Hello everyone,

It’s been a while – I’ve been quite occupied of late, weaving further original research into my big book project, Moorlands, which examines our widening disconnection to the land and each other through the lens of my mother’s former family farm in old Pickering Township, at the mouth of the Rouge River, near the easterly edge of Toronto.

It’s in this context that I’d like to share a good news, local story about faith in each other and reconnection to the land, in the midst of the utter madness we see unfolding south of the border.

In 1972, almost a decade after what is now the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority began expropriation procedures for Moorlands, the Federal government announced the further expropriation of 18,600 acres of Class 1 land to the north of the farm for a new, international airport. The implementation of this wrong-headed scheme entailed the unthinkable: the systematic removal of generational farm families from their ancestral land, and the Stalinization of former working villages and community hubs.

While the government’s move was sold as “progress”, this shocking loss was never forgiven or forgotten, and local, principled opposition to the airport was tirelessly maintained over five decades, spearheaded first by People or Planes, and in later years, Land Over Landings.

This past week, the Federal government announced what was viewed by many naysayers as preposterous: its intention to transfer the vast majority of the remaining airport lands to Parks Canada, and a formal consultation process to determine the best future uses of the lands. (I understand that the transfer may be achieved through statutory authority, and not through Parliament.).

I’m so grateful to all those who have been at the forefront of this tremendous effort, and am still processing what this means in the context of the decades-long David and Goliath struggle, but I do know this much: in these dark and uncertain times, with the imposition of American tariffs that threaten all sectors of our economy including agriculture, this decision is a huge win. It is also an opportunity to restore food production to Toronto’s front door, and put people who deeply want to be there back on the land in serious numbers. It is, quite simply, a decision that recognizes the Common Good over the Immortal Dollar.

One other thing that arises for me is this: despite the abject madness of ‘rugged individualism’ playing out in the United States of America, Canadians are not stuck. Call it a degree of social embeddedness, call it our frayed Tory soul, call it what you will, but let’s not underestimate the ever-present strand of communalism we retain in this country that still allows for mobilization across political parties and belief systems, and the unshaken resolve of many that thoughtful, targeted protest can still bring effective change. Canadians, We are the Land. We take care of each other. And that’s something to hold onto in what promises to be the tempestuous months, and years to come.

The brilliant 92-year-old Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has a new book out — Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment.

In it, Taylor explores the Romantic and post-Romantic poetic responses to the excessive rationalism, individualism, and scientism that are in his view integral components of the Modern Age.

A self-styled “philosophical anthropologist”, his vast oeuvre evades classification, especially when considered in relation to the tired and increasingly irrelevant political paradigm of “Right” and “Left”.

Offering a critique of liberalism without ever leaving the liberal tent, he is perhaps best understood as one of the leading thinkers of the almost forgotten tradition of Canadian idealism, which includes thinkers as diverse as Tory George Grant (Lament for a Nation) and Marxist leaning C. B. Macpherson.

Many of Taylor’s ideas about liberalism and its unintended consequences underlay the conceptual infrastructure of my current project, Moorlands, that tells the story of our widening disconnection to the land through the lens of my mother’s former family farm at the edge of Toronto.

Well known writer, fellow Montrealer and ‘small-l liberal’ evangelist Adam Gopnik recently reviewed Taylor’s new book for The New Yorker. Though I believe he has misunderstood and/or simplified Taylor in several key respects (objective truth, enchantment, and the necessary link between Romanticism and toxic nationalism) the piece nonetheless deserves a close read — feel free to agree or disagree, and leave me your comments!

The values of restoration, beauty and respect for the past are deeply entwined with my current project – with this in mind, I’d like to to pay tribute to a distant cousin and extended member of the Moorlands clan, music producer Peter J. Moore, who died last Saturday in Toronto. Peter’s credits include a number of musicians who contributed to a unique and lasting Canadian oeuvre, including Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Bruce Cockburn and Oscar Peterson, though he’s probably best known for his brilliant rendering of the one-microphone recording of the Cowboy Junkies Trinity Session in Toronto in the 1990s.

Peter’s career culminated in a shared Grammy award he received for masterminding the restoration of Bob Dylan and The Band’s legendary Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11 in 2016. His honour was well earned; he laboured for 8 months straight, 7 days a week over decomposing tape rediscovered in barns, some of it water damaged and covered in manure.

Through it all, his legacy is the creation of beauty through the art he, “set free in the world” – he never wavered from that purpose, and we’re consoled that he will continue to live on through his inspired work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHTXoMB8Uk

Central to Part II of my current work, Moorlands: An Ancestral Memoir of Loss and Belonging, is a rethink of the liberal project Canada and the West have undertaken over the past 500 years.

By the liberal project/liberalism, I mean the holy trinity of rights, democracy and capitalism that most of us unconsciously take for granted, and that forms the basis of our current social order and political structure. I’m arguing in Moorlands that while the success of liberalism is undeniable, it has also led to a series of unforeseen consequences, including a profound loss of belonging, and a deepening disconnection from the land and each other.

So let’s just say I was gobsmacked about a week ago, when I first watched Oliver Anthony from Farmville, Virginia standing alone in the bush, ripping an elegiac lament about that very disconnection and loss. His YouTube song, “Rich Men North of Richmond”, currently sitting today at 21 million views, specifically takes aim at the plight of the working poor, the vicious suicide crisis particularly prevalent among young men, and the loss of belonging many of us have experienced as we enter a new age more closely aligned to quasi-feudal capitalism, than the woke utopia the Left has on offer.

