Honourable Steve Clark and…

Honourable Steve Clark and our Provincial government,

SmartGrowth Waterloo Region is a community organization founded almost a decade ago to promote Smart Growth, sustainability, efficient use of infrastructure, housing choice, housing affordability, active transportation and climate change preparedness.

These proposed changes to the PPS and the elimination of the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe is pretty much the polar opposite of everything we and our hundreds of citizen members have been advocating and successfully implementing here in Waterloo Region for years.

Waterloo Region is thriving as one of the fastest growing places in North America. We are the envy of most other cities attracting leading firms from around the world, revitalizing our core areas, creating world-class institutions, having the most profitable and successful farmers in Canada, and doing it all while decreasing our carbon footprint, protecting our farmland and increasing our greenspace.

We are a model of pioneering planning, innovation, barnraising spirit and good planning that people are coming from around the world to study. We should be the model for the rest of Ontario, however quite unfortunately the Premier and provincial government feel that instead our system is broken and needs to be replaced with backwards, decades-old methodology and concepts such as what is being proposed for the new PPS that have been proven not to work, to be the cause of many serious planning issue, and the reasons why so much of North America is in decline and crisis.

The proposed policies to sever farmland into multiple pieces and promote housing anywhere at any cost defies all logic and good planning principles - it will destroy our farms and ability to feed ourselves as well as imperil our groundwater sources we are totally dependent on here in Waterloo Region while doing almost nothing to solve the housing crisis - in fact it will likely worsen it by diverting scarce resources to the most inefficient uses conceivable.

The elimination of intensification and density targets, removal of population forecasts, the unfettered expansion of settle areas and urban boundaries, the removal of affordable housing, the ongoing MZO fiascos, the expansion of aggregates, the ongoing destruction of greenspace, wetlands and tender fruit areas, and finally the elimination of watershed planning and conservation authority activities is all beyond absurd, completely confounding and is the complete opposite of everything responsible for our success here in Waterloo Region.

These policies seem to only be for the benefit of a couple well-connected billionaire developers and are clearly against the greater public good and benefit of the citizens who need good government and good planning the most.

We cannot state enough how misguided, wrong and totally inappropriate these proposed policies compared to what is actually going to be needed for the success of future generations here in Ontario.

We urge you completely abandon these proposed policies, stop undermining SMART growth, focus on sustainability and use Waterloo Region as the model of successful planning for the rest of the province.

Thank you.