It’s been close to a year since the County sent its request for an MZO for Picton Terminals to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Rob Flack.

If granted, the MZO would open the port to container shipping and storage. Disruptive as that would be, it is the least of our worries. The settlement the County offered ABNA Investments in June 2024 includes any “expansion lands” in the new Industrial-Extractive zoning the MZO would confer across the whole site.

The Doornekamps, accordingly, have been hard at work scooping up their neighbours’ properties. This isn’t as hard as you would think: if you make living next door to a rock quarry miserable enough, the neighbours will eventually sell you a property it is clear nobody else is ever going to buy, and leave.

The footprint of Picton Terminals is now more than double what it was. It stretches north and east of White Chapel Road over 148 acres.

If the MZO is granted, a much larger rock quarry could be coming for the limestone cliffs of Picton Bay.

But where is that MZO?

In June, the province posted the request to the Environmental Registry for a five-week public comment period. The portal closed July 17.

That public posting was the first opportunity the residents of PEC and the Bay of Quinte were given to formally comment on the deal made in their name by this Council. There was no public consultation around the decision to settle, which took place entirely behind closed doors.

When Council arrives at a decision in closed session, it must come, however briefly, out into the open for the final vote. On the one occasion a formal decision on the secret path to the Picton Terminals settlement had to be listed clearly on the Council agenda and ratified in regular session, the public crowded into chambers to make its many objections clear.

Not only did Council ignore them, public comment on the MZO deal had already been made moot.

The Minutes of Settlement note the document would be made public “after execution by Picton Terminals and the County.”

After the fact.

And so, not surprisingly, the Minister’s request for public input opened a floodgate. The number of comments has not yet been released, but I think it’s safe to say hundreds were posted to the Registry about the Terminals’ illustrious history of shipping and quarrying on the Bay. Its leaching salt. Its uncovered storage structures. The fuel spill of 2017 that shut down the town drinking water supply. The toxic dust everywhere. The endless noise and jackhammer vibrations.

And almost a decade of pretty much unregulated rock quarrying. The shipping and selling, royalty free, of tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Picton Bay limestone.

The Ministry of Natural Resources, which intervened this year to quash an attempt to bring a charge of illegal rock quarrying against the Terminals, calls the quarrying an “officially induced error.” It issued permits that allowed for the excavations necessary to improve and expand the port’s shipping capacity. Why it turned a blind eye to the massive extractions that ensued is anybody’s guess.

And anyway, “error” or not, it continues. Night and day.

In the face of this outpouring of anger and dismay from the heretofore unconsulted public, Minister Flack seemed to have an attack of conscience.

The Gazette has learned that his office is now undertaking formal Indigenous consultation around the issue of an MZO for Picton Terminals.

Prince Edward County resides within the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee. In this case, those of the Kanyen’kehá:ka, the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte. They have a crucial, and constitutionally protected interest, in the lands and waters where they hunt and fish.

This will also be the first time the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte have been consulted about the massive expansion of an unlicensed rock quarry and possible container port on Picton Bay.

If the MZO deal was only to be disclosed to the public after it was done, it also made consulting the MBQ an optional afterthought. 

Right at the very end of the 19 pages of the Minutes of Settlement, in the very last clause, no. 25, of Schedule C of Schedule B, under “Special Conditions,” — things like how the lights can stay on all night when a ship is in port, and how a phone number has to be posted at the gate for when people have complaints — it says, “in keeping with the 94 Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Report, the parties will make reasonable attempts to consult with the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte.”

Hang on. What? “The parties will make reasonable attempts to consult.” What does that mean? Pretty much what it sounds like. Nothing.

There was no consultation. Nobody was “consulted” on this secret deal, not the general public, and especially not the MBQ. In letter after letter to the Mayor and Councillors of PEC since at least 2020, Chief Maracle has made his total opposition to the poisoning of the waters on Picton Bay, and to trucks running up and down County Road 49 at all times of the day and night, perfectly clear. He has patiently detailed the MBQ’s concerns about the environment, and about the connections between container shipping and human trafficking.

Real consultation would have threatened the deal, of course, so it didn’t take place.

Which is why, a year after the MZO request was made, the news that Minister Flack is pursuing the formal consultation both PEC Council and the owners of Picton Terminals failed to undertake is pretty interesting.