Thank you very much. I do apologize for that.
I'd like to thank you very much for allowing me to appear today. I'm actually an accidental politician. The image you're looking at right now is my community. That's what my community looked like for 43 years. At the time it was built, it was one of the largest coal-generating stations in North America and it was right smack dab in the middle of my community.
I started to investigate what the emissions were. This was when the coal-generating station was operating with scrubbers at 15% capacity. There is a grade school 300 metres from here that was the third lowest rated grade school in the entire region of Peel for over 20 years. They closed this generating station in 2005 and then they decided they were going to give us a 1,000 megawatt gas plant right on our waterfront.
If you put a compass on the site we're looking at, it's right at the epicentre of the golden horseshoe. It's the southeast corner of Mississauga, which means it's right beside the city of Toronto. It's 10 minutes by car to Yonge Street and it's 10 minutes to Pearson International Airport.
The site you're looking at outlined in red is approximately 285 acres. With the lakefill project, an additional 85 acres will be created.
I thought it was completely wrong that they should give us a coal-generating station for 43 years and then turn around and give us a 1,000 megawatt gas plant on seven kilometres of beautiful waterfront. I determined that this wasn't going to happen, so I put together a group. We partnered with the University of Toronto and we spent three years modelling with the community and we asked them if this was a blank slate, what they would like to see. We educated them on best practices. We did a complete cost analysis of the entire project. We became the first citizens group in North America to ever create its own master plan and have it accepted by all levels of government.
We defeated the power plant and we got both the City of Mississauga and the Government of Ontario to adopt what we called the legacy project. Our goal is to create the world's most environmentally sustainable community, and I know we can do it.
Then I spent two years chairing Mayor McCallion's task force on waterfront development and environmental sustainability. I got to work with some really terrific people. We got the power plant defeated in 2008. I did two years with madam mayor and the committee, and then everybody sat me down and said, “Okay, if we're going to get this job done, we have to get you elected”. I ran against a five-term incumbent and won by 128 votes. It was fun. It was like a horse race. I'm sure the politicians here can appreciate a good horse race. That was great.
Then we immediately wound up negotiating with the Province of Ontario and got a memorandum of understanding for a proper development of the site by 2014. We then started yet another round of what we now call Inspiration Lakeview. We went through a number of processes where we engaged the public. We allowed the community to design this new sustainable community. That's after we signed the memorandum of understanding with Charles Sousa, madam mayor, our city manager, and some people from OPG.
The site also has a terrific history. The very first airport in Canada was on this site. In 1915 J. A. D. McCurdy, the first man to fly an airplane, was the flight instructor there in 1915, 1916, and 1917. Eight of the top fifteen aces from World War I were trained there. They came over from England. There was this incredible history that was almost lost.
Here are more images of Inspiration Lakeview. We broke it down into eight principles. I'm going to go through them very quickly. We wanted to link the city and the water. In other words, we wanted to bring not only the city to the water, but the water to the city.
We had people from Hammarby, Sweden here. I don't know if any of you are familiar with Hammarby. It's currently the world's most environmentally sustainable community. We've actually just received a $175,000 grant from the federal government to bring some of the designers from Hammarby back over to help us with the next master plan, which we'll be starting in a week and a half.
We wanted to open the site and make it publicly accessible because it hadn't been accessible since 1896 when the Garrison Common used the entire site for firing ranges and artillery ranges.
We wanted to create a green, sustainable community. In Hammarby, Sweden, instead of using stormwater pipes, they use stormwater channels. They're quite beautiful, and they also help to filter the water. There's an economic benefit, too, because they're cheaper in the long run to maintain than a major stormwater system is.
We wanted to create a vibrant community that was at human scale. People like human scale. We also wanted to connect. The City of Mississauga is spending an awful lot of money on higher-order transit right now. Mayor McCallion was once considered to be the queen of sprawl, but no longer. She now gets transit, so that's really great.
We'll also create destinations down at the waterfront. The other thing we're going to do is commemorate history. We had the largest coal-generating station in North America, but now it's part of our heritage. It's a great heritage, and some of the best engineers in the world worked on this project.
We also want to make sure that it's financially viable. This is where a project like the one Ken has been referring to comes into play. These are all our sustainability things.
We've now done two different plans, and we'll be starting a master plan in a week and a half. It'll be finished in 18 months. Then we're going to start building. We're not asking for any money. We're going to do this ourselves. We've been doing it all along with private investment and with City of Mississauga money.
In the master planning, the 85 acres fit in quite beautifully. There are seven and a half kilometres, and the only place we didn't have public access is around the sewage plant. We have two creeks that are very badly degraded, and our wetlands project is going to help us with that. We're going to bring the water up into the site so it will create a lot of really interesting environmental opportunities.
We've already established our green corridors. Then, too, there's culture. Mississauga does not have a cultural centre and we want to bring in arts, heritage, science, and culture. We want to converge them all on this one site. If we can take a site with 120 years of military use and industrial abuse and turn it around to create a model for how to do things, then this can be done anywhere in the world. We can use this site, and we already have partnerships with three universities, to train a new generation of Canadians, and we can export that knowledge to the world.
Thank you.