with more than of carriage drives along rolling hills and ponds. Mount Pleasant Road was later constructed to pass through the centre of the cemetery and is named after it. The cemetery also has remains and a number of stone markers that were moved from the Potter's Field. The urban expansion of Toronto eventually led to Mount Pleasant Cemetery being situated in the centre of the city. A number of Canadian servicemen who died during the World Wars were interred at the cemetery. It contains 231 Commonwealth War Graves, comprising 126 burials in World War I and 105 in World War II. 188 are of the Canadian, and 43 the British, armed forces. In the autumn of 2009, the cemetery opened Mount Pleasant Visitation Centre. The new building is approximately and is built on the property grounds. It was built with the intention to provide visitation space and chapel services. The cemetery began planning the building as early as 2004, but disputes with the City of Toronto government, local funeral homes, and the Ontario Municipal Board all delayed the project. Changes were made as a result of this process, most notably vehicle access is now through the cemetery grounds only (near the cemetery offices), not directly from Moore Avenue. Controversy Despite the cemetery having been created as a public trust by Special Act of the Ontario legislature in 1826 (Toronto General Burying Grounds Act), Mount Pleasant Group began to assert publicly that it had been converted in 1871 into a corporation subject to the Corporations Act of Ontario and that it was no longer a trust. Community activist Margot Boyd and others argued that its status as a public trust remained unchanged. With donations from the community, Boyd engaged the McCarthy Tetrault law firm in 2009 to review the statutes pertaining to Mount Pleasant Group. An 18-page letter sent to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty stated: “Legally, this trust might be characterized in several ways, but an accurate description of the trust in question is a ‘public trust.’ ” Local politicians Toronto Centre MPP Glen Murray and Ward 12 Toronto City Councillor Josh Matlow both agreed at the time. As early as 2006, Mount Pleasant Group began describing itself as a commercial privately owned entity, and refused to disclose its financial records, giving rise to allegations that it was engaged in the stealth privatization of a public asset. In 2012, Mount