Thank you for the…

Thank you for the opportunity to give my input. I wish to express my profound opposition to section 10 of Bill 66, Restoring Ontario's Competitiveness Act, 2018. For years I have worked with my local municipality to ensure that clean drinking water, healthy air and healthy lakes and rivers are part of the Official Plan under which we make the rules that govern our township.

Official Plans are hammered out over time, and passed, often with a great deal of debate at the municipal and county levels, and follow the direction set down by the Province under the Provincial Policy Statement. It has been developed to reflect the best science that we have available on how to have a healthy environment and healthy, productive communities, on which not only the people of Ontario, but also our businesses rely.

I can't imagine how the provincial government can consider undercutting all the good work that our municipalities have done. In our municipality the council sought input from the public on multiple occasions. The people of our township have expressed their desire for a clean, healthy environment over and over. In our Strategic Plan, for example, a healthy environment was the top priority identified by the people. Now, this work is to be overridden so that businesses can do whatever they want, even if it means destroying wildlife habitat, polluting our drinking water, polluting our air, killing off our precious wildlife and contaminating our lakes and rivers?

Bill 66 would threaten wetlands, woodlands and habitat for Species at Risk across Ontario. We need strong rules to protect these if we want to have a livable province. Bill 66 would run contrary to the interests and desires of the people of Ontario: a 2016 Nanos poll found that 90 percent of Ontarians believe the government is responsible to ensure a healthy environment for all, and 97 percent support the right to clean air and water.

I live in a part of Ontario where tourism is a major driver of the economy. People come here because we have beautiful forests, lakes and rivers. Our tourist operators rely on the health and beauty of the natural world to attract visitors. People choose to live here because it's a relatively clean place. If Bill 66 becomes law, all this will be up for grabs by business interests, and without any recourse for the people who will be affected? Are people not to have basic rights to use even the courts to defend their homes? This is completely undemocratic, and unacceptable. Citizens have to have recourse when their way of life is being threatened.

I also find it completely unacceptable that Bill 66 would compromise transparency and public engagement, by allowing decisions to be made without prior public notice behind closed doors.

The farmland of Ontario needs to be protected. Bill 66 would undermine our ability to preserve good land for farming. You can't grow food on asphalt! Any legislation that prevents our being able to save good farmland from development is contrary to common sense. Ontario has a large and growing urban population. They need to eat!

Bill 66 would also threaten our drinking water. Since Walkerton, the Province of Ontario has taken some important steps to ensure that our water supplies are protected. That means looking upstream to prevent pollution. It is unacceptable that protections of existing and future sources of municipal drinking water could be overridden, allowing landfills, sewage systems and improper handling of manure, fuel and pesticides to take place where water sources would be threatened.

We already have too many toxic chemicals in our environment. Bill 66 would allow more by repealing the Toxics Reduction Act. I think of the number of people I know who have cancer. Think of the suffering from this disease, and the health care dollars that are spent on cancer care. Toxic chemicals are implicated in many types of cancer. How in God's name can the government consider allowing more?

Lastly, we need the policies recently developed for climate resiliency. We need, as a people, to prevent more CO2 going into the atmosphere, and we need the province to lead the way. Ontario, like most places, is going to face even more flooding, drought and forest fires. We also need to prepare for such events, which we know will be ever more frequent in the next decades. We cannot afford to allow legislation that undermines efforts to accomplish this.

To conclude, I hope sincerely, that the government of Ontario will withdraw these aspects of Bill 66. They are not in the public interest either in the short or long-term.