His anthem has inspired chatter from the usual suspects, including The Guardian, that (shocker) summarily tried and convicted him for slamming Washington elites and the line, “if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds…”

But before we write him off as just another rural, south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-line whack job, consider this: most of the societal ills Anthony sings about are live concerns for people not in the privileged, laptop class. In Canada, we have to look no further than the current opiod crisis, the ‘safe’ injection site ‘treatment’ programmes, and a recent Research Co. survey, released in May of 2023, where more than a quarter of Canadians indicated that being impoverished or homeless was justification for assisted suicide. This societal unhinging has contributed to an unexpected brand of populism – one that holds both the Left and the Right’s feet to the fire in equal measure.

As Anthony himself said the evening before the release of his song, “It seems like both sides serve the same master and that master is not someone of any good to the people of this country.”

.                    .                    .

How did we get here? Political scientist Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame University produced a fascinating book in 2018, entitled “Why Liberalism Failed”, (Yale University Press). Widely praised by a broad spectrum of the liberal elite, including former American President Barack Obama, it argues that, “liberalism has failed because it has succeeded”. Liberalism abhors limits, and is by nature progressive, both in its cultural, political and capitalistic/consumerist aims. It has produced both unfettered economic globalization, and encouraged the growth of rabid individualism over nurturing the collective, leading to a withering of our shared sense of history, and respect for the past.

In the late spring of 2023, Deneen delivered his follow-up work, Regime Change (Penguin Random House), that envisions an innovative, mixed-constitutional order honouring the lived experience of the many, while instilling responsibility in a newly envisioned elite to build a better society, focused on the Common Good, in a post-liberal age.

While I certainly am not in agreement with all that Deneen has to say (for example, who gets to determine the Common Good, and BTW, what’s the procedure for so doing?), it is nonetheless a courageous, intelligent, and deeply thoughtful attempt to address the legitimate and serious problems raised by the likes of Oliver Anthony. Rather than dismissing his clarion call as just another rightwing rant, I invite you to listen UP.

Sláinte

Jane

Hello friends — it’s been a while.

On the eve of Saint Patrick’s Day, I thought you might like to read a piece I wrote, previously published by Providence Healthcare (part of Unity Health, Toronto), on our city’s connection to the Great Famine, and the role the Sisters of Saint Joseph played in administering to Toronto’s Irish.

Níl cara ag cumha ach cuimhne. (Memory is grief’s only friend.)

The Ulster Irish have a word for it: cumha [KOOaye]. It captures the deep melancholy and bone-aching sadness that reside in the yearning for home. And that yearning was fostered through an unanticipated, perilous journey. British colonization of Ireland in the seventeenth century and rapid population growth set in motion a series of events that, by the nineteenth century, made the vast majority of Irish, at best, tenants on their own land. Successive failures of the potato crop, a primary food source, reached a crescendo in 1847, and the Irish people — collateral damage to British Imperialist policy — resorted to chewing on tree roots to survive.

Though immigration began earlier, a million and a half starving and indigent Irish (mainly, but not exclusively Catholic) were left with little choice but to clamber down into the dark recesses of coffin ships for the New World. Raw grief was their companion, losing as they did their language and thousands of years of connection to the land and the people they loved. And they were the lucky ones. Many thousands of others never again saw shore. Mothers, fathers, babies, sisters and brothers, often stricken with typhus, or “ship’s fever,” were committed to the sea. Over a million others lie in mass graves beneath the sod of the Emerald Isle.

“Gorta,” Lillian Lucy Davidson, From Art & the Great Hunger Exhibition, Dublin Castle, 2018.

The Feast of St. Patrick on March 17, commemorating Ireland’s patron saint, is an opportunity to reflect on An Gorta Mór, the Great Famine of 1845–1852, and the role the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto played in the aftermath of the heartbreaking tragedy. It is a story rife with loss and longing, but also of compassion and assistance to those whom the Sisters called “the dear neighbour,” the city’s first visible immigrant community. The result, in a matter of two or three generations, was full Irish integration into the fabric of a city with a strong and steadfast Protestant ascendancy.

Sister Francis emigrated from Clonakilty, Co. Cork, Ireland, in 1848. She lost a brother and sister in Toronto to what was likely tuberculosis, before becoming the city’s first resident to enter the congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1852. She devoted the rest of her life to caring for orphans, widows and immigrant women. Courtesy the Sisters of St. Joseph Archives.

SUDDENLY, it’s cool to be Irish. While there’s some truth in the statement that the Scots invented Canada, there’s also this truth: the Irish have greatly contributed to unlocking Canada’s creative potential. Saint Patrick’s Day, once a welcome day off from the strict observance of Lenten obligations, has now been transformed by the Irish diaspora into a worldwide, flat-out celebration of all things Celtic. But there’s another story of the Irish, beyond the genial, fun-loving aspects so often on display. Turn back the clock to mid-nineteenth century Victorian Toronto, and a tenebrous story emerges, redolent with human suffering.

Disneyland in Shanghai, China, going “green” for St. Patrick’s Day. thesun.ie

In the summer of 1847 in Toronto, it was definitely not cool to be Irish. At that time, the city was a backwater colonial town of some 20,000 mainly Protestant souls with little access to social services. The poor and mentally ill were often imprisoned, while orphans, the infirm and diseased frequently clung to life through the charity of others. Add to this the Industrial Revolution that was fuelling the economic growth of Upper Canada. Regular folk lived out their days in cramped quarters next to factories that spewed plumes of toxic smoke, with little healthcare available for the average worker.

