Hundreds protest in Pickering, demand province reverses Greenbelt land swaps
CBC
Hundreds of people staged a protest Sunday outside the office of Ontario Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy to demand permanent protection for the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve (DRAP), which was removed from the Greenbelt.
The protest comes days after the province's auditor general said the Ontario government's process for choosing protected Greenbelt land to open up for housing development was heavily influenced by a small group of well-connected developers who now stand to make billions of dollars.
In a 95-page report released Wednesday, Bonnie Lysyk offered a damning assessment of how the province selected sites last year for removal from the Greenbelt — a vast 810,000-hectare area of farmland, forest and wetland stretching from Niagara Falls, Ont., to Peterborough, Ont., that was meant to be off limits to development.
Lysyk made 15 recommendations in the report, but Premier Doug Ford said his government would accept and implement only 14. The single recommendation it will not accept is the call to revisit the land swaps and possibly reverse those decisions, he said.
Ford said Friday that he