while the Treasurer of the Province of Ontario simultaneously announced plans for a new satellite city, called Cedarwood, to be built immediately south of the airport. The federal government expropriated about 7,530 hectares (18,600 acres) of farmland for the airport, as well as the village of Brougham and the hamlet of Altona. Expropriation went ahead despite widespread public opposition and the Province's ongoing concerns. In September 1975, airport construction was halted when the Government of Ontario withdrew its agreement to provide the necessary infrastructure for the site. A similar major land expropriation had taken place in 1969, north of Montreal, for Montréal–Mirabel International Airport. Phase I of Mirabel opened in 1975, the same year that construction on the Pickering project was stopped. The federal government retained its ownership of the lands expropriated for the Pickering airport, reserving the option to revive the project at some point in the future. 1976–present After the airport construction was stopped, the federal government began to lease the site's farmland and houses to tenants, some of them former owners of the properties. This practice continued, and there were no significant developments until 2001, when Transport Canada resurrected the airport idea and commissioned the GTAA to "undertake interim planning work that would enable the federal government to determine if it should proceed with a regional/reliever airport on the Pickering Lands". As the study got under way, the federal government designated the land as an airport site. In 2002, the federal government announced a plan to preserve 3,051 hectares (7,540 acres) of the site, no longer needed for the airport, as green space in perpetuity, providing a corridor of land connecting the Rouge Park with the Oak Ridges Moraine. Management and protection details of the Federal Green Space plan were never formalized. In November 2004, the GTAA submitted its Pickering Airport Draft Plan Report to Transport Canada. The plan was for a large three-runway reliever airport. The report also referred to the long history of agricultural activity on the Pickering lands and noted that the "fertile soils have led to the majority of the land being classified as Class 1 or 2 in the Canada Land Inventory soil capability classification for agriculture". The draft plan went into limbo when Transport Canada announced on May 9, 2007, that the GTAA had now been commissioned to complete "a needs assessment study for a potential Pickering airport". The Needs Assessment