So when the ice retreated from Lake Ontario and a deluge of desperate Irish, riddled with typhus, began disembarking at Rees’s wharf below what is now the CN Tower, they weren’t met with waves of adulation. (John Strachan, the Anglican Bishop of Toronto, in an 1848 letter reported that approximately 40,000 Irish had moved through Toronto in 1847 alone; letter cited below.) Add to that the cultural difference. The Irish disembarking at Toronto were, in the main, a deeply rural people who retained a rich oral history and an indigenous connection to the land. The vast majority of them lived in large family groups and had no experience with mechanization, let alone city life. Though then British subjects, they might as well have landed on the moon.

The city fathers, hard-scrabble Orangemen to the core, took a very practical approach to a problem that could have easily unhinged the city. The grievously sick were provided for. Those with blackened tongues (the telltale sign of typhus) made an orderly, funereal procession up John Street to the fever sheds, from which many never emerged. Both Protestant and Catholic heroes stepped into the void to address the crisis. Roman Catholic Bishop Michael Power, born of Irish parentage, ministered to the sick and dying and administered last rites to the faithful in the sheds. He was the first to succumb. His splendid St. Michael’s Cathedral Basilica was under construction at the time of his death. Power was followed to the grave by the primary physician who worked night and day in the sheds, and ultimately gave his life to the cause — the brave Dr. George Grasett. His colleagues and assistants, among them nurse Susan Bailey, would soon follow.

Harp brooch discovered at site of the Emigrant Fever Hospital (formerly the General Hospital)
and fever sheds, 2006. Courtesy Archaeological Services Inc., Toronto.

The crisis of 1847 did not repeat itself the following year. Stringent taxes were imposed on ships entering Upper Canada in 1848 with passengers who required quarantine. Irish immigration continued to Toronto, though at a slower pace, with far more ships docking at Atlantic ports, including New York City.

“We are still suffering under a great menace of poverty, and the number of widows and orphans must be provided for,” wrote Bishop John Strachan to Waddilove, April 27, 1848. (Cited in Stage 1 Archaeological Resource Assessment of 326-358 King Street West, Toronto.)

The effects of the famine lingered. Recurrences of typhus and persistent bouts of cholera and consumption (tuberculosis) made orphans of an alarming number of children. Bereft widows were left with starving mouths to feed. Unimaginable social change brought many to the brink of despair, and mental illness rose to the fore. In 1851, Bishop Michael Power’s successor, Armand-François-Marie de Charbonnel, invited the Sisters of St. Joseph of Philadelphia to send a group of women north to Toronto to minister to the city’s most vulnerable.

The St. Joseph’s order originated in France, and the centuries–old mandate of the Sisters was clear: to show compassion to those most in need, regardless of creed or nation. In keeping with the mission, the Sisters initially managed the Widows and Orphans Asylum on Nelson Street (now Jarvis Street). The orphanage, donated by local entrepreneur, philanthropist and convert to Catholicism John Elmsley, began as a multi-purpose institution: it initially served as the Sisters’ residence. In 1852 alone, the Sisters took in and cared for 60 Irish women sent to Canada by the Poor Law Commissioners of Ireland until employment and full-time residences could be found for them. The Sisters were from the earliest years also directly involved in Catholic education. Schools were established in 1852 on Lombard Street and in 1853 on St. Patrick’s Square and Power Street.

John Elmsley, Bishop Power, and many other prominent laity and religious of the famine era
lie in the crypt of St. Michael’s Cathedral Basilica (under renovation at the time of this photo). Photo © 2018 by Jane Fairburn.

Within six years, the doors of the House of Providence were opened on Power Street. The institution ministered to the sick, the infirm, the elderly and widows and orphans. For years, it was run independent of government assistance of any kind. Residents assisted to the extent that they were able, and Torontonians of all religious affinities, as well as local farmers, gave generously. Mary Birney, whose husband was lost at sea, was the first resident of the House, and stayed on. The Annals of the House of Providence say of Mrs. Birney, “to devote her life to work for the poor and nobly she carried out her resolution. She was offered remuneration for her services, which she steadfastly refused.”

House of Providence, Toronto, 1914.
Courtesy Sisters of St. Joseph’s Archives and the Archives
of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto (ARCAT).

Eventually, the Sisters established their own farm, first in the Beach district in the nineteenth century, and later, in the early twentieth century, in the Township of Scarborough near the present-day intersection of Warden and St. Clair avenues, to provide for the nutritional needs of the residents and others under their care.

Providence farmer Basil Majowski brings in the hay.
House of Providence Farm, Township of Scarborough.
Courtesy Sisters of St. Joseph’s Archives.

In 1962, the House of Providence closed, and all residents were moved to Providence Villa and Hospital (now Providence Healthcare). Toronto was on the verge of another massive shift. Within a decade, the city would see a surge of immigration from around the world.

To coin an Irish phrase: the Sisters were, and continue to be, “some women.” Over the course of almost 170 years in Toronto, they have cared for a diverse population of immigrants, established and run hospitals, including Providence Healthcare, St. Michael’s and St. Joseph’s (together now known as Unity Health Toronto), and continued their task of teaching.

