Ottawa city planning staff were not expecting dozens of hectares of trees to be clear-cut in February at the site of the future Tewin suburb because developer Taggart had made only one inquiry seven months prior to the cutting, documents show.
The acting grand chief of a tribal council of seven Algonquin First Nation communities has written Ottawa city council members asking them to take the Tewin suburb off the table when they vote on a new official plan Wednesday, saying it could be "a very costly mistake on many fronts."
Mayor Jim Watson says the City of Ottawa should still expand to create a whole new community called Tewin, even if that land is mostly owned by a local developer and not Algonquins of Ontario.
But the huge tract also made headlines nearly 50 years ago in a different debate over how the region would grow, before hundreds of thousands of people lived beyond the Greenbelt. In the 1970s, the former Ontario Housing Corporation along with the National Capital Commission had pieced together land parcels and dreamed of building a model city near Carlsbad Springs. Instead, a place designated on a map as South Rideau became Barrhaven.
The Carlsbad Springs lands sat publicly owned but undeveloped for years.
In January 2020, land registry records show the Algonquins of Ontario Realty Corporation purchased three dozen properties from the Ontario government outright for $16.9 million.