Waterfront watchers ‘stay the course

By Anthony Marcusa –

The surge of interest in the fate of the Port Lands was on full display at the Toronto Reference Library on Dec. 12 for the first public consultation meeting since council’s unanimous Sept. 21 endorsement of Waterfront Toronto (WT).

Over 500 of curious and concerned Torontonians packed into the meeting space, with even more tuning in via streaming video or Twitter.

WT CEO John Campbell and deputy city manager John Livey started the meeting with a lofty vision of the future, comparing the Port Lands to fully realized waterfronts across Europe and Asia. After the presentation, the audience broke off into discussion groups to come up with coherent and concentrated concerns and questions.

The timeline of revitalization and the “acceleration” proposed by the mayor’s office was one area of concern. The very first question from the floor was whether or not “the process would be demeaned with early shovels in the ground.” When asked, “Why do you want to speed up the process, and how quickly?” the audience heard diplomatic but ambiguous answers.

WT did not confirm that they will follow the plans laid out by many years and millions of dollars of worth of studies and consultations, instead using the words “tweak” and “reconfigure.”

“We’ve asked for a pause on the environmental assessment (EA) to make sure we’ve got the best EA consistent with the terms of reference,” WT reps demurred.

Cindy Wilkey, chair of the West Don Lands Committee, received resounding applause when she declared, “I think many of us are interested in supporting those concrete results done over the years.”

Following the event, Wilkey e-mailed, “We must remember that WT has only three shareholders and one of them is the city. If we want to stay the course, we need to be supporting WT and the Toronto Region Conservation Aauthority’s work on the Lower Don EA and making it loud and clear to the mayor and members of executive committee that we want to see the already approved plan implemented.”

Public consultations will continue in February and March. A non-statutory report will be filed on these consultations and hope to give a sense of what needs to be done to move forward, according to WT.