While few of them walk the halls today, their legacy of caring continues, begun in the aftermath of the greatest human tragedy of the nineteenth century.

Many thanks to Linda Wicks, Archivist of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, Ron Williamson of Archaelogical Services Inc., Beth Johnson, Mission Integration at Providence Healthcare, St. Joseph’s Health Centre and St. Michael’s Hospital, and Cathal Ó Manacháin of Belfast, Ireland. —JF

Hello all,

I’d like to share news about the recent publication of a Cree poetry collection, written by lawyer Francine Merasty, and published by BookLand Press. I was honoured to write the Foreword to the book.

Iskotew Iskwew: Poetry of a Northern Rez Girl illuminates Francine’s lived experience in this extraordinary project we call Canada/Kanata — her life at the Pelican Narrows Reserve in the 1980s, her memories of her close and loving family, together in the wilderness, and her experiences as a residential school survivor.

Francine Merasty, July 2021

I’m just back from Saskatchewan, where Francine, her Uncle Wil and I celebrated the publication, and continued our own journey of reconciliation. Check out the CBC television interview we did on July 18th, 2021 that brings voice to our journey!

Imagine a time in Toronto’s not-so-distant past – the first fledgling years of the 1900s – when the water that flowed out of the taps could kill you. Go farther. Imagine the city as a random assemblage of former hamlets and villages, with no common civic fabric. In many sections, residents hobbled home from work on little more than dirt tracks, loosely connected to arterial roads.

Many folk lived out their lives in cramped quarters in the city’s downtown core, bereft of leisure facilities and the psychological relief that wide-open public space affords. Transportation services were held ransom to private interests, and Toronto’s invisible geography of ravines and sunken-river valleys left residents in developing parts of the city stranded and unable to imagine, let alone access, life in the urban core. Petty criminals served out long sentences in Dickensian prisons, without hope of rehabilitation.

These would be some of the challenges faced by Toronto’s first Commissioner of Works and greatest city builder, Roland Caldwell Harris, who was responsible for much of the foundational infrastructure that underpins modern Toronto. His capacious vision for the city gave us many of our most beautiful and important public structures and open spaces, including the iconic Waterworks in the Beach district, the Prince Edward (Bloor Street) Viaduct that spans the Don River, and Sir Winston Churchill Park, whose subterranean passages contain the St. Clair Reservoir.

R. C. Harris with the Saturday Evening Post, likely in the Beach district’s Kew Park. Family photo album, CTA F432

Despite his importance to the development of Toronto, Harris remains an enigmatic figure and his contributions to the city are under recognized and little celebrated. (Some may recognize R. C. Harris as one of the characters in Michael Ondaatje’s novel, In the Skin of a Lion. The book, though luminous, inaccurately portrays Harris as an ego-driven autocrat.)

R. C. Harris and his wife, Alice (neé) Ingram in front of their residence on Neville Park Avenue, which in the early years had an unobstructed view to the site that would later be developed as the Waterworks.

I was privileged to be involved in the creation of a plaque that memorializes R. C. Harris through the Toronto Legacy Project. You can read more about the legacy of R. C. Harris and my involvement here.

For those of you who wish to learn more (and I hope you do!), please check out this wonderful profile by leading Harris expert, Spacing Toronto’s John Lorinc. (Reprinted with permission. Originally published in Spacing Magazine (2006).)

Finally, a word about the critically acclaimed Spacing Toronto Magazine – for close to twenty years, it’s been producing in-depth articles from a wide range of perspectives on urbanism and the public realm for the Toronto scene. Consider picking up a yearly subscription here, for the price of four Starbucks coffees – I recently did!

Cheers,

Jane

Septembers in Ontario, like the vine, are perennially bittersweet. Children, still kissed by the summer sun, hasten off to the serious business of school. Routine and order reign, as parents get down to the task of making a living. Cooler days give way to blacker evenings and the certainty of hard frost, while maple leaves darken to vermilion. Winter looms.

The melancholy that is September has brought change to our city garden. As I write, a gnarly horseradish sits near the edge of my desk, atop a bunch of spindly and misshapen carrots. Despite our near-misses and our losses, including the demise of the ornery-yet-lovable-Helga-the-hen, the urban farming project we began on the edge of the lake this summer was a source of great fun and joy.

More spindly City Hick carrots! © Jane Fairburn, 2020.

There’s something primal and satisfying about growing and eating your own food — I say this knowing that I’m hardly alone in tracing a pathway back to the land through vegetables, compost and livestock. While 4,500 kilometer food chains of oil, gas and diesel feeding Toronto faltered and sputtered, many seed companies could not keep up with demand this year. Torontonians avoided big box grocery stores and shopped less. Those with fewer resources explored alternatives for fresh food. Public city garden plots were scarce or filled to capacity.

Faced with months of lockdown, many of us yearned for the chance to put our hands into the earth and restore a sense of unity and belonging. The fact is that the pandemic has lifted the veil on a compelling need in Toronto for greater sources of sustainable agriculture: locally grown, responsibly raised, affordable food.

City Hick cantaloupe, © Jane Fairburn, 2020.

Many may be surprised to know that the Toronto region has a long and storied tradition of growing local food that pre-dates European settlement by many hundreds of years — Iroquoian horticultural societies began farming in the lower Great Lakes region about 1,100 years ago. In the fourteenth century, there were a number of agricultural-based communities on the major waterways that flowed down to the shore at what is now Toronto.

