[Music]
Q: Tell me about
how everything started? A: Everything to do
with the mega quarry was rather
fascinating.
So this tremendous stretch of land,
just an hour and a bit north of the city,
is home to about
15-16,000 acres of soil that can really
grow
every kind of crop humans want to grow
and eat.
So it's really special in many ways and
in 2006 and 2007 a US hedge fund
bought a lot of land and
the short and the long of the story is
that they wanted to build Ontario's,
Canada's second largest open pit mine
under that soil
and people took objection to that.
Q: Okay so what did, what did your community
do?
A: Well like every other community was
faced with really life-altering
proposals of any kind,
we got together elected the board they
did the research.
We learned more about the land and the
limestone underneath it. We learned that
it's home to
water that feeds you know a million
people south of us
and in the end,
got the discussion started that society
has to make a choice.
And the choice being, do you want to
preserve your options of growing your
own food or will you just let a hedge
fund
raid those sort of perpetual resources?
And in the end
the drive was to stop the application
and
part two of that two pronged approach
was to change policies so that these
crazy strictly vulture type
applications just can't happen again. Q: So
tell me about end act
and what you guys did specifically to
stop the mega quarry?
A: Well first thing is, we knew that the
mega quarry might get grandfathered
under any policy change
but the point is there needed to be a
better decision-making process on how to
approve those kind of things.
Most of the policy you live with today
you know was written 30, 40, 50 years ago
and was never designed to handle a hedge
fund proposal from out of the country.
And part two of that was to preserve the
land.
So to get part one done, public awareness
was just a huge thing.
We're so grateful to student bodies at a
number of universities in in this
province. From Waterloo to
Osgoode Law School, Ryerson, OCAD, who put
just tremendous talent into research and
helping to build the awareness
on how important this really all was, how
important of a discussion it was, and in
the end
you know they take the credit and they
should take the credit for defeating
this crazy thing.
Big thanks goes to David Suzuki
Foundation. Big thanks goes to the
Canadian Chefs Congress.
They all helped with food stock. If you
know, Google it and see it and how a
community of
two and a half thousand people had 28
000 people for dinner.
Was just a once in Canadian history
deal and we're very proud to have hosted
it, participated in it,
and the year after it was soup stock
here in the beaches put on by the
Canadian Chefs Congress and the David
Suzuki Foundation and
you know drew 40 000 people unbelievable.
Q: So now,
when the highlands company withdrew
their application,
what happened then? A: Well generally when
groups get going and they
win they quit, and a big part for act was
right from the very get-go
to say unless policy has changed we
haven't really
done a lot because two years down the
road someone else can pick up the ball
and do the whole thing again.
So policy change was a big deal and we
had a great little celebration in
Honeywood in the February after the
Highlands Company withdrew their
application
and launched the food and water first
campaign which is supported by thousands
and thousands of people.
Part of the reason that I'm going to ask
you when we're done here is, to log on to
food and water first dot com
and take the pledge. Numbers at Queen's
Park matter
absolutely in any decision-making
process and the more pledges we can
collect to push
farmland preservation issues forward is
is a great thing.
Timing is opportune right now because
the greenbelt is under review, the
Niagara scorpion plan is under
review, and we have learned so much in
this whole process that
the numbers now back up what a lot of
people have been saying.
We don't need to push more urban sprawl.
The province already has a fairly
celebrated growth plan.
There is some 800 000 available lots
within
the greater golden horseshoe area to
be developed, so let's develop that first
or a good percentage of it and then
drive on and see where
society is 25 or 30 years from now. Q: Thank
you very much.
carl