I do not support Bill 23. I…

I do not support Bill 23. I understand there is a huge need for housing in Ontario. However, this should not be at the expense of ecosystems vital to our environmental, physical, emotional, cultural, and mental health. To have a bill that would allow developers to bypass approval processes that were designed to protect significant environments and ecosystems would defeat the purpose of having those processes in the first place.

Bill 23 scares me. It threatens my future. It threatens my grandchildren's future. It threatens the futures of the many nonhuman beings that we share this environment with. Already we are facing the huge and overwhelming impacts of the climate crisis, biodiversity, and habitat loss. Similarly, many people rely on natural environments as a source of food, shelter, cultural sustainability, and economic sustainability. Bill 23 will only serve to increase these global threats on local and provincial scales.

I believe that we as a province have more creativity and ingenuity to address the housing crisis and need for economic development, one that does not come at the terrible cost of our environment. We can look to (re)developing areas within cities (brownfield development), renovating and re-designing existing structures to be more accessible, more affordable, and have greater capacity. We have so many options for sustainable development and countless people being trained in universities, colleges, workplaces across the province on how to do exactly that. For example, Sustainable Planning and Development at Seneca College or Sustainability Studies at Trent University. It would be amazing if the Ontario government could instead partner with these institutions and programs to implement solutions. Let's use this incredible people power to serve our communities and protect our environment.