In the seventeenth century, the Hauedenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy began their northward expansion from present-day New York State across Lake Ontario. By the early 1670s they had established a series of villages at the outlets of many of the rivers that emptied into Lake Ontario, from what is now Prince Edward County in the east, to the vicinity of Burlington Bay in the west. Two communities were established at what later became the City of Toronto: Ganatsekwyagon near the mouth of the Rouge River and Teiaiagon, above the outlet of the Humber. These villages commanded the eastern and western branches of an ancient Indigenous portage route to the Upper Great Lakes and interior of Canada, known as Le Passage de Toronto (in later years, Carrying Place Trail).

Haudenosaunee colonial expansion didn’t stop at the foot of Le Passage de Toronto, or for that matter, the foot of the other river routes associated with the villages to the east and west. Theirs was a vast territory, from the fertile southern shores of Rice Lake, through to the northern limits of the rich hunting grounds of the ‘Land Between’, at Midland and Penetanguishene, on the southern shore of Georgian Bay. (Much of the Confederacy’s territory north of Lake Ontario lies within what we now refer to as the Greater Golden Horseshoe Region (GGHR).^[1]

The Bellin map, 1744, shines an 18th century lens on the Greater Golden Horseshoe Region, with some of the Haudenosaunee villages, including Ganatsekwyagon and Teiaiagon noted. Le Passage de Toronto ended at the Holland River, which flowed into Lake Simcoe (‘Lac Taronto’).

The ‘Iroquois du Nord’ grew food where they lived. An efficient system of agriculture near the mouths of the Rouge and Humber Rivers produced acres upon acres of corn, beans and squash (known as the Three Sisters), and sustained villages of 500 to 800 people and various other offshoot communities.

The irony is that in 2020, while many Torontonians buy their corn, beans and squash from Mexico, the United States and Chile, 100 percent of that food was produced on Toronto’s doorstep in 1675. And while increasing numbers of small-scale farmers within the GGHR clamour for access to local Toronto markets, a whopping number of other food producers ship their harvest offshore, to places as far flung as China and Japan. It seems to me there’s something askew with the concept of buying carrots from California when acres of them are being raised a short distance from your own backdoor.

Don’t get me wrong: I love my avocadoes, bananas and pomegranates in the midst of the bleakest months of winter, and I’m not planning on giving them up any time soon. What I’m talking about is the prospect of increased access and growing opportunities for food that is naturally capable of being raised locally and regionally. Given the current stress on global supply chains and the inevitable emissions they cause, and the fact that more than one in every ten Torontonians face food insecurity issues, we have to ask ourselves: How the hell did this happen? And better yet: What can we do about it?

Well, first, there’s this. Agriculture is not a zero-sum game. Even the Haudenosaunee had their issues with food production. The persistent planting of the Three Sisters gave the Seneca about 20 good years on the land before its mineral and organic resources were exhausted. European farming practices brought apparent solutions to sustain soil quality and boost yields through increasingly complex methods of industrialization.

Fertilization was adopted, later followed by the use of chemical pesticides. The land, previously worked by horse and plow by many of our ancestors, moved to tractors and excessive tillage, which led to erosion, which only demanded further use of chemical supplementation. The miracle of nineteenth and early twentieth century railways opened up access to offshore markets. Larger farms were needed with fewer hands and increasingly more complex and monstrous machines. Single crops began to rule the day.

.                    .                    .

Though some might point to the post-Second World War period as the beginning of the decline of the family farm in eastern Canada, its demise actually began decades earlier, in the fledgling decades of the twentieth century.^[2] A particular perspective had taken root — perhaps more prominent in English Canada than in La Belle Province. Somehow, through the industrialization process, we began to lose our love of the land and started to see it as a commodity. When the rising economic engine that was Toronto came calling, offering more money for less backbreaking work, country folk in the surrounding region began to walk away from the cathedral-like barns and towering hay mows of their ancestors.

Toronto lawyer, author and industrialist William Henry Moore established Moorlands, his idyllic, 200-acre mixed farm, in the vicinity of the former Iroquois village of Ganatsekwyagon in 1912.^[3] Located in the rural community of Rosebank, Pickering Township, at the waters’ edge, it stood as an example of regenerative, integrated mixed-farming at its best. The farm was in its heyday from the 1920s to the 1940s, producing milk, eggs, cream, pork, beef, chicken, and lamb for local markets.^[4]

Conceptual drawing of Moorlands. © Heather Rigby, 2019.
Moorlands was my mother’s home. The loss of that land has inspired my upcoming book, Moorlands: An Ancestral Memoir of Loss and Belonging. (Click on image to enlarge.)

Was Moorlands romantic? Yes. But beyond the artesian well that watered the heritage fruit trees, the frozen sheets of chiselled Lake Scugog ice that cooled the dairy in scalding summers, and the glorious pigs that spent their last days fattening on truckloads of Mr. Christie cookie crumbs, the farm achieved something more than beauty and utopia. Moorlands celebrated Ontario’s historic connection to farming and the land, through the generations, and indeed, the millennia.

