Evidence of meeting #34 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 41st Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was farmers.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Corneliu Chisu Conservative Pickering—Scarborough East, ON
What types of benefits do you foresee with longer term leases? You were mentioning that they were very short-term leases.
Whittamore's Farm
With a longer term lease, what you will see happen is investment in agricultural infrastructure. Probably the first one will be tile drainage. Because we've been effectively on one-month overhold leases for the last 30 years, farmers are hesitant to sink a minimum $1,000 per acre into the ground. Tile drainage has been around... Well, I was in China and saw it in a museum, so they were doing it 4,000 years ago. Tile drainage is one of the single most important things for agriculture to increase efficiency and yield and for hydrologic function, because when the water, instead of running off the land when it's not tile drained is able to go through the land, the water is much cleaner and it's much better for the environment.
If you think about your plants at home, if you put too much water in, they quickly die. I'm good at growing plants outside; I can't do that inside. That's why there's a hole in the bottom of the container, because plants want lots of moisture in well-drained soil. That's the single biggest thing.
Then you'll see farmers start to invest in outdoor buildings, buildings for providing housing for animals or for equipment. With long-term leases you will see investment in these farms.
Conservative
Corneliu Chisu Conservative Pickering—Scarborough East, ON
On the environment side specifically, what are the benefits, for example, of crop rotation? I am an engineer; I'm not a lawyer, but I'm asking. I know the benefits of crop rotation.
Whittamore's Farm
The number one thing that crop rotations do is they break the life cycles of insects, disease, and weeds, which helps us to reduce our pesticide use. Good crop rotation has been around for, as I said, millennia. It's good for the soil. It helps to create the flora in the soil providing more bacterial activity, more worms. It's a benefit for the surrounding environment and cover crops, because we use a lot of cover crops that prevent the runoff.
Conservative
Corneliu Chisu Conservative Pickering—Scarborough East, ON
This is my last question for you. Will longer term leases reduce the amount of fertilizer you will need to use on your land?
Whittamore's Farm
Will a long-term lease reduce the fertilizer? I guess potentially it could if the farmer decided to start farming some different type of crop other than what he is doing right now. Currently, the farmers are using best management practices. Some of the application technology.... As I said, we're using drip irrigation. Thirty years ago we were spreading the fertilizer across the whole field. Now every single strawberry row, every raspberry row, any crop that we grow has a drip tube underneath. It's plant zone fertilization, so it has reduced our fertilizer usage significantly.
Conservative
Corneliu Chisu Conservative Pickering—Scarborough East, ON
Thank you very much.
I have a couple of questions for Ms. Schultz. You spoke about the ecological integrity a lot and I appreciated your comments on the ecological integrity.
How do you define the ecological integrity in the context of the Rouge national urban park? What is the level of protection you see?
We are creating a new park. It is different from the national parks. What is your vision of this one?
What is your definition of this ecological integrity in this particular situation?
Executive Director, Ontario Nature
My definition is similar to that in the National Parks Act and in the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act. What I will say is that I don't think there's any requirement to be perfect right at the beginning.
The notion of ecological integrity being this gold standard—and you have to be there and if you're not there, then it isn't relevant to this park—that's what we dispute. There are numerous examples of provincial parks and national parks in the system that have not the same but equivalent disturbance to what we see in the Rouge. Those parks are managed still with that standard.
The concern is the bill does not maintain that standard in terms of how the park would be managed to have the management procedures and processes in place to move towards achieving that standard.
Conservative
Corneliu Chisu Conservative Pickering—Scarborough East, ON
I'm asking you what protection at this time is the Ontario government providing for the Rouge Park? Which standard is applied at this point? Should we accept the lands from the Ontario government if it is not living up to the standards?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Harold Albrecht
The time is up, but I'll give you 15 or 20 seconds to respond to that.
Executive Director, Ontario Nature
What I would say is the existing Rouge Park.... What we want it to be is something that is protected and has greater ecological protection than it has had with the various interactions of different management regimes in the past.
This is the big opportunity to move towards a park that celebrates sustainable agriculture, and ecological protection with ecological integrity, as the standard we're working towards in terms of the natural ecosystem.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Harold Albrecht
Thank you, Mr. Chisu.
We'll move now to Mr. Harris, for seven minutes.
Dan Harris NDP Scarborough Southwest, ON
Thank you to the witnesses for both being here.
Mr. Whittamore, you made a statement right at the end of your opening remarks that regardless of these different other things that would happen, it would impact farming of that farmland.
