Respect for LeBreton Flats

This weekend a public dialogue was held to discuss the future of LeBreton Flats. The event attracted a broad range of residents, community activists, and included professional and amateur planners, non-profit housing providers, educators, health professionals, transportation buffs, accessibility advocates, cultural sponsors, local artists and writers.

A few of the old residents of the Flats, were also there, and risked opening-up old wounds, to remind the participants of the spector of the NCC’s expropriation. The importance of remembering and respecting the history of the site was laid out at the forefront, and especially that LeBreton Flats lay within Algonquin territory, on land that was never ceded, and of the significance of the site to Algonquin heritage and culture. Participants were also reminded of the diverse ethnic groups who were affected and rejected by the expropriation including those of Italian, Jewish and French-Canadian ancestry.

Drained once or twice before by administrative enclosure and exclusion of the planning process, community actors and activists were not detered from engaging once more in a process to define the next phase of LeBreton Flats - in an inclusive from that was reminiscent of the old Flats.

These enthusiastic participants brought forward their hopes and dreams of all in an honest and vigourous discussion. Their suggestions of what should happen on the Flats integrated the diversity of the community and the past, long and short, into a full-range of options for the next phase of development.

Many of the community actors who had been involved in advocating against the NCC’s sell-off to Claridge in Phase 1 participated despite the failure of past efforts, and the NCC’s obscene power-brokerage. They were willing to overcome what was generally seen as a slight against them.

Based on a multiple small gatherings in themed break-out groups reporting back to the room as a whole, the session produced an ambitious but lively call for a diverse and equitable community. The participants were almost unanimous in their call for a small-scale, inclusionary planning process which should be launched through a community directed planning process. Their vision included real, and long-term affordable housing maintained in perpetuity, provided my multiple builders including non-profit housing providers, for multi-generational, multi-income and multi-cultural users. The participants called on the new phase to respect the past, most importantly by acknowledged the aboriginal past, and be from the start in close consultation with the Algonquins ensure that their interests in the land were addressed. The working past of the Flats was also on their minds as participants suggested that places be created for the trades artist, and workers, with innovative spaces such as tool-cooperatives and workshops, and light industrial places. Local workers would also find studios and workshops to work from, and families place to play. It was a quite different from Claridge’s stale, condominium based Phase 1 “doughnut.”

Despite invitation, no one from the NCC showed up, even to observe. If they would have bothered to show-up, the NCC property sharks would have heard a clear rejection of Phase I and its limited view, gentrified and exclusionary vision for LeBreton Flats.