"unequivocally, we will not…

"unequivocally, we will not touch the green belt. Unlike other governments that don't listen to the people I've heard it loud and clear. People don't want me touching their Green belt, we won't touch the green belt. We'll figure out how to clean up this housing mess, this housing crisis that we're facing in different fashion.

To all my friends, I listen to you. You don't want me touching the green belt, we won't touch the green belt. - Doug Ford 2018

Seems to me another fashion might be using the 12,000 hectares that we have set aside for development instead of cutting into the green belt.

Between a highway that would save only seconds, and opening up lands for development in those beautiful spaces will only lead to mcmansions and not help the housing crisis in any way. It's not millionaires in crisis of finding housing. Nor communities looking for a long commute to their low paying job that need housing. Develop upward and more densely, develop in the places where housing is at crisis. This isn't a field of dream scenario, the poor don't have the means to come if you do build it.

Doug Ford should take a breath and listen to his better self from 2018 and the people he used to listen to that brought him to that comment in 2018. The people are saying the same thing now, you don't see picket lines of people saying cut down the forest. Those picket lines last week had the people on them that need housing and better wages, and many of the students they serve need that affordable housing.

Make policy change not development change. There are too many unoccupied homes causing crises. In my town much of the housing is owned by people who don't live here, they said empty most weeks and all winter, and they create further scarcity in the rental market and housing market but being owned by people who don't need them. They are an item or entertainment to be pulled out of the drawer occasionally by the very well off and wealthy.

Meanwhile rent for a bachelor apartment is $1,500 here which should absolutely cover entire houses or cottages and not a single pathetic room. My bachelor room cost as much as my mortgage from 2013 did, and that was for an entire property and detached home instead of maybe 250sq feet. Down payments are unreachable and rent costs more than a mortgage, this is a policy issue. An issue of a lack of regulation to keep pricing in check with reality and wages. Letting property management companies run amok is a major part of this. Housing is for persons, not companies. Put a moratorium on second or third home ownership, through legislation create equity for renters in the homes they are doing all the work of paying down, perhaps they could leverage that investment into a home themselves one day. It doesn't make sense that those doing the consistent financial work to maintain that mortgage get nothing out of it, the most broken concept in our housing is that a homeowner can just rent it out for the full cost of the mortgage or more and also keep the equity created by those renters spendings as well as changes in property value over time. Aside from a down payment and a signature nearly all they do is wait, and then they retire on someone else having paid their mortgage over a lifetime while also putting that person out on the street when they sell. Thanks for helping me buy that house, you can go now and do it for someone else at the now inevitably vastly higher rental rate.

Fix the concept of housing without cutting down important environmental spaces. Scrap your Highway and cutting into the green belt. Stick to your promise.