Federal government will decide this spring about fate of land in Pickering.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
At the eastern edge of Toronto, 37-square-kilometres of river valleys, hardwood forest and rolling farmland have been frozen for 50 years. This land in Pickering was assembled by the federal government in the early 1970s for an airport that was never needed.
This spring the federal government will decide what comes next. Some of the land will be added to the adjacent Rouge National Urban Park. But the rest could be sold off for cul-de-sacs and warehouses. Or it could be something else: a working agricultural landscape with public access, providing the Toronto region with food and connection with nature.
It’s clear what should happen. But that will require the federal government to be bold and to resist the commercial pressures that are stretching our regions into endless sprawl.
Land long reserved for possible airport in Pickering, Ont., will go to Parks Canada, Ottawa says
The airport question, at least, is settled: In early 2025 Ottawa announced that this land would never become an airport, closing half a century of uncertainty. A Pickering Airport was not needed, since Pearson Airport can expand to fill the needs of the region.
(For the same reason, the pint-sized Billy Bishop Airport does not need to expand, whatever its operators might claim.)
What then for the Pickering lands? Transport Canada’s consultation process wraps up April 17. The City of Pickering is working on its own recommendations for economic development and land use and will hold a public meeting April 22.
The superior vision is being presented by a coalition of NGOs led by Waterfront Regeneration Trust, who have commissioned design professionals including the world-renowned Danish landscape architects SLA. Their vision would create an unusual place, one that includes working farmland and maintains villages to house those who work the land.
It would also open up this area to local tourism from across Southern Ontario, with an expanded network of trails along forested areas and river valleys and visits to the farms themselves.
“We are protecting prime farmland where it performs best, while stepping back from creeks and low-lying areas where water and biodiversity must take priority,” Rasmus Astrup, design principal with SLA, said in an e-mail this week. Along the boundaries, sustainably managed forestry would form a boundary between cultivation and development.
A farm-fresh idea for the modern city
All this would protect what remains a fragile place containing huge volumes of first-class agricultural soil, connections to the headwaters of the major Don River system, and a corridor linking the Greenbelt around Toronto to Lake Ontario.
For architect and urban designer Ken Greenberg, who is working with the activist coalition, the stakes are conceptual as much as territorial. “It’s not about details,” he said in an interview. “It’s about a completely different way of thinking about the relationship between the hinterland of a big, growing city and all of the developed areas.”
In short: the city stays contained, while farmland grows at the fringe providing both food and a place for city-dwellers to connect with nature. That is precisely how Toronto was planned from the 1940s through the 1960s. That model worked well, until we decided to abandon it.
The alternative appears to be selling the land for typical development, likely a mix of housing and industry. Alexis Whalen, chair of the local advocacy group Land Over Landings, argues that the City of Pickering’s “land use review and economic analysis” will push for the status quo – an idea that her group rejects.
“Why at this time of geopolitical, climate and food insecurity would we entertaining any development schemes for Class One soil?” Ms. Whalen asks. “We need this farmland. It is the most productive type of farmland in Canada on the doorstep of a large urban population that is hungry for more fresh produce.”
She and her colleagues have it right. The Toronto region has vast expanses of underbuilt land on which new industrial uses – and, especially, housing – can be built. Much of the region’s neighbourhoods have smaller populations than they did a generation ago. There simply is no need to pave the place. A different kind of future could grow here.