I would like to provide…

I would like to provide comments because I am an affected party and have lived in the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve (DRAP) for well over 20 years. Full disclosure, I am a retired fish & wildlife biologist. The DRAP was green-belted because a former premier of the province was angry at a developer for outing a very private political fundraiser on the front page of several national newspapers and to support a land swap with different developers.

Ontario decided to stop a previously fully-approved housing development in Oak Ridges to prevent the bisection of the Oak Ridges Moraine. So the province swapped land in the moraine for Seaton in Pickering, stopping the construction of 900 houses in Oak Ridges and allowing 90,000 in Seaton on extremely environmentally sensitive lands which include the last three cold water streams in the GTA. In order to punish one developer and placate motivated Eco activists, the DRAP was created on land the City of Pickering had previously planned to develop for housing given its existing infrastructure, servicing and immediate proximity to Toronto with its transportation routes and public transportation. To quote a longtime senior planner with the City of Pickering: “The development of the Agricultural Preserve was a no-brainer ‘till it got political”.

In order to impress the former premier’s displeasure with a developer, he had the DRAP sterilized with 7 registered restrictive covenants on the title of the majority of the properties, some of which belonged to the offending developer. These include: 1. the owner can not get, change, discharge a mortgage; can’t rent, sell, lease their land/home without written permission of the City of Pickering. 2. Agricultural Easement requiring farm uses but with two 14” pages of restrictions on the type of farming and farming activities; 3. A wildlife easement for migrating wildlife? As a F&W biologist, I know that wildlife corridors follow natural contours and watercourses, not along non-existent streams and rivers incorrectly depicted on the wildlife easement maps on and over barren fields. 4. Ministerial Zoning Order from Liberals. 5. Ministerial Zoning Order from the Conservatives. 6. Inclusion in the Greenbelt Act 7. Inclusion in the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve Act. In addition, the federal government registered a restrictive covenant on every property preventing silos of higher than 80 feet. Bear in mind that the DRAP is in Canada and these restrictive covenants are nothing more than an abomination of public process.

I fully support the implementation of Bill 33 to fulfill a desperate need for housing, and to correct a partisan political act that harmed the intended developer, many innocent home/land owners, the City of Pickering and the citizens of the province of Ontario who lost out on realizing the value of costly infrastructure their tax dollars have paid for. Bill 33 is brought forward in recognition of a dire need for housing in direct response to our federal government’s stated objective of welcoming 500,000 immigrants per year for many years to come. Societally, we desperately need these new Canadians to come to this country to work, prosper, pay taxes and to enrich our Canadian mosaic. When the first phase of housing was sold in Seaton, I walked over to see what was happening. I observed that the vast majority of prospective purchasers were immigrants from many counties who spoke diverse languages, but all seemed to have an absolute faith in the Canadian Dream of coming to Canada to work hard and prosper.