Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise in the House today to have the opportunity to speak in support of Motion No. 533. As the urban affairs critic for the NDP caucus, I take a special interest in the motion, and I especially applaud the member for putting forward a motion for the inclusion of urban areas that are affected by the establishment of a natural resource development.

Too often, we are presented with false dichotomies by the government and the false choices that flow from them. That people see remote rural life as distinct and separate and unconnected to urban life has a partial explanation in the phenomenology of those lives. They are very different. They are very different experiences. People see very different things on a day-to-day basis.

People say I am talking about an urban agenda for Canada, but what about rural and remote Canada? This is not to deny that there are issues distinct to rural Canada and distinct to remote Canada, nor is to deny that there are distinctly urban issues and considerations. In fact, our party has urged consideration of the peculiarly urban issues in the cities of Canada by the government, and as the critic for urban affairs, I developed and released an urban agenda for Canada for all Canadians to read and consider.

However, the urban agenda and our views on cities and urban life in this country are very much mindful of, and informed by, the fact that urban Canada, our cities, sit in a broader context. They are part of a broader ecosystem. Our water comes usually from somewhere other than our cities. The preponderance of our food usually comes from somewhere other than our cities. It is captured in that common phrase that we see on the bumper stickers: farmers feed cities.

Therefore, cities are shaped by the broader landscape in which they are embedded, and the converse is true as well. Cities shape the broader landscape in which they are situated, and this is true of all cities. It was true in a city in Saskatchewan that I visited. It was in the context of a booming extractive economy there that the chamber of commerce told me it is not just about environmental assessments but that they also need to have community impact assessments for resource development happening outside the boundaries of the city. The suggestion was that before the next big project goes in, there needs to be an assessment of whether that city can handle the traffic that flows from that project, handle the housing required by the influx of workers for that project, and so on.

In another city in Saskatchewan, a large community service agency told me that it was only when the rural and remote extractive economy started to boom that the extent of the true challenges of homelessness in that city actually emerged. As with any ecosystem, the system flows one way or another.

I would like to tell a story about a natural resource development project close to Toronto. It was the Melancthon Township megaquarry.

Melancthon Township sits about 80 kilometres north of Toronto. It is class 1 farmland and provides about half the potatoes eaten by the citizens of Toronto annually. The land is called the headwaters because it sits atop a number of watersheds that provide fresh water to about one million people in cities in Ontario.

Thousands of acres of the headwaters and of class 1 farmland were purchased a few years back by what was then considered to be the tenth-largest financial hedge fund in the world. The plan was to build a megaquarry where that farmland existed. It was to cover 2,300 acres and go down 200 feet for the purpose of getting aggregate rock to ship into our cities to continue to build out the sprawl of Toronto and the surrounding municipalities.

Now, 2,300 acres is actually about half the size of my riding of Beaches—East York, so it was obviously worthwhile to share with people a vision of what this thing would like. It would be half my riding, going down about 20 stories. One of the interesting things was that being the headwaters, the water table sat just below the surface, about 20 feet down, requiring the pumping of water in perpetuity for the mining of this aggregate.

Efforts were made repeatedly to engage the environmental assessment process on this, but that process has been so ravaged and degraded that there were really no hooks.

What was understood by thousands upon thousands of residents in Toronto was that this issue was their issue, that the building of a megaquarry on class one farmland, 80 kilometres outside of Toronto, was in fact an urban issue.

At one point, thousands of Torontonians went north one weekend and clambered across fields and through the woods for a local food cook-off put on by professional chefs. On another occasion I organized a bus tour for constituents of mine and other NDP MPs in Toronto to go north to meet the farmers who were holding out on the hedge fund and hanging onto their farmland.

Finally, there was a soup day to support the fight against the megaquarry. It was held in my riding in a park, and 40,000 Torontonians came out to my park to buy soup, but most importantly, to support the concerns of those farmers and other residents living in and around Melancthon Township about the development of this megaquarry.

Similar activities have taken place outside of Toronto and have engaged the citizens of Toronto. Not all of these have been about natural resource development. Some have been quite the opposite. In fact, on the federal lands in Durham region, the government and previous governments, going back to the 1970s, have proposed taking class one farmland and building an airport, just paving it over, for the continuing development of the city.

However, like the megaquarry, the citizens of Toronto understand that issue and that project to be an urban issue. Those farmlands outside the city are important for local food security for our city so that we have, close to urban life, easy access to fresh food.

As with the megaquarry, it was easy to fill a bus of constituents and head out to tour those lands in support of farmers who are living lease by lease on those lands.

It is clear that where there is an ecosystem, where our cities are embedded in a broader landscape, there is also a social ecosystem, and we are connected. The first nations both within our city and outside our city, whose lands these are, the farmers whose lands these are, and urban residents, as well, understand that we are connected this way.

This was and remains my attraction to the opportunity Bill C-40 presented to us. Unfortunately, it was an opportunity spoiled. It was an opportunity for Canada's first national urban park so that we could begin to at least aspire to the notion that urban Canada and the concept of ecological integrity in our cities, being more energy sufficient and more food sufficient and secure in our own cities, is possible. We can begin to build and shape our cities so that urban life can exist in this landscape.

Let me conclude by applauding the motion in its entirety. More specifically, let me applaud the inclusion of urban communities in the motion and by extension the kind of collaborative and inclusive decision-making processes that will rise up from the passage of this motion.

Matthew Kellway

Transcript

Private Members' Business

Discussions (0)