CLEARVIEW TOWNSHIP, Ont.—A GTA hospitality entrepreneur has spent years entangled in a nasty dispute over Toronto dirt — specifically, why her neighbour has been allowed to profit from having it dumped on his property while she cannot.
The situation has escalated to the point that Angelina Williams says she’s now often too frightened to visit her own land.
“It’s been a day, lots of emotions coming out here,” Williams said one January morning on a rare visit to her 172-acre property.
She shivered beside the snow-covered cornfields where she dreams of building a year-round refuge with cabins, a barn for special events, and greenhouses.
“Driving up, I felt, like, a little teary, a mixture of frustration, apprehension, sadness, but there is hope.”
This all began with construction dirt.
Williams’ neighbour has a lot of it, and he’s importing more by the truckload — hundreds most every weekday.
Angelina Williams, who owns property next to Edenvale Aerodome.
Steve Russell/Toronto Star
While being an active airport for small, single-engine craft, Edenvale Aerodrome is also home to a commercial fill operation. Owner Milan Kroupa imports excess dirt from construction sites that pay him to dump it at the aerodrome.
The activity is obvious as you pass by on Highway 26, about halfway between Barrie and the town of Stayner. A mound of dirt stretches nearly kilometre long and rises eight to 10 storeys tall. Dump trucks line the highway most mornings before unloading and returning to the city.
This bustle, Williams said, is why she wanted some dirt of her own. The plan for her property, which includes the old, unused eastern portion of the aerodrome, would need its own, much smaller berm for privacy and to block out the activity next door.
“There’s a lot happening over there,” she said last month as three 18‑wheelers dumped their load of dirt onto the mound.
Dump trucks empty their loads of dirt onto the growing pile at Edenvale Aerodrome.
Steve Russell/Toronto Star
Why Toronto’s dirt ends up at Edenvale Aerodrome
Since 2018, in excess of 3.2 million cubic metres of Toronto fill has been dumped at the aerodrome property without a permit. That means the soil’s movements don’t have to be registered, the dirt doesn’t have to be tested, nor the trucks tracked, requirements that have been in place in Ontario since 2022.
Speaking to the Star, Kroupa said the reason he doesn’t need a permit is because “We are an airport.” A biography for sale on Amazon describes Kroupa as one of Canada’s most successful entrepreneurs who founded a cleaning services company many decades ago. Asked where the soil trucked into his property is coming from, Kroupa said, “I think it comes from the subway or something.”
(For its part, Metrolinx said it is not shipping soil to Edenvale Aerodrome.)
What’s taking place here has played out in other municipalities in Ontario. Each year, the GTA produces around two and a half million truckloads of excess dirt from condo tower construction to subway excavation, putting countless trucks on Ontario highways — and millions of dollars into the pockets of landowners willing to take it, explained Ian McLaurin, a retired engineer who heads a watchdog group called the Ontario Soil Regulation Task Force.
The province has regulations on how soil should be moved and tested, and many municipalities now have strong dumping bylaws, he said.
But while “things seem to be getting under control to monitor it,” there’s a catch when it comes to aerodromes.
Some aerodrome owners argue they are exempt from municipal fill bylaws because airports are federally regulated.
McLaurin noted that two courts in Ontario have ruled in favour of municipalities regulating incoming soil to aerodromes, and while Transport Canada has supported this interpretation in an advisory circular, not all municipalities have gotten the message.
Clearview Township officials wouldn’t comment about the Edenvale Aerodome because the matter is before the courts.
Still, whether or not it’s exempt from bylaws, Kroupa’s fill operation hasn’t stopped.
Williams’s berm, on the other hand, was stopped almost instantly; bylaw officers issued a stop-work order, and Williams was notified she needed a fill permit.
Since then, the disagreement has escalated to the courts.
The view down the runway from Angelina Williams’s property.
Steve Russell/Toronto Star
Last December, in a Barrie courtroom, Toronto lawyer Christine Carter, representing Williams and her numbered company, told the judge that not only has Clearview turned “a blind eye” to the commercial fill operation going on at Edenvale, but it has played favourites by preferring the aerodrome’s economic interests to “the detriment of a Black female newcomer to the community.”
The municipality has to be impartial, Carter argued, “It cannot enforce the bylaw against one property owner at the expense of another property owner.”
Clearview Township’s position is that it hasn’t refused to issue Williams a fill permit, but is requiring that she meet all the conditions of the local bylaw. Until she does, it’s seeking a permanent injunction to block Williams from depositing any further fill.
Williams maintains she has complied with all the requirements, including twice paying for independent consultations and getting confirmation from Nav Canada — which manages 18 million square kilometres of Canadian civil airspace — that her berm would not affect the approach to the aerodrome’s two active runways, which are directly adjacent to her property.
Clearview also argues that whatever is happening at the aerodrome is irrelevant. “The conduct of third parties on neighbouring lands, whether or not they are subject to federal regulation, has no bearing” on whether fill is being placed unlawfully within the municipality, lawyer Matthew Hodgson argued in court and in documents filed with the court.
