“The Greenbelt Plan,…

“The Greenbelt Plan, together with this Plan and the Niagara Escarpment Plan, identifies where urbanization should not occur in order to provide permanent protection to the agricultural land base and the ecological and hydrological features, areas and functions occurring on this landscape and found within the Oak Ridges Moraine.”
From: Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan, 2017, Introduction-context paragraph 5

This isn't permanent protection. The rationale you are using to remove land from the Greenbelt can be used over and over to justify continuous removal of land. This completely defeats the purpose of the Greenbelt.

The ecosystems, farmland, biodiversity, the values that these lands are supposed to preserve, cannot ever be replaced with substitute land. That land is not the same and there is illusion in designating another piece of land as part of the Greenbelt. Expanding the Greenbelt is fine, but the land removed represents a permanent, irreplaceable loss.

The Greenbelt should not be changed except to add to it. Over the last 200 years we have irrevocably altered the ecosystems around us. We cannot get them back so we must protect what we have left. That’s what the Greenbelt was created for. As people, we need abundant natural spaces near our urban centres. There must be space for other species besides humans, not only for their sake but for ours. We cannot survive without nature.
We also need farmland close to where people live. It is imperative that we preserve the farmland we still have to feed our own population into the future when it may not be possible to import as much food as we do now.

The Greenbelt should never be diminished, only expanded.

This policy represents the beginning of the end of the Greenbelt.

For the Province to not see this suggests severe ignorance or a huge blind spot on their part.

We know that many developers have been lobbying hard for the opening of the Greenbelt. This isn’t about any noble goal of creating housing, but rather, making heaps of money, beginning with a source of cheap land.

Destruction of the Greenbelt is completely unnecessary to achieve the Province's housing goals. Many municipalities have good plans to address the need for more housing without overdeveloping our rural/green spaces. My municipality (Quinte West) is one of them.
The provincial housing goals come across as an excuse, not a good reason, to open the Greenbelt for development. Ultimately, we gain urban sprawl, bad urban planning. We lose a precious resource in the Greenbelt.