- Withdraw Bill 23 in its…

- Withdraw Bill 23 in its entirety, and replace it with a plan for housing that respects municipalities, renters, and the environment.

This is a land grab that benefits the companies that bought greenbelt land. It is terrible!! The general public was not consulted about this. Doug Ford vowed to protect greenbelt areas and now he has allowed the sale of these lands to builders. Shame on Doug Ford for lying and shame on all of those who profit from this heinous Bill!!

It has incredibly wide-ranging impacts, and the general public will be affected in one way or another. You are basically planning to blow up planning and conservation as they currently exist in order to promote more sprawl and further enrich developers. And with almost zero consultation before doing so.

Despite what the public might have heard about the "housing supply crisis", there is NOT a shortage of approved, "shovel ready" developable land for new housing throughout the province. It's just that developers are choosing not to build on it, due to various market conditions. To give an example from Waterloo Region, developers have been building just 9% of approved suburban housing units in a given year over the past 15 years; that is a lot of already approved housing that remains unbuilt!

This proposed legislation has MASSIVE implications for the way Ontario is planned and built; the province wants to override local input and democracy, destroy regional (read: holistic, big picture) planning, practically abolish conservation authorities, and open up the Greenbelt for development - not to mention build two new 400-series highways through prime agricultural land and the headwaters of several rivers. If the government succeeds it will result in major degradation of environmental protection and conservation, destruction of farmland, and set us back even further in the climate crisis. And it will almost certainly not make new homes any more affordable than they are today.

Withdraw Bill 23!!!!