And the chances are that it’s going to continue – at least until the federal election is over in a couple of weeks.
The debate began with the Liberal candidate, Lui Temelkovski, of the Oak Ridges-Markham riding, who proposed the creation of an “urban national park” located in the GTA. The park is proposed to be called the Rouge Valley National Park, and, spanning from Lake Ontario to the Oak Ridges Moraine, would be massive. By the end of the project, it’s said that the park would extend over 10,000 acres, which is already about 20 times the size of the Toronto Islands. And in addition to that, the Liberals would also like to use 5,000 acres of federal land in Pickering, land that was taken away from farmers in the 1970s to build the Pickering Airport, a project that didn’t see any success. This land however, would remain an agricultural preserve.
Temelkovski says this is just the kind of thing that people in the GTA need, those same people who can’t afford to travel across the country looking for some of Canada’s greatest national parks. The Rouge Valley would give Torontonians a place they could escape to on weekends – or just after dinner. Giving the park national status would also allow the space to remain a natural park forever. Temelkovski thinks that the plan sounds like a dream to some 7 million people living in the GTA, as the park would even be accessible by public transit. But the Conservative candidate in the Oak Ridges-Markham riding doesn’t agree.
Conservative MP, Paul Calandra, says that he’s all in favour of a national park in the GTA, but it simply doesn’t make sense to take away precious farmland to do it. Calandra says that the idea of a national park in the GTA is a good one, and that should he be elected, he’ll fight for a wilderness area that Torontonians and their neighbours can call their own. But, he says, it doesn’t have to be 15,000 acres in order to do it; and making sure that no farmland is lost might just be a way to give residents the best of both worlds.
Temelkovski quickly criticized Calandra for being against the Rouge Valley project, saying that the Tory MP was now “backpedalling” and “changing his tune,” although he gives little in the way of an explanation as to how Calandra has done this. Calandra responded by holding a press conference next to a corn field on Tuesday evening. Here he addressed Temelkovski’s concerns, and reassured the public that he is in no way “changing his tune” or trying to get out of a previous agreement.
Instead, Calandra explained, he has created a proposal that would attempt to make everyone happy. Not only did the proposal include the national park proposal, but also an idea for farmers in Pickering to get their land back. While they have been leasing it back from the government ever since the demise of the Pickering Airport, Calandra explains that farmers will now be given the option of buying that land back and owning it once again, under the guarantee that they will keep it and use it as agricultural land.
