Now former Ontario Housing Minister Steve Clark is featured in two separate stories on the front page of this week’s issue and the relationship between the two news items has a small but significant impact on Manitoulin Island.
The front-page picture, the lead photo this week, shows Mr. Clark predominately helping cut the red ribbon to officially inaugurate Fielding Place, a dozen brand-new seniors housing units on the hillside above Low Island Park in Little Current.
Mr. Clark’s former ministry contributed significant funding to see the project through to last Wednesday’s grand opening.
This was a project that is significant, not only on Manitoulin, but also in the Manitoulin-Sudbury District Services Board (DSB) region. It was initiated over two years ago by the DSB (which donated its own funds in the process) and it was a true partnership among the Northeast Town (which donated the valuable real estate which really made the project viable), and Ontario Ministry of Housing (Mr. Clarks’ former portfolio) contributed to the building costs as did the Government of Canada.
So it’s a nice property, senior-friendly, in a wonderful location and the result of a multi-tier partnership. It doesn’t get much better than that.
It shouldn’t at any rate, but politics proved something of a spoiler on the day of the ribbon cutting that should have been a day of participatory celebration for lots of Manitoulin people.
It should have been, except that residents weren’t made aware of the grand opening, the informative open house and the lunch that were part of last Wednesday’s 9 am event.
That official appearance by then-Minister Clark was the last official duty by the embattled cabinet minister, mired in the controversy surrounding his government’s decision to go back on its election promise to keep its hands off the Greenbelt that somewhat surrounds Toronto. Not only a broken promise, but opposition parties in the legislature, First Nations leaders and many others are deeming the parcelling off of bits of the Greenbelt to select developers who had direct access to the former minister’s chief of staff, (who also resigned a week before his former boss) to be corruption.
This is very much in the news.
So how does this impact Island citizens in particular?
Well, in an effort to shield former minister Clark from the Greenbelt controversy, the Ministry of Housing apparently choose not to tell Manitoulin people that there was to a grand opening and open house, at least not in any useful way.
The Expositor learned about the event, accidentally in an unofficial way, at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, after the August 23 paper was on press and so it was publicized in the paper’s Friday Newsletter as that was the only vehicle on hand.
As for the ministry, it eventually posted a press release, in the middle of the Tuesday afternoon the day before the Wednesday ribbon cutting, but only on its own website. It was not shared with local and regional media.
So, in an apparent effort to protect an embattled minister from possible scrutiny, the event was basically kept as a secret and so local folks were denied the opportunity to enjoy a very positive event and to tour the units before they were occupied.
This seems a desperate measure undertaken by ministry staff at the expense of the local community.
How much better it would have been if the former minister had simply stayed away and the event widely publicized.
The Greenbelt controversy isn’t going to go away. A former government, now in opposition, put the program in place specifically to avoid urban sprawl around the GTA, something that the current government appears to want to embrace, in spite of any number of urban planners telling the Ontario government that there is sufficient land in the city proper to meet its stated housing needs.
The effective denial of Manitoulin residents the opportunity to witness history (this was the 24-year-old DSB’s first-ever housing project and the first on municipal lands in over 30 years) is collateral damage.