Expropriation procedures, begun by the then Metropolitan Toronto Conservation Authority, eventually resulted in the sale of Moorlands to that body in the mid-1960s. (The property is now known as the Petticoat Creek Conservation Area.) A few years later, the Class 1 farmland a short distance to the north of the farm became the subject of a sinister and controversial expropriation process which remains unresolved to this day. In 1972-3, the federal government expropriated 18,600 acres of farmland, natural habitat and waterways across three townships to build a second international airport for Toronto. While more than half of the original expropriated area has been subsumed into Rouge National Urban Park, 6,700 acres of Class 1, fertile farmland in what is now the City of Pickering remains in the hands of Transport Canada.

This despite a report from international consulting giant KPMG, that in March of this year determined an airport on the Pickering Federal Lands is not required within the current planning window that extends to 2036. Nonetheless, the fate of the Lands are slated to remain in a further state of limbo until yet another airport assessment in undertaken. The once lively hamlets of Brougham and Altona, a stone’s throw from Toronto and in former years the backbone of the farming community, radiate a ghost-like presence now. Heritage barns and proud farmhouses stand abandoned in the wind and the rain, victims of demolition by neglect — a sad metaphor for our disappearing rural heritage.

The once stately Bentley-Carruthers House is now located inside the Rouge National Urban Park border. It is an elegant example of Ontario post-pioneer brick construction, and a powerful symbol of the half-century long struggle to protect the Lands. © Jane Fairburn, 2018.

W. H. Moore, in an interview with the Globe on October 23, 1918 said that, “…only when loved for its own sake, does the land yield its fullest benefits to mankind… it may be that having deserted the farms we cannot permanently maintain ourselves in the city.” Those were prescient words, when viewed in light of the opportunity for agricultural renewal that is presented by the Pickering Federal Lands today. The current plan, put forward in a 2018 report commissioned by Land Over Landings, the group that opposes the airport, is no pipedream. A Future for the Lands: Economic Impact of Remaining Pickering Federal Lands if Returned to Permanent Agriculture outlines a road map for the establishment of sustainable agriculture that will feed the Toronto region and address issues of climate change, food insecurity and responsibly raised food.

Pickering Federal Lands, © Jane Fairburn, 2018.

Specifically, 30-year, renewable leases are recommended to encourage infrastructure investment, and an integrated system of farms, businesses and communities. The vision is that ‘North Pickering Farms’, adjacent to North America’s largest urban park, would become a primary agricultural focal-point for Toronto. Literally accessible to the downtown core by public transit, the Lands would act as a food hub for mixed, small scale farms providing a variety of fruits and vegetables for diverse communities. The Lands are also envisioned to be a leader in eco-tourism with a strong educational component — a research facility on climate change adaptation is part of the plan. The bonus is that resultant economic increases in the York-Durham Region are anticipated to be in excess of 125 million dollars per year.

Prior to the Covid crisis and the KPMG report, the prospect of an airport on the Pickering Federal Lands had once again gathered steam in 2018. In April of the following year, I attended a talk at the Toronto Region Board of Trade, where the idea of an aerotropolis was floated for the future of the Lands. Experts could barely contain their glee as they described nirvana: a bulldozed landscape cast in concrete, where workers lived in neatly contained corridors and food was grown in bunkers, adjacent to airport runways. What left me the most agog were the large numbers of people in the room from various points of view and economic sectors who simply didn’t flinch at the plan.

Which got me thinking of something else. More than courage will be required to successfully develop the Pickering Federal Lands as an agricultural centre for Toronto. What is needed is a fundamental shift in perspective. Perhaps the first task is to get back to the future and collectively rediscover the value of the culture of agriculture — to learn from the experiences of the Haudenosaunee, and uncover the stories of our own ancestors, who in the not-so-distant-past worked this land, or the faraway fields of distant places, still treasured in the heart.

Only then we will be inspired to put our hands back in the earth. Only then will we learn how to love this land.

Many thanks to Alexis Edghill Whalen (Land Over Landings) for our wide-ranging discussions, and a treasure trove of information on sustainable agriculture.

“Return from the Harvest Field”, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, 1903.
National Gallery of Canada.

[1] During the course of the research for my current project, Moorlands: An Ancestral Memoir of Loss and Belonging, I’ve had the benefit of reviewing several excellent papers on Ganatsekwyagon and the Iroquois du Nord. Among them are Tom Mohr’s “The Gandy Project: Locating the Historic Seneca Village of Gandatsetiagon”, 1998, Dana Poulton’s draft paper, “The Bead Hill Site: A Late Seventeenth Century Seneca Village on the Lower Rouge River, Pickering Township, Ontario”, presented at the 46^th annual symposium of the Ontario Archaeological Society, November 1-3, 2019, and Archaeological Services Inc.’s “Southeast Collector Recreational Enhancements, East Branch of the Toronto Carrying Place: An Historical Overview”, (otherwise known as the Rouge Trail Report), March, 2011.

[2] By 1921, there were almost half a million more people living in urban communities in Ontario than in rural areas. See: Ninth Census of Canada, 1951, vol. 1, Table 13.

[3] In 1925, Moore stated that 2,500 bushels of grain alone were gathered from the fields of Moorlands, The Toronto Daily Star, September 7, 1926.

[4] W. H. (Billy) Moore became the Liberal Member of Parliament for Ontario in 1930, holding his seat until retirement in 1945.

Gardens, hen and hoop house, Meadowcliffe Bluff. © Jane Fairburn, 2020.

