City not halting casino project

The city has no intention of halting its casino plans, says Mayor Daryl Bennett, even though a concerned citizen has applied for a court order to quash the rezoning of the property.

The city could wait and see what happens with the court filing before allowing construction to happen, but the mayor says the city won’t.

“The city will follow its normal public process in dealing with the application,” Bennett wrote in an email.

The next step in that process is a final vote of the site plan for the property; it calls for a casino and a six-storey hotel on Crawford Dr. at The Parkway.

Councillors gave preliminary approval to that site plan on Tuesday.

After that final vote, on June 5, construction is expected to start. Great Canadian Gaming Corp. would like to build this summer and open the casino by mid-2018.

But activist Roy Brady has applied for an interim court injunction to stop any progress on the casino. It means that if the city goes ahead and allows construction to start, it could be forced to stop.

Brady applied for a judicial hearing to take place in Oshawa, but there’s no court date yet. Lawyers from the Toronto firm WeirFoulds are expected to represent the city in the matter.

On Tuesday, Brady released documents arguing that the rezoning of the casino property should be void because councillors discussed the casino location in private, at an “illegal meeting” in November 2015.

An investigator later said that council discussion should have taken place in public; the private meeting broke the rules of the Municipal Act.

Yet councillors directed staff to begin the process of rezoning, following that closed-door meeting, so the court document says it was a “tainted process” that began in secret.

But Bennett describes Brady’s court filing as “the latest attempt” to block a casino by the citizens’ group No Casino Peterborough.

The citizens’ group has argued there shouldn’t be a casino in Peterborough, fearing it would promote social ills such as gambling addiction. Brady has protested in front of City Hall with the group in the past.

Brady wasn’t commenting on the matter this week.

But his lawyer, Michael Binetti of the Toronto firm Affleck Greene McMurtry, said Brady filed his application as a private citizen. This isn’t about a group of citizens trying to undermine the city, in other words.

“The application is about the city’s conduct – not anyone else’s,” Binetti said. “He (Brady) has every legitimate right to expect that his municipal council respect the law.”

The city is free to go ahead and allow the construction to start, Binetti said – but if the court injunction is granted, the city “runs the risk of explaining to the developer and citizens the decision has been nullified.”

Yet Great Canadian Gaming Corp. is not exactly anticipating delays. Spokesman Chuck Keeling said the company will “monitor” the situation.

“But we have no intention of changing anything related to the progress of the project,” he wrote in an email.

City CAO Alan Seabrooke said the city isn’t going to withhold any approvals to get that construction started.

“There definitely will not be any pause,” he said.

NOTE: View the complete Roy Brady court filing at www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com.