Private property versus the public good

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/01/2025 (290 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Over the years I’ve been advocating for urban nature and a healthier greener environment for our city. Sometimes I’ve experienced wins, but many campaigns I’ve participated in have been lost.

And as the losses pile up, so does my anger — anger toward elected officials who don’t seem to care and a system that stacks the deck in favour of money, whether doled out by oil and gas lobbyists or developers.

I’ve tried to keep my anger in check, but as the months and years of inaction on climate and the environment drag on, the rage builds. So I find myself feeling not unlike George Monbiot, an environmentalist and journalist with The Guardian, who’s been at this game a lot longer than me.

Once upon a time, Monbiot’s articles about rewilding Britain and addressing the climate crisis sounded almost optimistic. After decades of global meetings on climate and biodiversity producing little change, he’s beginning to sound like a raging voice calling out from what little is left of the wilderness.

It’s a similar anger being felt by people from across this city — Indigenous, Métis and non-Indigenous — who have been gathering on the streets adjacent to the Lemay Forest, protesting the destruction of one of Winnipeg’s few remaining intact tree canopies.

The fact that protesters are dismissed as NIMBYS and accused by trolls of being “privileged” whiners — read here white and wealthy — trying to protect their little backyard forest does little to mitigate the anger.

What lies beneath that anger is grief — grief at the potential loss of some 19,000 mature trees and a habitat that provides one of the few safe urban homes and corridors for a host of animals, from deer and foxes to owls and migrating birds.

Grief for generations of children, many of them too poor to enjoy nature outside the city, being denied the opportunity to experience it within city boundaries.

And the protesters are not alone in their grief or in their demands that the tree cutting stop and the land be protected. Their voices have been joined by the Manitoba Métis Federation, Manitoba Wilderness Committee and heritage organizations, including Manitoba Historical Society, Heritage Winnipeg and the Manitoba Archaeological Society.

The latter organizations are outraged that the historically significant Asile Ritchot cemetery, which lies beside and beneath the forest canopy, is being desecrated by tree felling, in contravention of the Provincial Cemeteries Act and the Heritage Resources Act. A cemetery that contains the unmarked remains of as many as 2,300 infants and children who died at the nearby Asile Ritchot orphanage and home for unwed mothers, between 1904 and 1948.

Yet despite the environmental and historical significance of the Lemay Forest, the city’s zoning department has not suspended the developer’s tree-cutting permit, even to allow for a review of existing laws that would prohibit further tree cutting — although they were recently given 30 days to explore acquisition and rezoning the area as parkland.

And what of Tochal Development’s Toronto-based CEO, Mazyar Yahyapour and his Winnipeg-based project manager and spokesperson, John Wintrup?

Well, last week Yahyapour refused an offer to purchase the Lemay for $5.25 million, almost four times what he paid for the land. Wintrup was then quoted as saying that whether Tochal’s development plans were approved or not approved, the Lemay Forest was coming down.

If that sounds like a hollow threat, it isn’t. Wintrup has consulted on two projects — the Parker Lands and old Shriners Hospital site — where trees were clear cut prior to development approval.

Those actions are happening under the guise of something called “predevelopment,” a word which is neither defined, nor referenced, in the city charter.

So why won’t the city expropriate the land to build a park just as they do for roads? Why do the private property rights of some consistently trump what is obviously a public good — acres of forest that absorb storm water, reduce heat, sequester carbon and sustain urban wildlife?

Am I angry? You bet I am. But my anger doesn’t mean much unless all of you are angry too. Angry enough to email or call your elected representatives to express not only your outrage, but your love — for Winnipeg, for nature and for all the children who may one day inherit a city where every intact forest has fallen to the developers’ axe.

Erna Buffie is an author and filmmaker. Read more @ https://www.ernabuffie.com/