When Joyce Anna Scott died in May, she died a tenant of a home she’d spent half her life trying to buy back from the government. Now, her kids are making a last-ditch effort to keep the four-hectare farm they grew up on.

Sitting in the house Monday, Joyce and John Scott’s daughters combed through a lifetime of photographs, paintings, statues and teacups.

As of Sept. 1, everything has to be moved.

Despite living there since 1958, the house hasn’t belonged to their parents for 44 years. It was expropriated by the provincial government in support of a simultaneous federal expropriation, for the Pickering Airport and North Pickering Community development projects.

Though an airport was never built, the land is still owned by the government — so, the family explained, the government is taking it back unless daughters Laura Alderson and Melissa Preston can argue their case next week. Their sister Kate Collver was also at the house Monday lending a hand.

The family hasn’t been told what will happen to the house after September.

The sisters argue that the home’s land was transferred to the Ontario Land Corporation in October 1979 without what they say was a promise of an opportunity to repurchase it. It was then transferred again in 2004 to the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority.

A conservation authority spokesperson told the Star that nobody was available Monday to comment.

“In an attempt to restore equity, fairness and finally make right the past, we would like to have our family home at 14 Pickering Town Line returned to us,” Alderson and Preston wrote to the conservation authority on July 4.

A date was set for Aug. 11, when the sisters will plead their case to the authority’s executive committee.

The first piece of evidence they’re pointing to is a pamphlet dropped in the 1970s from the Ontario government, which said if the government didn’t end up needing their home, “you will be offered the chance to recover ownership at the same price you were paid initially.”

That second is a letter from Minister of Industry and Tourism Claude F. Bennett, saying that any homes that were compatible with their plans for redevelopment “which is scheduled for completion by the end of 1974,” would be available for repurchase by the owners at their original price.

In March 1989, the Scotts wrote to the Ministry of Government Services and asked to buy their home back. No airport had been built, they argued.

“Fully 16 years after their expropriation for a project that never happened, a reply was sent on April 6, 1989 from the ministry advising that while our parents had expressed interest in purchasing the property, they had not yet declared it surplus,” the sisters wrote in their letter this month to the conservation authority.

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“How is it possible that in June of 2017, fully 44 years after we entered into what we thought were honest, fair and equitable dealings with the provincial government, we are still waiting?,” the sisters asked.

Joyce’s lawyer Stephen D’Agostino advised the siblings to send a letter to the authority pleading their case.

“If land is expropriated for a purpose and that purpose is no longer being pursued by the authority, the authority is required, subject to some requirements of the expropriations act, to offer that land back,” D’Agostino said.

But, while a final decision is on the horizon, there’s been no indication whether the Scott’s children will be successful. Either way, they say they had to make an attempt.

“With the passing of my parents, we thought, you know what? It seems to us to be such an unfair thing,” Preston said. “If there’s any possibility, this was my parents’ legacy, right? And we thought, ‘well, why don’t we just try?’ ”

Correction –August 1, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said the land was expropriated by Ottawa. In fact, the land was expropriated by the Ontario provincial government in support of a simultaneous federal expropriation, for the Pickering Airport and North Pickering Community development projects.

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