This is yet another…

This is yet another unnecessary and dangerous legislative endeavour.

The premise that this legislation will get "more Homes Built Faster" is false, with no hard evidence to support its efficacy.

The Government already has advice on Bill 23 submitted prior to the election of 2022 indicating that there were sufficient development lands available outside of protected green belts, wetlands and farmlands. Other recent government-proposed bills in the flurry of legislative proposals since October 2022 have also received overwhelmingly negative responses from informed citizens.

Further advice in public comments was overwhelmingly against tampering with the natural systems under legislative protections instituted by previous citizen-government collaborations.

Legislators need to remember that humans are intimately and systemically connected to natural systems - we depend on them for our homes and our nutrition as well as our healthy and mental well-being.

We do have a housing affordability crisis but carving up natural systems is a very short-sighted plan with many unintended consequences. Affordability is not addressed in this legislation, but devastating costs to the natural ecological systems are guaranteed.

Indeed, natural systems may be the very thing, if preserved, that will help us reconsider how we build, what we build and where we build if we see ourselves as "one-with" and recognize the truth that we are intimately connected with ecological systems. To not consider this will guarantee us damaging floods and potable water shortages well into Ontario's future.

Our ongoing Climate Emergency, with its more intense storms, floods, fires and costly repairs, is one of the unintended consequences of a human system based on constantly-expanding development and expectations of continually growing financial economies. There is a limit, and we must find more sustainable ways of living within the limits in which we and natural systems co-habit symbiotically and beneficially to each other.