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The strong arm of Benny Farm With 1,500 NDG residents signing a petition against the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's (CMHC) proposed bylaw changes for its Benny Farm redevelopment project, the CMHC may be running scared. At the very least, it appears they have taken to running concerned onlookers and other passers-by off the property. On October 2, Jason Hughes, the NDG Community Council coordinator, and Mirror photographer Normand Blouin were walking along the project's back road. Two CMHC employees in pickup trucks drove up, asked for ID, and told them: "You can just leave because this is private property." >> According to Hughes, "they were very aggressive... there was something thug-like about it." Hughes adds that, strictly speaking, the back road is considered public property. >> The next day, it was the turn for Jeremy Searle, Loyola councillor and member of the City's urban development commission that will soon study the CMHC's bylaw change request for Benny Farm. >> While walking around the site, Searle says that a building manager arrived with five other men. After identifying himself and his reasons for the visit, Searle recalls: "He tells me he's too busy, 'shove off, get out of here.'" >> In a later talk with CMHC officials, Searle says they denied that it was either a pattern nor intentional and that it would not happen again. But that didn't quite satisfy Searle. "That they would be trying to intimidate, discourage or otherwise prevent people from coming in and formulating opinions [about the project] is tremendously unsettling." >> Putting together the two incidents, Hughes says that when concerned citizens are not allowed to scrutinize what's happening to their community, "it becomes almost a question of what you're doing to the democratic process." --Wayne Hiltz
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