Volunteers communicating the need for Pickering Airport
Lobby group made up of mostly tenant farmers
NIMBY stands for Not In My Back Yard. It is a social trend in Canada and other parts of the developed world in which a local group of usually wealthy (often retired) citizens enjoying the status quo, block the growth of the community that they live in. The reasons are as varied as the development […]
By Ted Nickerson At the recent City of Pickering Council meeting regarding the motion to reverse the City’s support for an airport on the Pickering lands, I was struck by one presenter’s comments. , A clearly pro-farming, anti-airport advocate, stated their firm opposition to vertical farming or greenhouses on the lands. The comments were […]
By Ted Nickerson News Flash – November 2021 “The Big Lie Exposed”, a media release by the lobby group Land Over Landings states that the Transport Canada-commissioned study says an airport in Pickering Ontario is not needed by 2036. https://landoverlandings.com/resources/the-big-lie-exposed/ Oh, really! This pronouncement makes me think of the phrase “If you tell a lie […]
By Mark Brooks There are two completely different interpretations of a government report meant to clarify the future development of Pickering Airport. The first was from government back-bencher MP Jennifer O’Connell whose press release was published by a lobby group only 101 minutes after the report was made public. The MP’s press release stated that […]
By Mark Brooks Did Jennifer O’Connell, Member of Parliament for Pickering—Uxbridge, or someone on her staff, give lobbyists and other interested parties a sneak peek at a then-confidential Transport Canada report? The million-dollar consultant’s report, called the Pickering Lands Aviation Sector Analysis (ASA for short), suggests breaking ground on the new airport in 2026, building in stages from […]
By Ted Nickerson Released in October 2020 by Land Over Landings (LOL), a document titled Research Paper 11 focuses on rebutting comments by local politicians regarding the potential for greenhouses and vertical farming on the federal Pickering Airport Lands. The comments by local elected officials were made in the context of including agriculture as part […]
A farmer asks his landlord to put up a No Trespassing sign and remove an unwanted structure. Not usually a news event heard across the country. But this time the flash point was as Canadian as it gets, a pond being used as a natural skating ring by local children in the middle of a […]
By Mark Brooks In October, 2020, the Member of Parliament for Pickering-Uxbridge, Jennifer O’Connell, sponsored an E-Petition in the House of Commons calling on the federal government to cancel a new airport being planned in North Pickering. It called for the existing leases on a billion-dollar government land parcel to be extended for decades to […]
By Mark Brooks Today, five of the six local municipal governments, including the city of Pickering, support building a new airport and economic development zone. But aviation is a federal jurisdiction and one of the local Members of Parliament, Jennifer O’Connell, is opposed. The new airport, to be built on land already set aside for it […]
It reads like a B-movie script for a government scandal. A billion dollars in government land leased out to a select few, mostly unknown, insiders well below market rates. Brave local mayors and town councils harassed at every turn as they fight to get the attention of a distant uncaring federal government. The local citizen […]
