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Selling Orangeville’s industrial future for a tax cut

February 3, 2022   ·   0 Comments

By Neil Orford

This year is barely a month old and we’ve already learned a lot about the fate of the Orangeville Brampton Railway (OBRY) and, more particularly, the lands on which it operated.

Soon, Orangeville will discover that the corridor has been disposed of — not only the five acres in Brampton that were sold for a cool $25 million earlier in January, but the entire 55 km line that runs south from Orangeville, across the Forks of Credit and all the way to Mississauga.

This is the rail corridor that many local people call ‘Dufferin’s most valuable asset.’

Whether this sale happens ‘very’ soon or over the next few months is determined by the Orangeville Railway Development Corporation (ORDC). How much is sold; whether it’s sold piece by piece, to whom, and for what purpose, is also up to the ORDC. There is too much we don’t know.

The lands are owned by the ORDC, a private corporation that is run by the Mayor and the Town Councillors. It has never held open meetings, produced agendas, published minutes or shown taxpayers how their assets are being managed. Nor has the ORDC disclosed any information about the $25 million it earned selling the parcel in Brampton. Same goes for the funds the ORDC will earn from the forthcoming sale of the rail corridor. According to a January 10th press release from the Town, the buyer will likely be Peel Region, which is looking at the “feasibility” of repurposing the corridor for a recreation trail or utilities.

While Orangeville council voted in late 2020 to sell the ODRC’s assets, the transaction has been carried out in secret, and with no evidence that the Town even considered alternatives.

Of critical importance is the fact that the ORDC is a ‘private’ enterprise run by elected officials who are in the process of selling your railway without having done a stitch of planning: there’s been no study, no public consultation, not even a Q & A session over coffee. You can’t find any mention of the ORDC on the Town website. If you ask Town officials, (as I did) to release the ORDC’s documents, you’ll be told (as I was), that ‘it’s private.’

All of which raises the more important question: what could the ORDC be? What is its unrealized potential?

For an excellent example, look to the counties of Brant, Elgin Middlesex and Oxford in southwestern Ontario. They came together in 2020 to form a corporation to preserve their rail corridor through an entity called SCOR EDC (South Central Ontario Region Economic Development Corporation). As the SCOR website thoroughly explains, these municipal partners consulted widely, and found broad consensus behind a plan to re-open an abandoned rail line connecting St. Thomas and Tillsonburg.

SCOR executive director Kimberley Earls says the municipalities took “a regional approach.” County partners collaborated with short-line rail operators GIO Rail and businesses along the line to look at what the impacts of losing the service and foregone future investment opportunities, among them infrastructure that can support local supply chains. In fact, the federal government in 2017 set up the National Trade Corridors Fund specifically for the purpose of leveraging these kinds of assets to create jobs and economic development.

“Shortline railways are often one of the first links in essential Canadian supply chains,” added Earls. “These railway providers have invested over $101.5 million across Canada and facilitate the movement of $34.2 billion worth of goods annually. Additionally, transport by rail is more environmentally sustainable than truck, using less fuel and carrying significantly larger volumes of goods.”

Rather than selling off the corridor piecemeal, SCOR developed a long-range plan that sought funding from all three levels of government and the industrial sector to invest in a critical element of Canada’s rail infrastructure. Also worth noting is the fact that SCOR re-opened its railway in January 2022, just 10 days after the ORDC killed Orangeville’s.

SCOR, in other words, represents the path we didn’t take — a 21^st century vision for rail. By contrast, the ORDC, hamstrung for a decade by poor management and rancour over the railway, just unloaded its best asset, and its industrial future, without a plan, much less a trace of competence. Or so Orangeville Mayor and ORDC chair Sandy Brown admitted last week.

Twenty years ago, the Town did have a vision for ORDC, but successive councils have let it die on the vine. The ORDC lost sight of its mandate and forgot the importance of rail to Dufferin County. Instead, Brown, aided by the cloak of secrecy around ORDC, found it easier and more expedient to simply bargain away our industrial future for a bit of tax-relief come election time.

Doesn’t sound like a smart trade-off to me.

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