The Globe and Mail

In 1946, a newlywed architecture student from Zurich, named Sonja Bata, first gazed on the farmer's fields in Eastern Ontario where she and her new husband would build their lives after the Second World War. Sixty years later, Mrs. Bata, almost 80 and matriarch of global shoe giant Bata Ltd., has extraordinary plans for those fields -- 1,500 acres of land, with an abandoned shoe factory, that she owns around the former company town of Batawa. When Mrs. Bata surveys this site 90 minutes east of Toronto, she dreams of condos in the old factory, hundreds of houses in tasteful modern styles, large parks, a retail destination, and homes for retired farmers and refugees from the city. "We have big plans but we have to find out what the market will absorb," says Mrs. Bata, who last year bought the factory and land from Bata Ltd., which had closed the 60-year-old plant in 1999.