BY L.H. TIFFANY HSIEH
It was the same debate, only the volume was cranked up and the applause amplified.
“I think the farmers won tonight, they made very convincing cases,” said Regional Councillor Gordon Landon, leaving the Hilton Suites shortly after midnight on Tuesday.
More than 800 people packed a hotel ballroom to hear about Markham’s growth management strategy. With 82 deputations, 31 of which were heard by midnight, the public meeting was set to reconvene for a second night at council chamber on Wednesday.
The majority of those who spoke were divided by the controversial foodbelt proposal, which calls for permanent designation of Class 1 agricultural lands in Markham’s whitebelt buffer zone, north of Major MacKenzie Drive, but leaves local farmers and landowners in a state of limbo.
While the proposal was somewhat buried in the presentation of the town’s three growth options – the 52-, 60- and 100-per-cent intensification – it was lauded as “progressive,” “visionary,” “bold,” and “forward-thinking” by Whitchurch-Stouffville Councillor Clyde Smith and various environmental groups, including Earthroots, Milne Park Conservation Association, the Sierra Club, the Rouge Duffins Greenspace Coalition, Local Food Plus and the David Suzuki Foundation.
“Markham has emerged as a human capital in Canada,” said Markham-native Faisal Moola, chief scientist for the David Suzuki Foundation. “We urge you to adopt the foodbelt proposal.”
Environmental lawyer David Donnelly, who advocates for smart growth, said the proposal doesn’t have to translate into high-rise buildings, if managed properly, and cited places such as Paris and Toronto’s The Beach as examples of low-rise high density.
He said Markham should ask to be exempted from the province’s Places to Grow act and move additional incoming population to municipalities like Durham Region.
“There’s no moving Class 1 farmlands,” Mr. Donnelly said.
However, the very people who can make these Class 1 farmlands work think otherwise.
Speaking on behalf of nine farming families, Markham lawyer Donald Hindson said positive results of improved farming output have come directly from farm sales.
He said prominent farmers in Markham have sold their farms and carried on farming elsewhere: the Lewises in Port Perry, the Reesors in Lindsay, and the Becketts in Uxbridge.
“A foodbelt will ignore the contribution of these farmers,” Mr. Hindson said. “May I remind you, if there are no farmers, there can be no agriculture.”
The majority of farmers in attendance agreed, dissing the foodbelt as a “horsebelt,” a “sales pitch,” and a “smear campaign.”
Charlotte Frisby is a seventh generation hog farmer on Elgin Mills Road. She works in the barn every morning before going to her full-time job just to make ends meet.
“Farming is not sustainable in Markhamâ?¦the overhead alone is too high. But I continue to farm in my father’s memory,” a visibly emotional Ms Frisby said.
In the eyes of Esther Lewis, if farming in the town’s whitebelt is forced, machinery will only add to traffic congestion and the smell of manure repel condo dwellers south of the current boundary.
“This foodbelt is too little too late,” she said.
But Tupper Wheatley of Milne Park Conservation Association said the farmers’ plead was “puppetry at its best.” He said small-scale farming can work in Markham, a recent farm sale of $500,000 per acre is no accident and other farmers expect the same pay-out.
The farmers, despite being outnumbered by the general public, were backed by various developers as well as the North Markham Landowners’ Group, the Building Industry&Land Development Association, the Centre for Spatial Economics, and the Ontario Landowners Association, the latter which brought out about 100 people from the Niagara, Muskoka, Lanark County, Durham and Peterborough regions.
Among them was Randy Hillier, MPP for Lanark, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington and former president of the association.
Mr. Hillier said a proposal that will deprive the property rights of landowners is an “unnerving thing”.
“The greatest hypocrisy of all this is if local food is so bloody important to you, then you go and buy the farms, quit your environmental jobs in downtown Toronto, and put your money where your mouth is and get a tractor,” he said.
