I am deeply opposed to this…

I am deeply opposed to this proposal for a number of reasons. No lands should be removed from the Greenbelt and this proposal should be thrown out entirely.

1. The province’s own task force, despite being stacked with developer-related experts and lacking municipal and conservation authority input, stated in their February report that there was no lack of land for development. Hence there is no need for this proposal whatsoever.
2. The rationale behind selecting the lands to be removed has not been shared with the public. This should be fully transparent and justified. What were the criteria? What other lands were considered and how did they score compared to these? It took years of negotiation to develop the current Greenbelt map; it seems suspicious that these lands were selected so quickly.
3. Some of the lands proposed to be added to the Greenbelt as compensation are already otherwise protected (eg creek valleys), so adding them to the Greenbelt does nothing, is merely smoke and mirrors, and could result in a net loss of protected land.
4. Removing any lands from the Greenbelt weakens the protection on all of them. This has been extensively studied by rural and regional planners for decades in both Canada and the United States. If the boundary is not seen as permanent, lane speculation will occur, driving up the cost of farmland, weakening the agricultural sector and damaging the farming community within the remaining Greenbelt. I’d be curious what OMAFRA had to say about this proposal.
5. The type of development likely to occur on these lands if developed (low density sprawl) is inefficient, unhealthy, and too expensive for municipalities to run. They will become a drain on the taxpayers.