeholders, including FRW, were aware that the announcement of the final management plan was forthcoming, and were informed of the tabling over the course of the past day,” he said in a statement.

The proposed park, which straddles Toronto’s eastern border, combines the provincial Rouge Park with neighbouring federally and municipally owned property. Parks Canada directly manages, or has interest in, more than 80 per cent of the lands set aside for the park, with remaining lands expected to be transferred from local municipalities in the coming months.

The country’s first national urban park, it will stretch over 7,910 hectares, connecting the Oak Ridges Moraine to Lake Ontario. It runs from Uxbridge and Whitchurch-Stouffville in the north, through Markham and Pickering to Toronto’s eastern waterfront.

Parks Canada said the management plan, tabled by Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, prioritizes “ecological integrity,” with an emphasis on species at risk and programs to restore local ecosystems. It will also provide long-term protection for the farms located in the park -- some of the last in the GTA -- and add dozens of new hiking trails, according to the federal agency.

The plan says park programming will offer opportunities for GTA residents to learn to camp, paddle, hike and grow their own food, while new welcome areas and facilities for visitors and learning will be set up in the Toronto, Markham, Pickering, Whitchurch-Stouffville and Uxbridge areas.

Close to 900 hectares of public and private land within the park’s outer limits will remain excluded and not subject to the management plan, including much of the hamlets of Cedar Grove and Locust Hill, private lands, and roads, railway lines and hydro transmission corridors. The park’s enabling legislation allows the transfer of up to 200 hectares of land to a federal, provincial or municipal authority for public infrastructure needs.

The Rouge National Urban Park Act became law in 2015, and the Liberals successfully passed amendments to the legislation two years later.

Robb said the management plan needs substantial changes to reflect promises made by local Liberal candidates in the 2015 election to ensure “ecological integrity” and to support existing provincial land-use management and conservation plans.

He said the failure to implement biodiversity recommendations from Environment Canada would cost taxpayers in the GTA $100 million each year from “unabated” pollution, extreme temperatures, and climate change-induced flooding and erosion.

Robb criticized the management plan for restricting public access to large swaths of the park to allow for farming operations. He said the FRW supports farming as a “continuing activity” in about one-third of the park, not the roughly 50 per cent allotted in the management plan, adding that leases for farmland in the park were going for 25 to 30 per cent below “fair market value.”

Sinibaldi said Parks Canada consulted more than 20,000 Canadians and over 200 organizations on the management plan, and incorporated “significant content from past regional and provincial plans.”

The final plan -- along with the 2017 amendments to the Rouge National Urban Park Act that ensure ecological integrity is the first priority when managing the park -- provides the Rouge with the strongest protections for these lands, he said.

Sinibaldi added that Parks Canada has “initiated and completed” 52 ecological-restoration and farmland-enhancement projects in the park since 2015, and has partnered with local conservation authorities, Indigenous groups, park farmers, municipalities, schools and volunteers to restore more than 60 hectares of wetland, stream and riverbank habitat, and over 26 hectares of forest area.