Week 15

22 August 2021

Welcome to Week 15 of 21 Weeks of Resistance, keeping the Foundry Site in the public eye.

As you probably already know, the City and Province have come to an agreement regarding the fate of the site. The main details of that agreement are outlined in a new Heritage Impact Assessment, made public last Friday.

The key points are:

  • The Machine Shop and Foundry Building (a.k.a. the Cleaning Building) will not be demolished (we wanted this)
  • The Office Building and the Warehouse will be demolished (we expected this)
  • When the property is sold, conditions of sale will constrain the purchaser to protect the two heritage buildings
  • The percentage of affordable housing to be built on site has been increased from 25% to 30%

In essence, we won! We forced the Province to stop demolition and change its plan, and we saved the two most important heritage buildings on the site.

Today, it is important that we demonstrate that concessions lead to a shift in public opinion.

Your task this week is to write Ontario Infrastructure Minister Kinga Surma to thank her Ministry and her staff for the hard work they have dedicated to the Foundry.

In your letter be sure to include:

  • Why you're interested
  • How you feel now about this latest development
  • That you understand Infrastructure Ontario staff had a lot of unexpected hard work to do on this brief, and appreciate their work
  • What you hope for the Foundry in future

Please copy Premier Ford and Municipal Affairs Minister Steve Clark on your letter. And please bcc us! All these email addresses are below.

As to the future, "the devil is in the details" — our remaining 21 Weeks of Resistance will focus on different aspects of the project moving forward, reminding politicians, public servants, and the media that the community will continue to watch, and to care.

Until next week, thank you for your continuing activism,

Friends of the Foundry

 

Email addresses:

P.S. If you would like to review the two key documents released on Friday (the Heritage Impact Assessment and the Cultural Heritage Evaluation), they can be found here on this page in the Friends of the Foundry website.

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