Posted Nov 16, 2013, 5:47 AM
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Join Date: Nov 2009
Posts: 55
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I would also add that Ontario passed a comprehensive environmental liability law, including prescribed guidelines and methods for the remediation of contaminated land and the filing of record of site conditions in a registry for previously contaminated land to allow it to be sold without any continuing environmental liability. This is particularly relevant here because all land south of the train tracks in Toronto, where you are seeing a huge amount of growth today is highly contaminated lakefill, originally it was flooded, which was previously dominated by port infrastructure and industrial zoned properties. By creating a framework that allowed the previous land owners to remediate these properties to government recognized standards and then file a record in the provincial registry which allows for the change of land use to residential, parkland and institutional, a huge swath of land immediately adjacent to downtown and along the waterfront, which was previously untouchable because of legal liability issues could now be developed for residential land use. It remains to be seen if this framework has indeed created a safe level of remaining contamination fro residential occupation, as the standards have since been revised lower for many contaminant compounds in 2011, and so properties originally re-developed between 2003 and 2011, are perhaps built on land with contaminant levels exceeding the newer standards. Under the framework, these properties are grandfathered in without the necessity to do additional work (thankfully, because the soil is now under a lot of towers), but nevertheless, people live there... In any case, one big reason!
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