PRESIDENT'S LETTER SPRING 2022

PRESIDENT'S LETTER

Dear PALS Supporters,

As PALS Board members greet Spring, our attendance at the most recent of numerous meetings on Niagara Region’s draft Official Plan and our planned Blossom walks, bring with them a sense of deja vu, taking us back to the 1978 to1981 Ontario Municipal Board hearings on the first Niagara Region Official Plan boundaries, where PALS won half the 7,200 acres of the fruit land in dispute. We also remember participating in many subsequent Regional Niagara planning meetings, where progressive policies, such as intensification, growth steered away from fruit lands to lesser agricultural lands in south Niagara, and protection of valued natural heritage were wins as well.

To-day though, PALS is dealing with a proposed non-appealable Official Plan, which, if accepted by the Regional Council at the end of June, will allow unneeded urban sprawl on close to 3,000 acres of prime farmland, some of it having favorable climate and soil for tender fruit and grape farming, and shamefully, destroy hundreds of acres of natural heritage wet lands and Carolinian woodlands.

Our uphill battle is with Regional Niagara and contracted outside planners, and dominated by provincial government policies that promote sprawl through a 30 year planning period, market-based housing, and soon, a reduction in public participation in planning. We are buoyed however, by the growing number of Niagara residents who are speaking out against urban expansions, and the many Ontario municipalities such as Hamilton, Peel, Halton, Orillia, York, Durham and Oxford, who are refusing to follow the Government’s pro-development dictum.

Let us hope that Niagara Regional Councillors will do the same to protect our unique and threatened fruit lands, prime farmlands and valuable natural heritage resources, when they vote on the proposed Official Plan in late June.

P.S. With kind donations from the James Hugh Corcoran Trust and the John Deere Canada Foundation, PALS continues to raise awareness of the very special nature of Niagara's tender fruit and grape land through its 2017 2nd edition of the cookbook Taste Niagara, and seeks to educate a new generation of youth through our recently released educational video Pick and Choose to Preserve Niagara Fruit Lands ( Filmed by Stacey Koudys. Narrated by Jon Lepp, with direction from film expert, and producer of PALS 1980's film by the same name, Don Alexander)

2019 Executive Directors

President's Letter Fall/Winter 2021

Dear PALS Supporters,

The next six 6 months of land use planning in Ontario will be crucial, as municipalities struggle under a Provincial government dictum to complete their Official Plans for the next 30 years of growth by July 2022. While some municipalities are anxious for "market-based" growth, and in the case of York, development within the Greenbelt, others are resisting, and Hamilton City Council has just voted for fixed urban boundaries. What is most worrisome for PALS as the Region develops its Official Plan, is that Regional Niagara Planning Consultants have eagerly promoted a higher population growth target than the Province specifies which will, they say, require more farmland and natural areas to be developed. Additionally, just this week, a Regional Planning document alerted us to their favourable view of development applications for urban expansions onto Niagara Falls grape lands - a scenario against which PALS fought and won at an earlier OMB hearing, and last Fall, recommended for inclusion in the Greenbelt; a planned shopping mall on large acreages of prime farmland and natural areas in Fort Erie; as well as West Lincoln's proposed expansion onto prime farmlands . Meanwhile, tender fruit and grape lands continue to be lost to, or negatively impacted by greenhouses, commercial uses such as cannabis operations and most recently, tourist-oriented event venues.

All of this, plus the strong provincial commitment to Highway 413, which includes lands within the supposedly permanent Greenbelt, confirms that we must continue our work to attain the tender fruit land program that the Conservative government cancelled in 1995, and Liberal Minister of Agriculture Jeff Leal, backed by then St. Catharines MPP Jim Bradley, supported between 2015 and 2018. Therefore, a few weeks ago we sent a strong letter and backup materials to the Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs outlining the extensive values of investing in restrictive covenants to protect these very special fruit lands in perpetuity and asking for a meeting with her to make our case. (see Quotables page 4 & 5 )

We will keep you posted,