Of course you are very familiar with the short-term leases that have been going on for a long time. Of course right next to the Rouge there's still this big plot of land that's zoned for a potential Pickering airport. Would it not make sense to you for that to be zoned back to farmland?
Whittamore's Farm
Is this the land at the north that's currently not in the study plan?
Whittamore's Farm
Yes. I have no problem with that. I have 30 years of experience with the people who have been....
Let me qualify. I'm going to talk about Jim Robb. He has done a tremendous amount of work. I have respect for the work he has done, but he is very focused on reforestation.
I sat at that meeting in September with the minister of infrastructure and they were talking about that piece of land. I have no faith at all that the land that he wants to be studied and ultimately put in the park will be left for agriculture, because that statement about the mixed Carolinian forest was one of the five things that was in the addendum that went to the minister. It's a blank canvas for many of those people. It's a blank canvas to try to reach the goal of ecological integrity, and it will exclude agriculture.
I've watched my neighbours lose a thousand acres of land.
NDP
Dan Harris NDP Scarborough Southwest, ON
I was actually asking the question not in terms of should it be added to the park, but should it be taken back as farmland versus potentially zoning for the airport, where they could be kicked off and an airport would appear. That was why I was asking the question, because we don't already have enough local farmland to feed our cities and certainly making sure more land was protected for farming would help to satisfy those future needs.
I want to move on to Ms. Schultz. The debates often get heated at different times; different folks say things. My colleague Mr. Calandra said Ontario Nature wanted to evict farmers from the Rouge.
I wanted to ask, as part of that, does Ontario Nature want to push farmers out of the Rouge? What is your actual position? Let's hear it directly from you.
Executive Director, Ontario Nature
Whoever said that we or many of the other organizations that we work with are opposed to farming in the park is mistaken; it's absolutely wrong. I'm not sure where Mr. Calandra got that impression. We feel that farming is an integral part of Rouge urban national park, and it's a huge opportunity for local food production to be integrated into the park. I think, as Mr. Whittamore has pointed out, there are a lot of practices that are ecologically friendly that provide important habitat for pollinators and other wildlife, etc.
So that is fundamentally not true.
NDP
Dan Harris NDP Scarborough Southwest, ON
Excellent. Thank you for clearing that up from the debates.
You mentioned that you support the 200 hectares for potential future infrastructure growth, and that's an upper limit, so hopefully we don't get to that. Would you agree that for the region to be able to support further development and intensification, so that we can avoid sprawl, some of the headways, the waterways, need to get better protection than they're getting now to mitigate future growth?
Executive Director, Ontario Nature
I think my answer is yes, if I understand your question correctly.
NDP
Dan Harris NDP Scarborough Southwest, ON
It's just that when you look at, for instance, how the Little Rouge travels through the park area, but then the Rouge River actually travels out of the protected area, and the headwaters, certainly....
Executive Director, Ontario Nature
Protecting the headwaters is fundamentally important. That's where that whole connecting of the ecological corridor from Lake Ontario to the moraine that I referred to is fundamentally important, because in a lot of instances we're protecting the headwaters on the moraine, but if we're not actually protecting that whole corridor, then it doesn't bode well for the whole system.
NDP
Dan Harris NDP Scarborough Southwest, ON
That's great. Thank you very much.
Also, the minister, who was here a couple of days ago, was fairly adamant about the legislation's meeting, or in some ways exceeding, what's currently there. She used several examples, such as mining and hunting, to demonstrate that there would be additional protections.
I wanted to ask where the places are in the bill that you feel fail in enhancing the local protections or the ones that are there. We're all interested in putting forward a great bill and making sure we have a fantastic park that takes into consideration all of the nuances and differences, because this isn't a national park in the way we're used to.
Where do you think the bill needs to be brought up because of its failings?
Executive Director, Ontario Nature
Well, as I mentioned in my presentation, there is the lack of mention of ecological integrity and protection of ecosystems. That is not in the bill currently. Without reiterating all of those points, I have highlighted those specifically where the bill needs to be strengthened to ensure true ecological protection in the park.
I think what we're all aspiring to is a park that has better ecological function than it has today, and that can be achieved without compromising other activities, such as farming in the park. The big thing that we're lacking in southern Ontario, particularly in this part of southern Ontario, is whole natural ecosystems and prime farmland, because we've lost a great deal of both to urban sprawl, particularly in the GTA.