1,200 homes on prime farmland: What's known about the plan to develop the Greenbelt in Pickering, Ont.

The battle over the future of the largest chunk of land the province removed from the protected Greenbelt in December has intensified in the last week, ever since Ontario's auditor general revealed how a small group of developers influenced the process.

As many as 30,000 housing units could be built on the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve (DRAP) in north Pickering in the coming years, according to a city staff report from May 2023, on farmland that was supposed to be forever protected.

The homes would make up the bulk of the 50,000 units Doug Ford's government hopes to produce through its changes to the Greenbelt — a vast area of farmland, forest and wetland stretching from Niagara Falls to Peterborough that's meant to be permanently off-limits to development.

But community groups and opposition politicians continue to fight back against the plan to build housing there.

Here's what you need to know about the preserve, from its environmental importance, to what developers are planning to build, where those plans stand, and the ongoing pushback from the public, the City of Pickering and federal government. 

The DRAP contains around 1,900 hectares of prime agricultural land and natural features in northwest Pickering, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources. 

The provincial government expropriated much of it from landowners in the 1970s ahead of construction of a planned federal airport nearby. When the airport didn't pan out by the late 1990s, the government began selling the land back to the original landowners and tenant farmers at a discount because agricultural easements placed on the land designated it for farming uses only in perpetuity. 

Still, developers — including companies linked to Silvio De Gasperis of Tacc Developments — began buying up parcels and working with the City of Pickering to obtain permission to build housing. 

After the McGuinty government included the preserve in the Greenbelt in February 2005, the city tried to cancel some of the easements. In response, the province enshrined the agricultural status of the land by passing the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve Act — a law the Ford government repealed in December.

De Gasperis then launched a public campaign to embarrass McGuinty and a court battle that ultimately failed but cost him millions of dollars in legal costs.

A CBC Toronto analysis of property and corporate records in November 2022 identified 28 properties in the DRAP, covering a total of 718 hectares, owned by companies listing brothers Silvio, Carlo and Michael De Gasperis as directors. Twenty-four of those properties were purchased in 2003 and 2004, two in 2016 and two in 2020, for a total of $21.5 million.

Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk found the DRAP was chosen for removal from the Greenbelt after the "developer for the DRAP site" provided Housing Minister Steve Clark's chief of staff with an information package about it at a building industry dinner in September 2022.

In June 2023, companies linked to De Gasperis purchased seven additional properties in the area and bought out the co-owners of an eighth property. Those purchases, which were first reported by the Toronto Star, add another 209 hectares to the brothers' property holdings.

Citing estimates from the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation in 2016, Lysyk indicated in her report last week that the Greenbelt boundary changes would increase the value of land in the DRAP by at least $6.63 billion.