Hundreds rally in Pickering to protest changes to the Greenbelt

Protesters gather in front of Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy’s office demanding halt to changes including to the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve

Thestar.com
Aug. 14, 2023
Katie Daubs

If Premier Doug Ford needs a sign that people are angry about his government’s changes to the Greenbelt, the skeleton relaxing in the lawn chair on a busy Pickering street might suffice.

“Waiting for Doug Ford to do the Right thing,” read the sign propped up beside the skeleton, mimicking a tableau usually reserved for jokes about Maple Leaf fans waiting for the Stanley Cup.

Pickering is home to the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve -- a swath of land once called the “Crown Jewel of the Greenbelt,” that lost its protection when Ford’s Progressive Conservative government made changes to the Greenbelt lands in late 2022.

Stop Sprawl Durham organized the rally in front of front of Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy’s Pickering office on Sunday. The hundreds who gathered to protest the loss of environmental protection for the land were buoyed by non-stop honking from cars, trucks and motorcycles driving on Kingston Road. Many credited the size of the rally to last week’s release of the Auditor General’s report that found that Ford’s government “favoured certain developers” in their Greenbelt land swap.

“We’re not going to let the premier weather this storm,” said Abdullah Mir, 30, the co-chair of a Stop Sprawl Durham. “That’s what these people think, that this whole thing is a joke, and we’re just going to roll over and forget about it. This isn’t the end of it.”

Pickering-Uxbridge MPP and finance minister Peter Bethlenfalvy did not respond to the Star’s request for comment. Instead, the premier’s spokesperson Caitlin Clark sent an email reiterating the importance of building 1.5 million homes to cope with the province’s “unprecedented growth.”

“For nearly 20 years, the City of Pickering has advocated for removing these lands, including as recently as last November when both outgoing and incoming mayors wrote to the province,” she wrote, forwarding letters of support from both mayors.

Mir says the Ford government isn’t protecting the interests of “regular people.”

“They, in fact, routinely and repeatedly side with those in our society with money, power and influence,” he said.

“It feels personal,” said Leigh Paulseth, who sat in the shade with her one-year-old daughter Marion as the blue-eyed baby ate puffed rice snacks. “I worry about her future. We’re talking about a really big piece of land that’s really close to where we live that either enhances her future or potentially destroys it.”

There has been a tug of war over a vast swath of agricultural land in northern Pickering for decades. In the 1970s, the Ontario government expropriated the land to build an airport that never materialized. In 1999, the land was sold back to the original owners and tenant farmers at lower agricultural prices. The transactions were facilitated by a deal between the province, Durham Region and the Town of Pickering, requiring every purchaser to agree to an easement protecting the lands for agricultural and conservation use, “intended to protect the lands in perpetuity,” according to the Auditor General’s report.

Norm Collier, a local who staged a 40-day hunger strike to protect the land back in 1999, called that result “fantastic.”

“I think this will have the effect of protecting this land for agriculture for a long time,” he said, 50 pounds lighter from his strike.

As it turns out, not everyone agreed on the meaning of “perpetuity.” A Star story from 2004 notes that developers still bought farmland “with Pickering officials giving them the message that some day the land will be developable.”

Norm Collier died in 2020. “Otherwise he’d be out here,” said his longtime friend Stephen Marshall on Sunday, holding a “Developers Rule Ford is Their Tool” sign.

By 2003, the Town of Pickering was chafing at what it considered the province’s meddling. When it included the Duffins preserve area in a development study with an eye to building homes, the province stepped in with a ministerial zoning order (MZO) to overrule local planning decisions. Pickering council members decried their inability to plan in “one third of the city,” the Star reported at the time, wearing black arm bands to signal “the death of democracy.”

It didn’t end there. Before the province finalized its Greenbelt plans in 2005, the Town of Pickering released the easements it held on two-thirds of the properties, arguing that they never intended them to be permanent. The province trumped the municipality with its Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve Act in 2005.

In December 2022, those protections were removed by the Ford government as part of the Greenbelt swap that opened 7,400 acres to development, with more than half of that land in the Duffins Preserve. Ford has pointed out that he also added 9,400 acres to the Greenbelt, but in last week’s report, Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk found the majority of those parcels were “already protected under other means.”

An investigation by the Star and the Narwhal showed that eight of the 15 parcels of land removed from the Greenbelt were purchased after Ford’s Tories took power in 2018. Another joint investigation by the Star and the Narwal this summer noted that developers have purchased hundreds of acres of land in the Duffins preserve since it lost its government protection.

“We may feel despair because they keep going at us, and they keep taking land away, and they keep disrespecting people across Ontario, but all of us here together, this is so encouraging,” said NDP MPP Sandy Shaw, the official critic for Environment, Conservation and Parks, at Sunday’s rally.

The Ford government has vowed to continue with its plans, which it says are necessary to alleviate the housing crisis.

Robert, a 10-year old from Scarborough, disputed that point in a speech at Sunday’s rally (as did Lysyk in her report.) “The housing crisis is not going to be solved by building on the Greenbelt,” he said as he stood on the grassy berm between the plaza and the road, his mother holding the megaphone so he could hold his speech. Ontarians want homes near where they work, he said, not sprawl. The crowd cheered. The cars honked.