Tractors lined up on a road in Mirabel, Que., as farmers geared up to fight a high-speed rail project. This is along the same roads where they battled expropriation of their lands to make way for an airport more than half a century ago. “We don’t want money, we want to keep our lands just as they are for our children and grandchildren,” says farmer Sylvain Ethier. For the protest, he rode an old tractor adorned with a sign that read, “I fought against the expropriation of Mirabel.” In the 1970s, that same red tractor had taken to the roads in protest against an airport. His father was at the wheel then, while Ethier, by his side, watched at times tense confrontations. This time, the tractors honked on the roads of Mirabel against Ottawa’s proposal for a train travelling at 300 km/h in a corridor from Toronto to Quebec City. The Alto crown corporation, leading the train project, has proposed a ten-kilometre-wide path that runs through Mirabel, a corridor that will be narrowed to about a kilometre when the final path is proposed. “This project will be beneficial to Canada as a whole,” says Alto spokesperson Benoit Bourdeau. “We are talking about an uplift in GDP, we’re talking about an alternative solution that is fast, frequent and reliable.” He says 18 million people now live along that stretch of the country, and that within the next 25 years, that is expected to rise by 6 million more inhabitants. Traffic has been steadily increasing, and a high-speed train could significantly shorten travel and have environmental benefits. Farmers in Mirabel, however, hear echoes of a painful past as they listen to discussions about the innovative train of the future. A painful past In 1969, Ottawa expropriated 97,000 acres in the area -- a patch of land larger than the island of Montreal -- to build what was then dubbed “the project of the future” that became Mirabel International Airport. It was designed to become the eastern air gateway to Canada, and opened with great fanfare in 1975, ahead of the Montreal Olympics. “It will be the year 2025 when the last stage is completed,” said then-prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. But the airport was built on just a fraction of the land the federal government acquired, and proved unpopular with travellers, in part due to its distance from Montreal. It notoriously became known as a white elephant, and its terminal was eventually destroyed. After a decades-long fight, the unused agricultural land was eventually returned to original owners or their successors. Ethier’s parents were among the nearly three thousand families expropriated in 1969. “I started to learn what expropriation was when I was just nine years old, and now I am 65, and once again, feeling the very difficult toll that the fear of losing your land,” says Ethier. He often has tears in his eyes recounting the impact of watching his parents lose ownership of land that has been in his family for generations, and where his ancestors built a home in the late 1800s. His family rented the property it once owned from a corporation set up in the area to manage the land for decades. They eventually built a sugar shack he still operates, but his parents often feared they would have to dismantle it all if Ottawa decided to use the land until they became owners again decades later. Their lawyer, Denise Beaudoin, fought a long legal battle on behalf of thousands of farmers and family members. “The international airport no longer exists,” says Beaudoin. “It’s a tragedy here, and we’re now saying, ‘why?’ Why could there be more expropriations around here affecting some of the same people.” She says there is no social acceptability for the project in the region, and that she is now sensing the same fear and seeing the same tears she saw decades ago. Fears of history repeating Alto is holding public consultations, including one that was held in Mirabel. It says it wants to hear from the local community to find a route that will have the least impact on the community and says expropriation would be a measure of last resort. “We’ll never understand what those people went through,” says Bourdeau. “The scar is very deep, and we are conscious of that. And that’s why we are out there on the ground to listen to what people have to say and to get that feedback so that we can have an informed decision.” Many in Mirabel also fear Ottawa could use new expropriation powers, that are now under study as part of the government’s C-15 omnibus budget bill, including streamlined notices and an exemption to a requirement that the government first attempt to purchase a desired property before moving to expropriation. “They are going very fast just like the train,” says Beaudoin. “Speeding through the communications, the laws, they really want all this fast.” Ethier says the train could carve out land that he wants to pass on to his children and grandchildren. If his land is not expropriated, he says he could also feel the impact as the region’s roads could be cut off by a speeding train. His granddaughter was holding a sign and chanting that there should be no high-speed train in Mirabel at the protest, demonstrating to protect the family plot, just as Ethier did half a century ago.
