EYE ON: You can't put a condo in your coffee
eye WEEKLY
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eye WEEKLY October 10, 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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EYE ON EYE ON
YOU CAN'T PUT A CONDO IN YOUR COFFEE
by
PETER KUITENBROUWER
The people at Redpath Sugar want to make one thing perfectly clear:
they would make lousy neighbors.
"We have trucking operations on a 24-hour basis, traffic, noise,
loading and unloading around the clock," Ken O'Malley, the vice-
president of manufacturing, tells me in his office at the sprawling
refinery on Queens Quay E.
"The switch engine visits us once a day to take loaded rail cars of
sugar away. And we have the usual noises, and vapor plumes. Plus
equipment trucks. Trucks at 10 o'clock at night or 3 o'clock on a
Sunday afternoon."
Still wanna buy a condo next door?
Because that's the problem. On Monday (Oct. 9), City Hall voted to
permit Avro Quay Ltd. to build up to 1,400 residential units next to
the refinery at the old Marine Terminal 27. However, "agreement
remains to be reached on adequate buffering of new residential
development on the Site from Redpath Sugars," reads a city planning
report submitted recently to the Land Use Committee.
Redpath now has 30 days to appeal the decision to the Ontario
Municipal Board. For now, Redpath continues to negotiate with the
developer. "Our attempt is to find an acceptable compromise," says
O'Malley. But he adds, "Industry and residences are not compatible in
close proximity to each other. It's next to impossible."
When Redpath opened its Toronto refinery back in 1959, Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II showed up at the ceremony in white gloves and
pearls. That's the last time anybody wore pearls around here. In
preparing for a tour, the first thing Redpath's museum curator Richard
Feltoe hands me is a set of earplugs. Plus a white smock, hairnet and
hardhat. OK, now we're ready to go see how they make sugar.
The raw sugar comes in by ship -- from Africa, Australia, Central
America, Cuba. Ship after ship, laden to the waterline, coursing up
the Seaway to bring us our sugar fix. On the eastern edge of the
refinery the Federal Vigra, a 150-metre Norwegian-flagged bulk tanker,
is unloading into the city's biggest sugar bowl, the 65,000 metric
tonne capacity Raw Sugar Shed.
Redpath is stockpiling sugar now for when the Seaway freezes up."By
the end of November this building will be entirely full," says Feltoe.
"End to end, floor to ceiling, wall to wall -- solid sugar."
We head into the main refinery where machines weigh the sugar, mingle,
spin, and melt it, strain, press and char it, vacuum, tumble and
screen it. Seventy tonnes an hour, all day, all night. Everybody's
wearing earplugs. It's like a giant symphony of machines gearing up,
winding down.
"We're not at our best," apologizes Feltoe. "We're as much a
construction site as we are a sugar refiner." Redpath, a division of
the British giant Tate & Lyle, is investing $40 million here to
increase production capacity by 75 per cent.
"We have plans for much more expansion," Redpath president Andrew
Ferrier writes in a letter to the area's city councillor, Kyle Rae.
"We cannot find ourselves in the situation five or 10 years from now
where disgruntled condo buyers next door start complaining about the
number of trucks around and force a curtailment to our operations."
Rae says Redpath's executives suffer from the mistaken perception that
everyone wants their surroundings to be a boring, silent suburb.
"All the executives at Redpath live in Oakville," he says. "I grew up
in Oakville and it's a barren wasteland and it's culturally bereft."
Rae calls industry "part of the fabric of a mature, prewar city," and
says he, and lots of other people, would love to live in a condo next
to a refinery. "Those trucks are shiny and beautiful." He's optimistic
that Redpath and the developers will ink a deal.
Fred Eisen, a director of the Four Seasons hotel chain who's piloting
the $200 million condo plan for the Philip Roth family, says his side
will develop in a way that meets Redpath's concerns: "I certainly have
hopes that this will be approved by the city with the support of
Redpath. If it isn't, we'll do what we have to do."
Personally, I'm sweet on the refinery. With the expansion, Redpath
will employ close to 350 people. Let's not embitter them.
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