Did Ontario premier Doug Ford really ask Santa for full-size trains this year? It is amazing how far that gravy train can chug. When at city hall in Toronto, Doug and Rob Ford were always complaining about the supposed ‘Gravy Train.’ Expensive audits proved that the gravy train never existed in Toronto’s city hall but the province could end up being an entirely different matter.
Doug Ford’s gravy train has come to Queen’s Park. His government has already ordered three more diesel trains at $139 million. Maybe they are to help carry the money. It might be that Ford expects a large portion of the gravy to come from Highway 413. His brother probably made it clear to him that it is those generous developers who are happiest when they are getting land cheap, on which they can build expensive homes.
The proposed Hwy 413 was an idea that had been examined by the previous liberal government and had been rejected as unnecessary. The route parallels Hwy 401 and Toll Hwy 407 and runs from Hwy 400 in the north of Vaughan to Halton Hills.
What smells bad about this gravy train is that developers had bought up the good development land around the proposed interchanges for Hwy 413 before the conservatives publicly announced they would build the highway.
And that was before the gravy train chugged into Ontario’s Greenbelt. This is land with aquifers, wetlands and good farmland and heritage sites around Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe that is protected to supply fresh water and grow food for the province. The conservatives are proposing they swap 7400 hectares in the Greenbelt for 9400 hectares which oddly enough includes the town of Erin, Ontario. This is the largest swap ever proposed for the Greenbelt and the most surprised are the people who live in Erin.
What leaves us wondering is that a major developer has been buying land in the Greenbelt area designated to be swapped out. Nobody has a ouija board that accurate. If they did, it would be worth many millions of dollars. Doug Ford tells us he is going to have 50,000 homes built on that ‘former’ Greenbelt land.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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