The Saving of the Seaton Trail and Duffins Creek

In the past I’ve written about the amazing Seaton Trail, the old-growth forests along its route, the crystal clear creek that runs alongside it, and the surrounding farmland and greenspace. Controlled development was being allowed along its east bank while the west shore adjacent to Rouge Park was protected. At the time I wrote “there are two ways to look at the Seaton plan – one is that a large amount of greenspace is being protected in the GTA, including some ecologically significant areas. The other is that an almost equally large area of existing greenspace and farmland is being developed.”

Fast forward to 2022, when the Doug Ford’s Conservative government was handing nearly the entire western portion of the original Seaton lands, known as the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve, to wealthy developers. The De Gasperis family owns 28 properties in a parcel of farmland the Ontario government is removing from the Greenbelt between Duffins Creek and Rouge Park. Since some of these properties directly abut the Seaton Trail we could have expected houses to be built right up to the trail in many places.

This wasn’t some marginal land that’s getting developed, it’s actually one of the crown jewels of the Greenbelt, including some of Ontario’s best farmland and a large part of the watershed that supplies one of the healthiest streams in the GTA. The Duffins Creek Watershed has the most natural cover and the most forested area of any watershed in the Toronto region. The clean cold waters of Duffins Creek allow it to support the endangered fish species Redside Dace, and regionally rare Brook Trout.

Parks Canada weighed in, saying “Should these lands be removed from the Greenbelt and developed as proposed, Parks Canada’s analysis suggests that there is a probable risk of irreversible harm to wildlife, natural ecosystems and agricultural landscapes within Rouge National Urban Park thereby reducing the viability and functionality of the park’s ecosystems and farmland.” Despite this and widespread public opposition the Ford government is plowing ahead.

I try to choose my battles carefully because advocacy and activism are exhausting, so if I’m going to wade in, it’s for a place that really matters, that is ecologically important and inspires the imagination. This was unequivocally one of them.

And we won!

The people of Ontario broadly support the Greenbelt, and they could see that the main beneficiaries would have been billionaire housing developers who bought protected land at for pennies on the dollar then donated to Doug Ford’s campaign, and asked him for a favour. Changing the designation of the Duffins-Rouge lands would have meant a transfer of one to two billion dollars from the province (which sold the properties at a discount under Mike Harris’s Conservative government) to some of Canada’s wealthiest families. Developing the Greenbelt would have done little to alleviate housing shortages, since in fact there is plenty of land still to develop that is not in the Greenbelt, much of which is actually closer to Toronto.