Come to think of it, I’m pretty much sure I’ve always been a city hick. Like many Canadians, my story of ‘back to the land’ is rooted in the experiences of my ancestors and married to the policies of British Imperialism and colonization that radically transformed much of the modern world. The Celtic peoples of Scotland, Ireland and Wales were the first societies in Europe to experience land displacement and loss of community and language as the result of British colonization. Ironically, many of those same people were among the millions of Europeans who in later generations crossed the sea and participated in the further unfolding of the saga, ushering in a period of cultural subjugation and technological change in the new world.

My great-great-grandfather was Scottish industrialist George Hope Bertram, M. P. for Toronto Centre and the proprietor of Bertram Engines on Toronto Bay. George, along with his brother John, built some pretty impressive floating palaces in their day, including the elegant Toronto passenger steamer, and the little Hiawatha, that still graces Toronto Bay as the tender for the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. But George, despite all his accomplishments, was pretty much a city hick too.

Bertram’s father Hugh had humble agrarian roots. He was the steward on the model farm of the original George Hope, the fierce-eyed tenant farmer, agriculturalist, and land reformer of East Lothian, Scotland. The heavy, water logged clay soils of Fenton Barns just outside Edinburgh were pure misery for tenant farmers, who for generations eked out a living through subsistence agriculture and rents paid to the gentry. Among Hope’s improvements was the manufacture of clay tiles from the ‘muir’ bogs. (‘Muir’ is the Scots name for moorlands, or wild, uncultivated fields. It’s also the Scots Gaelic word for the sea). Those same tiles, shaped from the clay, were then dried, and used to drain the fields. That practice, along with deep cultivation, soil amendments, and the promulgation of rights and responsibilities for landlords and tenant farmers, garnered George Hope an international reputation in agrarian circles.

George Hope, 1811-1876. Agriculturalist.
Painted by Sir George Reid, National Galleries Scotland

George Hope Bertram of Toronto Bay was named for the original George Hope, but eventually promoted an even more ruthless landscape than the Scottish moorlands of his ancestors: the Great Clay Belt of Northern Ontario. In an 1897 brochure addressed to the Attorney General of Ontario, Bertram, along with George Cox and soon-to-be-knighted Sir William Mackenzie, laid out the economic case for a railway line connecting Parry Sound, on Georgian Bay, to the threshold of the mysteries of the Arctic Circle: James Bay. In between those unimaginably distant points were mineral riches beyond description, vast bleak forests, and from the north shore of Lake Timiskaming to Lake Abitibi, a massive stretch of heavy loam soil, deemed suitable for agriculture.

Display of vegetables. “The Great Clay Belt of Northern Ontario”, Teimiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway Commission, 1913. See: https://archive.org/details/greatclaybeltofn00temi/page/n3/mode/2up

Bertram, George Cox and Sir William dreamed big and envisioned pioneer settlement, and in time, the growth of towns and cities, through the establishment of a supportive agricultural and industrial base. (Though their dreams of a ribbon of steel and successful colonization fell flat, the Ontario Northland Railway eventually reached James Bay in 1932. The railway drove the development of the mining boom in the Timmins-Porcupine area and the emergence of Northern Ontario’s pulp and paper industry.)

It was through the early years of the James Bay project that Bertram’s son-in-law and my great-grandfather William Henry (Billy) Moore got his start, becoming the Secretary of the Canadian Northern Ontario Railway in 1907. In the midst of the industrial age and by the 1930s a successful Toronto lawyer, economist, author and parliamentarian, Moore also yearned for the land. In 1912 he began the development of his utopian farm, Moorlands, on the outskirts of the city, on the east side of the mouth of the Rouge River, in Pickering Township. (Moorlands is now the Petticoat Creek Conservation Area in the City of Pickering).

Ontario has a long history of agriculture that extends back in time for hundreds of years prior to European settlement. Here is Augustus Jones’s 1795 survey of part of the River Nen (currently known as the Rouge River). Note the presence of “Indian Corn Fields” on the east side of the river, where Moorlands was later developed. Courtesy Archeological Services Inc.

The last of the Moores left the farm in the late 1960s, but in the early 1970s, though then living in a cookie cutter development on the edge of a ravine in southeast Scarborough, we were still driving out to Pickering Township to tend to the land.

.                    .                    .

I’m thinking that it must have been about 1972, or very latest, 1973. Our family hadn’t made the move up north, to Brock Township yet, and I was old enough to have a paper route for the Toronto Star in the city. The best part of the gig was the occasional stints I did with Wild Bill, my sweet, inspirational father. My Dad fit his moniker perfectly. Case in point: Wild Bill chucked the afternoon daily out to me through the open window of his moving vehicle, while I stood on the running board, clinging for dear life to the passenger-side door. Was that normal? Probably. Not. But I can tell you that it sure made short work of the route and was a hell of a lot of fun!

It was a race, you see. As soon as we were done, we left the buzz of the city behind us and disappeared up the Altona Road into the countryside, onto lands freshly expropriated for the Pickering Airport. On our minds was land development of a different sort, however. We had potatoes to hoe in what was my parents’ own ‘back-to-the-land’ project: a gigantic garden shared between our family and the families of a few of their forward-thinking friends.

Pickering federal Lands, 2018. For more information on the agricultural potential of the lands expropriated for the Pickering Airport, see: https://landoverlandings.com/.
© Jane Fairburn, 2018.

