Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this opportunity to address the committee.
Whenever I come to Ottawa and I'm given this opportunity to talk to legislators, I really am impressed with the country I live in, so thank you. It makes me feel really good about the country I live in.
First I would like to say that Friends of the Rouge support farming in the Rouge Park—continued farming, long-term farming. Our question is about where the balance lies. I'd like to just give you a little bit of information about where we are.
In the world context, we're in the greatest extinction that's been known for millions and millions of years. It's one of the three or four big extinctions in hundreds of millions of years. We're losing many species. We have global climate change happening and it's affecting our communities, causing multi-millions, even billions, of dollars in damage in our communities.
Within this area, I'd like to draw you to this particular park. This is a picture of me 30 years ago in the eighties. The Save the Rouge Valley System were really the promoters of this park and the people who helped to protect this land. Going back 30 or 40 years, people such as Lois James and others encouraged the land to stay in agriculture and green space rather than be developed for housing. If it weren't for the efforts of tens of thousands of people, this land would already be developed.
When we worked on this it was very much a community initiative; there were thousands of people, literally, showing up at public meetings. The east end of the GTA love the Rouge; they've worked on it for decades and they will continue to work on it. Their commitment's there. So you can see all three parties supported it.
What happened back then is that the Mulroney government—which was very good on the environment, I must say—actually nudged the Liberal government of David Peterson, which wasn't quite sure about how much they'd leave on the table as undeveloped land. The Mulroney government played a really important job in urging Premier Peterson to do the right thing. It's almost a karma circle now that the province is trying to urge the federal government to do the right thing.
So what do we have? In southern Ontario less than a quarter of one per cent is in national parks. We have 60% in agriculture. We have this slice of land; it's 100 square kilometres plus of public land. It's already in the greenbelt natural heritage system. It was designated greenbelt natural heritage system because it's one of the few natural links between the lake and the moraine. It's in Canada's most endangered eco-zone, Carolinian and mixed wood. One-third of our endangered species are in this eco-zone, and a third of Canada's population. Less than three-quarters of a per cent is in provincial and national parks combined, whereas 60% is in agriculture and 18% is urban.
This map is really important. If you look at this map, you'll see the stripe in the middle, the agricultural area. When the Rouge Park was created in 1995 there was a balancing that occurred, which was that the provincial government said they were creating a 10,500-acre park and creating a 8,300-acre agriculture preserve at the same time. So there was this balance. The park would be mainly natural, but with farmland, and the agriculture preserve would be mainly farmland, with some natural.
What happened to that balance? In the late nineties, when the government of Mike Harris was in, Paul Calandra was, I think, an assistant to cabinet minister Steve Gilchrist, and they decided to sell the land. But they wanted to give it back at an affordable price to people leasing it, so they gave it back for $4,000 an acre—no competitive bid, right of first refusal. What was the key clause? The key clause was that you had to sign on that it would stay farmland forever. So the land went to the tenant farmers. Unfortunately, what happened is it was flipped to developers. Groups like Friends of the Rouge and the Rouge Duffins Greenspace Coalition had to work for five years in really nasty fights to try to protect this land. In fact, it got so nasty that some of the farm community formed a community association that actually funnelled money from developers to beat Conservative Janet Ecker in the election. Full-page ads were taken out.
In that context—and Mr. Calandra was there when that happened—it still doesn't make it right to totally rejig that balance.
I can also tell you that Friends of the Rouge delivered hundreds of thousands of flyers over the year, including 10,000 in the middle of the winter, to create a Markham food belt for the rest of Markham to be farmland outside the existing urban area. What happened? The farmers stood shoulder to shoulder with the developers at the meetings, and they said, “We don't want you to create a greenbelt or a food belt; we want to be able to sell the land to the highest bidder.” We lost 7:6. Jim Jones cast the deciding vote.
We have always supported farms. We were there at all the OMB hearings. I seldom had farmers with me at the OMB hearings when I was trying to protect farmland and green space. We respect the farm community. I apologize if some things have been blown out of proportion in the media. I'm sure you all know about that. You say nine perfectly reasonable, sensible things and one that's a little edgy, and it's the edgy one....
You can see the greenbelt context. The Rouge was put in the greenbelt in 2005 and you can see this little wedge that goes through the urban sprawl. The dark green is the greenbelt natural heritage system, and you'll see the light green over in Duffins-Rouge Agricultural Preserve. That's more on the country side. That was in recognition that the Duffins-Rouge Agricultural Preserve was to be mainly agricultural. That's the provincial greenbelt plan.
Let me read just a few things here that you don't have in front of you, regarding the existing legislation the province is asking you to meet or exceed as well as the ecological integrity. The Rouge Watershed plan already says that its goal is “protecting and enhancing its ecological and cultural integrity within the context of a...natural...system”. That was in 2007. If you go to the Greenbelt plan, it says that policies of this plan “collectively support biodiversity and overall ecological integrity”. The minister's letter said those things weren't there. If you go to the Oak Ridges Moraine conservation plan, it says, “protecting the ecological and hydrological integrity of the Oak Ridges Moraine Area”. That's the first priority. The minister's letter says it's missing from the legislation. The 1994 Rouge Park management plan in section 10 talks about how “protecting the ecological integrity of the Rouge Watershed is a necessity”.
So ecological integrity is already there in spades. Also, you would have heard evidence that this isn't a protected area. It doesn't even meet the international standards unless you give priority to ecological integrity.
How can you do this? You don't have to throw out the farmland. You do it through zoning, so you scientifically define a sustainable natural heritage system, and you apply ecological integrity to that. Then outside that area, you apply something like net gain and watershed health. We can do this. We can make it work. We can sit down with reasonable people.
Unfortunately the advisory committee that was promised to be set up two years ago wasn't, so as the Right Hon. Joe Clark, former Prime Minister, said just two days ago, we need these committees like the environmental round table and the Rouge Park advisory committee because they help people to, instead of being antagonistic, work on win-win solutions.