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Residents take matters – and message – into their own hands on proposed 413

June 17, 2021   ·   0 Comments

By Rob Paul, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

For years now Highway 413—also known as the GTA West Corridor—has been a controversial topic in the Region of Peel and throughout Ontario: a toll highway to help offset traffic congestion in the GTA.

Environmental groups have taken issue with the highway for the impact it will have on the Greenbelt and surrounding farmland while costing billions to taxpayers. Plenty of Caledon residents have made their displeasure with the situation clear by putting up “Stop the 413” signs on their lawn—part of an Environmental Defence initiative.

As part of the Stop the 413 initiative, Environmental Defence volunteers decided to take it a step further by having a 12-foot long “Stop the 413” banner made to hang all around Peel. Former Caledon resident and Environmental Defence volunteer Stacey Mortimer had the banner made and then donated it to the Stop 413 campaign.

Since then, Caledon’s Jenni LeForestier has been taking the banner and hanging it in various locations in the community—primarily in two-week rotations on Environmental Defence volunteers’ properties. It even had a brief stay in front of Dufferin-Caledon MPP Sylvia Jones’ office.

LeForestier has been heavily involved in the fight against the highway for a decade and she saw this as just another way to step up and help raise awareness for the issues in Caledon and surrounding areas that could accompany the development of the highway.

With the history of the Highway 413 project, LeForestier has seen it been viewed as a guarantee before only for it to be cancelled. She’s hoping with Environmental Defence, other environmental groups, and the combined efforts of her and other local residents’, it can be cancelled again as long as they stay diligent.

“Stop the 413 goes back to 2011 for me,” said LeForestier. “The first time it was proposed I attended the very first meeting. Everyone who attended that meeting was given promotional material and on the cover of the binder [what] I was given was a picture of Forks of the Credit Road. If you know the proposed route, that’s nowhere near where the 413 would go. I wondered why it was being used as promotional material for a transport corridor and that sort of set off some alarm bells for me because I live in Belfountain near that road.

“As I started to look at it more carefully, I realized where the route was going and how much it would impact the Greenbelt. I was concerned that our mayor at the time (Marolyn Morrison) was at that first meeting and seemed delighted with the project. There were eight project managers at that meeting, and it was very fancy and it was pretty much counted as done deal. The language was that this is going to happen, and we need this and everyone’s going to be on board.”

Though the cancellation has happened in the past, history might not repeat itself if not for residents like LeForestier constantly reminding people that something has to be done to ensure it’s stopped, especially with the rising cost.

“Fast forward to 2018 when it gets cancelled, I was delighted,” she said. “Then it was reborn again, and again I felt very passionately that it wasn’t something we needed in this area. The route doesn’t really serve anybody and it’s a lot of environmental destruction for saving 30 seconds of commuting. It was estimated at $6 billion and then $10 billion, and those are conservative estimates now—we’re looking at more like $20 billion.”

The banner is another way to keep people talking and motivating them to do the most they can to get involved and make a difference, but LeForestier says it goes beyond the highway and hopes there’s a more noticeable effort to keep the future impacts of the climate crisis in mind when developing in Caledon and Peel as a whole.

“It’s hugely important people understand this,” she said. “We have massive loss of farmland, there’s sprawl happening all through the GTA—it’s Hamilton, it’s Halton, it’s us. If we want to still be able to grow local food, then we need to stop this. It’s not just the highway, it’s all of the sprawl on either side of the highway that goes with it. Just this week we were delegating against a massive warehouse that’s being proposed at Old School Road and Dixie, which is 4,000,000 square feet on prime farmland and will impact the Greenbelt because they’ll have to put stormwater ponds on that development to service it. It’s just never ending, so when does this stop? It’s not going to stop and that’s the problem. What we’re really looking for is for the Region of Peel to assess where the hard urban boundary should be and hold that line of rural farmland.”

LeForestier looks at how the pandemic has shown Canada needs the resources to continue growing food domestically but wonders how that could continue decades down the road if mindful decisions aren’t made now when it comes to land.

“Right now, we’re in a pandemic and we’re relying on food that can be obtained easily,” she said. “Why would we want to rely on warehouses to ship food in? If you believe there’s a climate emergency— and the Region of Peel has declared one — then you have to act accordingly. This is not that, this is the direct opposite. The Town of Caledon has a climate action plan, well this is part of that action plan, you have to hold that rural countryside. This is all about how we are going to plan our future in a way that’s sustainable.”

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