Brian and Jane Buckles had only lived on their property in Pickering between Concession Roads 7 and 8 for about four years, when, in 1972, the federal government expropriated their land for the proposed Pickering Airport.
Overnight their country dream home – with an old Ontario farmhouse on 20 acres of land – became one of the hottest political potatoes in the GTA. Brian Buckles, however, would not go quietly.
“Days after the announcement, (farmer) Lorne Almack and I became the technical committee for People or Planes. I talked to officials with Air Canada and De Havilland preparing the technical case against the airport.”
Within weeks, Buckles was making a full presentation to members of the Conservative government of Bill Davis. A former senior executive of Manulife, Buckles delivered a solid case.
First, he disproved the argument that increasing aircraft noise made an alternative site around Toronto mandatory. Second, he had a poll conducted inside Premier Davis’s own riding which revealed the public didn’t want another GTA airport.
“We couldn’t convince the feds to change their minds,” Buckles said, “but eventually the province withdrew infrastructure support.” Thus, in 1975, the airport seemed dead on the runway.
However, the federal government continued to hold onto the expropriated lands – some 75 square kilometres (18,600 acres) – and continued to demolish buildings and issue short-term leases, keeping the Pickering lands in limbo.
In response, for nearly two generations, grassroots organizations such as Buckles’ Green Door Alliance, Charles Godfrey’s People or Planes and Mary Delaney’s Land Over Landings kept banging on the door of Transport Canada to officially nix the Pickering Airport and transfer the expropriated airport lands to public use.
One of the longtime Land Over Landings campaigners, Michael Robertson, has rented land (for a hang-gliding school) in north Pickering since before the 1972 expropriation.
At this week’s Transport Canada announcement, he recalled a time in the late 1970s when the federal government appeared to double-down on building the Pickering Airport.
“So, Bill Lishman (of Father Goose movie fame) and I mounted a quick protest,” Robertson said. “I drove my hang glider to Ottawa and Bill organized the press. I took off in front of Parliament Hill in a hang glider, towed behind my truck, circled the Peace Tower, landed beside the Eternal Flame and this reporter hands me a microphone.”
Robertson suddenly commanded national attention. He expressed his opposition to an unnecessary additional airport in the GTA; but more important, he moved from cancelling the airport to the need to preserve “some of the best farmland in the world. It was all about the land. So, we changed the focus from People or Planes to Land Over Landings.”
In 2015, Transport Canada transferred about 20 square kilometres (nearly 4,700 acres) for the creation of the Rouge National Urban Park (RNUP). Then, in 2017, it transferred an additional 5,200 acres to the RNUP.
Finally, this past Monday, Steven Guilbeault, minister of environment, amplified the federal government’s additional transfer of 8,700 acres for public use, saying “that is the equivalent of 4,200 Canadian football fields, making the Rouge National Urban Park one of the biggest urban national parks in the world.”
Appropriately, the federal government media conference at Pickering Golf Club on Monday began when Councillor Jeff Forbes of the Mississauga of Scugog Island First Nation led a smudge ceremony.
He called for joint stewardship of the former airport lands and “a meaningful dialogue with Parks Canada on how we can work together to ensure that the land, water and our treaty rights will be protected.”
During his presentation, the shell with burning sweetgrass fell to the floor and broke; but Coun. Forbes turned the accident into a symbol of progress. “I can’t think of a more appropriate time or place for the shell to be laid to rest than here and now.”
The politicians present at Monday’s media conference repeatedly called the land transfer announcement “monumental.” I asked Brian Buckles to reflect on the federal decision to kill plans for the airport and then to look into the future.
“On one hand I was overjoyed,” he said. “But I’m also cynical. I’ve always felt in some respects that we’ve had more concern with housing going on that land, than having an airport. We’ve got a situation now where there’s nothing that stops sprawl outside the Greenbelt.”
Today, Brian Buckles’ former property in north Pickering has become a location for cash cropping – cultivation of corn for ethanol – and those 20 acres that in 1968 were his new country home remain part of the roughly 5,000 acres still neither airport lands nor land transferred to the park.
His vigil continues.