A decade ago the residents of Glenway in the Town’s north west quadrant were battling to save their community from the developer, Marianneville, who planned to build over 700 new homes on the fairways of the 140-acre golf course which threaded through the neighbourhood.

I vividly recall the packed, animated meetings convened by the residents’ group, the Glenway Preservation Association (GPA). They were well organised and highly motivated but they were up against a developer with deep pockets and an equivocating and hesitant Council unwilling to lead and shape events. 

The residents lost and the Glenway neighbourhood they knew has since been transformed. Many residents left the area.

Kelowna

In 2019 a key figure in the Glenway Preservation Association, Dave Sovran and his wife Ann, moved to Kelowna in BC. And, ironically, the City has just acquired the Michaelbrook golf course in support of its strategy for recreational services. The Town says the 52-acre property: 

“will remain fully operational as a golf course through a lease with a third party operator”.

This would have been the ideal outcome in Newmarket where the Town’s own Official Plan identified the North-West quadrant as being short of public open space. 

Predatory

In Ontario, predatory developers had been eyeing up golf courses for years, believing they were ripe for development and would deliver eye-watering profits if the land use designation could be changed.

Marianneville bought the Glenway lands for under $10M in 2010 hoping they would be able to change the land use designation – private open space – and be allowed to develop the land. 

The Town didn't meet the deadline for considering the developer's application and Marianneville appealed to the (now defunct) planning adjudication tribunal, the Ontario Municipal Board, which found in its favour. 

In its 2014 decision, the OMB observed that by 2010 the Town knew the golf course was available for development but took no steps:

"...to acquire these lands for public open space and public park purposes."

Glenway offered to the Town

In fact, Newmarket Council had been given the chance to buy the Glenway golf course in 2008 but, unbelievably, councillors turned the offer down in a thirty minute discussion on 17 March that year after the then Chief Administrative Office, Bob Shelton, told them in a verbal report that the Town was not in the business of running a golf club. Neither the OMB nor the rest of us was aware of this fact which only came to light in 2015. (Photo right: Bob Shelton)

The late and much missed Newmarket Councillor Dave Kerwin desperately wanted the Town to buy the old golf course when it was offered to them on a plate. He told me it broke his heart when the Town decided not to. 

Glenway was unquestionably one of the most consequential decisions the Town has ever taken. 

Disastrous

The Town responded to Marianneville’s manoeuvres by bringing in an outside planning consultant, Ruth Victor, to handle the Glenway file. She had no line manager and the then Mayor and now MP, Tony Van Bynen, left her to get on with things with no steer. The Town’s planning department was otherwise engaged on the Secondary Plan and couldn’t spare the staff to work on Glenway. They, too, left her alone. The result was disastrous.

Victor sided with the developer, Marianneville, arguing there were no planning reasons why the former golf course could not be developed. She was hired to give her professional opinion. But her recommendation to allow development was the kiss of death.

By the time councillors belatedly decided to back the Glenway residents on 25 November 2013 Marianneville’s appeal to the OMB was months away and the die was cast. 

Scared

Victor, paid by taxpayers’ dollars, was summoned to the OMB Hearing by the developer, Marianneville, and became their key witness. The developer’s silver-tongued lawyer, Ira Kagan, told the adjudicator on 27 March 2014 that he was tempted just to call one witness, Ruth Victor, so compelling was her testimony.

“If I was really bold I would not have called another witness (other than Ruth Victor) but I was scared not to.”

Kagan told the adjudicator that Victor had told him that Town planning staff “shared her opinions”.  But these were never tested at the Hearing because, incredibly, the Town’s planning staff boycotted the Hearing. Not a single member of the Town’s planning staff appeared. 

Mismanaged

The then Mayor, Tony Van Bynen, never championed the Glenway residents’ case. He mismanaged things from start to finish, always trying to find a middle way that could satisfy both sides. He told the ERA newspaper afterwards in the context of the proposed Clock Tower development (which he shamelessly supported):

“We learned through Glenway that polarity doesn’t help anybody.”

Under pressure, the Town convened a “lessons learned” meeting but we didn’t learn that much.

New narrative

Almost a decade later, the Town has thousands of new residents and things are rapidly changing. People have new perspectives and the memory of the Glenway residents’ protests is fading.

A new narrative is replacing the old one. 

In December 2021 Marianneville, having secured all its objectives, gifted 16 acres of undevelopable land in Glenway West to the Town as open space and received a tax certificate in return allowing the developer to offset this charitable gift against tax otherwise owing to the Canada Revenue Agency. (Graphic right: the gifted land)

Impertinently, the Town was also asked to place signs on the land telling us it has been generously gifted by the developer, Marianneville, as public open space.

We are expected to feel a warm glow of appreciation.

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