But at the age of 11 or 12, I wasn’t thinking at all about the issues of food security, organic produce, climate change, or land conservation. I simply adored the moment of being with my Dad in the silence and softening light of the late afternoon. A kind of beautiful decrepitude had already sunk into the land. As we worked side by side down what seemed like endless hills of potatoes, feral ponies gazed at us from untended fences. Multi-coloured tabby and calico kittens tumbled through tall grass. We were happy being together, smelling the earth and tasting a deep sense of belonging to the natural world around us.

Arugula from seed, Meadowcliffe Bluff. © Jane Fairburn, 2020.

My Dad is gone now, and I’ve lived out a large portion of my adult life in the Scarborough Bluffs, on the edge of the lake, a few miles from the curve of Frenchman’s Bay at Moorlands. I’ve always kept a garden in the city. What is it, year after year, that compels me to put my hands back into the earth? Is it the call of my ancestors? Am I trying to replicate those precious moments with my father? Is it a kind of self-administered inoculation against the constant and inevitable change with which each of us grapples?

I do know that working in the earth instills in me a sense of permanence and solidity. It settles me. And there is certitude deep within that though trapped in this linear sense of time, I’ll eventually revert to the clay. You belong here. The affection I feel for the lush remnant forests, fields and nearshore waters of the lake is in my bones. And perhaps that’s why I’m compelled to write about it and grow my garden. To till straight rows and to discover what lies buried, under the earth.

On the Burren, County Clare, Ireland. © Jane Fairburn, 2019.

This tribute was written by Richard MacFarlane, 45-year rowing veteran and historian, and member of the Hanlan Boat Club, Cherry Beach, Toronto. The story of the Hanlan and Durnan families, including a 2013 blog I authored with Ted’s assistance, may also be found in a series of links below.

Ted English, present-day.

A 1948 graduate of Jarvis Collegiate Institute, Ted emigrated to California in 1949, serving with the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He became an insurance broker in Beverly Hills, specializing in theatrical accounts in the entertainment industry. Prominent actors as Ted’s clients included Superman, Batman, Glenn Ford, Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, and others.

Mr. English competed in masters rowing events in Canada and the United States. A highlight was his gold medal at the Royal Canadian Henley regatta in August 1988 in the masters single, 60 plus category.

In Year 2003, Ted established the San Luis Obispo County Rowing Club on Santa Margarita Lake. Throughout his life, Ted has been an active promoter of the collection and preservation of rowing history. He was the principal founder of the U.S. based “Committee for the History of Rowing” based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Three wonderful, lifetime exemplars of dedication to rowing, and promoting the history who come to my mind are: Joe Lyttle, a tremendous leader of the Argonaut Rowing Club and past president, dedicated official at so many regattas, chief among these the Royal Canadian Henley, and regatta organizer and convenor for the Dominion Day Regatta Association; James Joy, lifelong coach and mentor to so many, creator of the Joy of Sculling experience, loyal advocate of the Hanlan technique, and hosting an annual Saratoga Springs conference for many years; and Thomas E. Weil, superb historian, and collector of thousands of artifacts, who has donated to the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, and River and Rowing Museum at Henley in England, among other institutions. Tom continues to be a committed supporter of the Friends of Rowing, from Connecticut. Surely, there are others.

However, in my view, Ted English stands out regarding the sheer weight of enthusiasm and his intense desire to ensure we remember those who came before us.

During the past 50 years, from the postwar era, no Toronto resident and, arguably, very few Canadian citizens, have put more energy, commitment, and dedication, to the remembrance of historic rowing events and celebration of rowing champions, most particularly, the great Ned Hanlan, than Edward A. English. He did all this, from a great distance, while residing in California. Ted was the inspiration for keeping family connections strong by bringing together Hanlan-Durnan-English relatives for these Toronto-based commemorative events.

Edward Albert English is survived by thirty-three grandchildren and great grandchildren. As he used to say, “There will always be an English!”

A very sad loss to the wider rowing fraternity and Toronto Island community.

Along with many others, Ted English is remembered with great admiration by his 30-year friend and fellow historian, Richard MacFarlane, of the Hanlan Boat Club in Toronto.

“Ted, you have rowed your final race, and you have lived the sport, documented, and displayed it, beautifully.”

English’s Boathouse, c. 1950.

Two fellow-Islanders mix it up at the English Boathouse Plaque dedication in the summer of 2016, Ted English (left) and Jimmy Jones Jr. (right).

Details of the Hanlan and Durnan Toronto Island Story:

Ted English’s obituary, Toronto Star, May 16, 2020: https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/thestar/obituary.aspx?pid=196199159

Jane Fairburn’s 2013 blog on the Durnans of Toronto Bay:
http://janefairburn.com/the-durnans-of-toronto-island-over-170-years-on-toronto-bay/

2016 Toronto Heritage plaque dedication to English’s Boathouse: https://youtu.be/I2jVqWI6DAE

Richard MacFarlane on Ned Hanlan’s historic 1880 race, “Champion of the World”:
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/today-in-canadian-history-3291/episodes/nov-15-ned-hanlan-becomes-worl-2879063

“Famous Hanlan Club Formed at Outset of Oarsman’s Career”, The Evening Telegram, January 4, 1908.
http://janefairburn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/hanlan_newspaper.jpg

Memorial for original Island pioneer and namesake of Hanlan’s Point, Irishman John Hanlan, as reported in Toronto Star, June 2, 2017:
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/06/02/memorial-for-john-hanlan-of-torontos-hanlans-point-150-years-after-his-death.html

English’s Boathouse at Centre Island, c. 1910.