On July 21, 2008, the Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal dismissed a motion by Findlay Creek Properties Ltd.  The motion sought to dismiss an application for Leave to Appeal a permit issued by the Ministry of the Environment to pump water out of Leitrim Wetland.  The appeal is spearheaded by the Greenspace Alliance and the Sierra Club of Canada on behalf of the Friends of Leitrim Wetland.

The Permit To Take Water (PTTW) would permit construction of further phases of Tartan and Tamarack Homes’s Findlay Creek Village development south of Leitrim Road, between Bank and Albion. The Friends contend that part of this new phase is in fact within the Provincially Significant Wetland; and that drainage will damage the Wetland that is supposed to be protected.

The appellants were represented by Linda McCaffrey and her team in the Ecojustice Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Ottawa.

The developer had applied for a PTTW and amended it twice, arguing that in the end it was not an application that was subject to appeal rights because the final application was for less than one year.

The Tribunal, in a Decision written by Vice-Chair Dirk VanderBent, firmly dismissed these arguments, asserting instead that the Ministry “has the authority and, indeed, the obligation to determine the nature and extent of a proposed water taking, independent of the time period stipulated in the application”.  The Ministry must determine “through realistic assessment of the undertaking” whether the proposal ‘would authorize the taking of water over a period of one year or more’ – the legal criterion for an application to be appealable.

Here is the Decision (26 pages, 484 KB).