Nor is it relevant, his document states, if Clearview Township Mayor Doug Measures repeatedly told Williams — as she alleges — that neither she nor the neighbouring property required a fill permit, because both properties were zoned airport industrial.
Hodgson wrote in an email to the Star that Clearview also will not comment on the specifics of the case. “However, the Township maintains its position and unequivocally denies any allegations of favouritism or discrimination.”
Williams’s allegations
There’s a sign on Highway 26 that reads, “Clearview Township Welcomes You.” Williams says she has felt anything but since purchasing her property in 2021.
She was drawn to the area based on her childhood memories of spending summers at a Bible camp. So when the property became available, Williams, who has done business development for boutique hotels and restaurants, thought: This is a “complete circle moment.”
From the beginning, Williams said, she’s felt dismissed by Clearview Township staff.
When she has been at the property, she said, strangers have shown up unannounced, asking her questions about what she’s doing on her own land. Once, she said she had an “North by Northwest” experience. She and her elderly parents were standing on her property when, she said, a low‑flying plane coming in for landing suddenly veered toward them, forcing all three to dive to the ground.
A short time later, a woman from the aerodrome drove down the runway, stopped and told Williams, “I shouldn’t be there.”
Similar encounters followed; whenever she arrived, unfamiliar people would appear, asking who she was and what she was doing.
In November, Carter alleged that the OPP and bylaw officials were responding directly to complaints from “the Edenvale property.” She cross-examined a Clearview Township bylaw officer, asking why “you, as a public official, are apparently on speed dial for one property owner, and at the same time, looking the other way when that property owner does not have a permit.” (Hodgson, who was present on behalf of the township, interjected that it wasn’t a proper question and told the officer, “Don’t answer it.”)
During the December court proceeding in Barrie, Carter also told Superior Court Justice Annette Casullo that Kroupa had told Williams that “he controlled the township.”
“That is an absolute lie. I would never do that,” Kroupa told the Star last month. He added that, “There’s no friendship with the township,” especially not since he got hit with a tax bill that “you would not believe … so we’re going to court.”
In December 2024, Williams’ gate was torn down. Contractors arrived to work, only to be confronted by more unexpected visitors. Then, last summer, one of those contractors was shot — three bullets fired, one striking him in the thigh.
No one has been arrested in the shooting; Ontario Provincial Police continue to investigate.
In her closing submissions to the judge in December, Carter said that it appears “There are people in this town trying to run people off the property using guns.”
Kroupa told the Star he knows nothing about the shooting, Williams’ allegation that someone flew an airplane at her or that her presence as a Black newcomer is unwelcome, which he called “ridiculous.”
Edenvale Aerodrome is an active airport with two runways.
Steve Russell/Toronto Star
The township’s response
Asked by the judge why Kroupa has been allowed to import fill without a permit, Hodgson again reiterated it isn’t relevant to this case. “We’re really just trying to ensure that putting a berm at the end of an active runway is safe,” he explained.
When the judge noted that Nav Canada has evaluated Williams’ proposal and has no objection to the project, Hodgson replied that the township’s peer reviewer has concerns that her berm’s planned height could expose the municipality to liability.
“There is a concern for safety.”
For her part, Carter noted Williams is proposing a barrier significantly less than the height of the growing hill at Edenvale. Nor are pilots complaining about it as potentially interfering with their takeoffs or landings. Williams’ design drawings submitted to the court proposed a 15-metre or 50-foot high berm, split into a pair of mounds about 400 metres long in total. The drawings specify that her project will maintain a 15-metre distance from the edge of the runway, and that all fill must be subject to Ontario regulations, with documentation presented to the township.
Kroupa, meanwhile, insisted to the Star that he has “no problem” with Williams and doesn’t care what she does with her land, but “she has to make sure the access to our airport, the landing and so on, is clear.
“But other than that, no, she can do whatever she wants there.”
Kroupa’s property has several hangars for private aircraft, whose owners lease the space and fly in and out on two paved runways. A full-size replica Avro Arrow, Canada’s legendary fighter jet‚ sits out front, and there’s an aviation museum inside the “terminal” building.
On Thursday, the judge dismissed Clearview’s application for an injunction and ordered the township to issue a fill permit to Williams.
“Aviation safety falls within the sole purview of the federal government,” Casullo wrote. “The Township does not have the authority to regulate the height, placement, or scope of the property’s proposed berm. The authority falls to Transport Canada.”
Carter, a veteran litigator who has acted for and provided risk management advice to many municipalities throughout Ontario during her 35-year career, wrote in an email to the Star that it’s unfortunate Williams had to turn to the courts to have her rights as a property owner vindicated.
“It is certainly gratifying that the court recognized that the applicant in this case went above and beyond what was required by the bylaw while Clearview Township rebuffed every effort with inappropriate demands. I am hopeful that Clearview Township elected officials and staff will review the decision and give careful consideration to their proper role in carrying out their public duties.”
Williams said she feels vindicated. “This has been such a long and costly road; the extent to which the township went to not issue this permit was bewildering and unjust, so I am pleased with the outcome.”