Dear Ontario Place pillagers…

Dear Ontario Place pillagers:

I'm writing about Bill 5, the one that gives the Province of Ontario the unfettered right to mandate development in any municipality or any territory and without any legal or regulatory or democratic constraint whatsoever, so long as Ontario wishes it to occur – which is something Ontario has been imposing on everyone for decades, anyway, with your pro-development pro-population growth basically pro-power-politics rent-seeking, since forever, with the Ontario Municipal Board backing you up.

It's none of your business to impose growth on anyone. Your job actually should be to constrain it and listen to the people who are concerned and why, and listen to the science and actually stop and think about the pace of change and what is actually being chosen (so very little of it is actually good enough). I don't know what you think you're doing for Ontarians when the only "good" jobs they can get are the ones that collude with the land-conversion agenda, and run roughshod over everyone else. Those jobs are also new-project-dependent, insatiably in search of land to despoil, so because of the turnover – and keeping those particular men well-employed, so that they don't turn to crime, because only finance or crime pays more – you exert an outsized pressure to keep this far-overweighted sector doing exactly what it does, but more.

What I'm specifically writing to you about now, that I just cannot believe (and yet, go figure, this is what is to be expected of *you,* based on all you have done before) is that you, who have already sliced and diced and stripped wildlife and plants and non-vertebrates of all protections and all considerations in every other way, now you're creating a law saying "NO, REALLY, LET US BE PERFECTLY CLEAR: IF YOU'RE NOT A HUMAN SPENDING A NEWLY-PROCURED SIX FIGURES OR MORE ON A PIECE OF REAL ESTATE, LITERALLY, GO AHEAD AND DIE, AND SAVE US THE TROUBLE OF EVEN PRETENDING TO CARE ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO CARE ABOUT YOU."

Because we KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt that you literally *do*not*care* about anyone other than the people who are putting down the six-figure-or-more paper, and who serve you by making the noises you want to hear about laying down more road (because the agenda for more road is to subdivide the land to create even more real estate!). Five years from now, you won't care about those people either, because you'll be in search of converting more. Forty years from now, you'll be looking for ways to convert their land use yet again. What a great revenue model! Everyone's happy, if they only get a slice of that action!

I have watched you and every government before you operate under this rentier paradigm – because so long as land is undeveloped, it's "not paying us enough" – and you, Doug Ford and all your cronies, all you care about, literally all you care about, is the making the most selfish, focussed-on-themselves-alone people happy - with their complaining that you haven't laid down the infrastructure for them to live exactly like it was 1966 with 2016 appetites, as they literally have less-than-zero concern for anything but the cheapest of everything, so that they can buy even more (on credit, bonus) to show that they've got more than their neighbours. And everyone else can suffer the impoverishment of having been imposed upon by ostentatiously blighted landscapes and shoddy quality everything with built-in obligate servicing, because you're happy to help your development and utility and property-management friends to do so. If people don't like the fact that they're powerless to resist your "Can't Stop Progress!" agenda, hey, they can at least go to the liquor store, and if they die of alcoholism, that's one less old person living on OAS, providing any sort of testimony as to what a beautiful place Ontario used to be, back when the slogan was "Yours to Discover (and you're gonna love it)” as opposed to "Open For Business (and GTFO of the way).”

Ontario and too many Ontarians have ruined so many landscapes, often for chump change (or for free, just to stake a claim), such that the only places that manage to protect any part of nature at all are those who seriously get their act together and possibly get some federal money for assistance, and almost always, that land is borderline brownfield. And there, your game is to interfere by pretending to get on board, making promises, but never, ever deliver, just so you can hold up the project (right, Caroline Mulroney and the Lake Simcoe Phosphorus treatment facility?). So very many places over my life: so few real improvements, while the rest is heartbreaking to have seen what used to be, gone forevermore. And you, as the Government of Ontario, *asked for it* to happen. Why is it you want to be the biggest province in Canada, when your vision is so limited and the quality of life so pedestrian?

Meanwhile, how many animals, how many species, have just gone *poof,* right out from under many people's watchful eyes? Oh, that's ok, if someone raids a natural American Ginseng stand, then at least they're making money, which somehow will come back to you in taxes, so it's all good. It's OK to cut down that stand of butternut trees if someone with zero interest at all says they'll plant more. You won't even check. Never mind that all the trees that supposedly get planted don't survive because their survivability is of no interest to you. It's all, all of it, every single last bit of it, a Public Relations Stunt. Just like the Arboretum at the corner of Bradford West Gwillumbury (a forced amalgamation, I bet) 5th line and the 400, which everyone has forgotten about in the "excitement" for the "Bradford Bypass." And your own constituents do not give a ****, because for them — a huge chunk of whom have fallen into Alex Jones Locker — it'll always be about whether they can budget for their next huge SUV tank of gas while they cry in their beer about how Mark Carney is going to ruin their kids' future. They would *like* it if the animals they never see didn't have to die, but what could they possibly do about it? This is not maliciousness on my part, this representation is factual.

Yes, I am contemptuous. You've earned it. If you can and will only make laws or take action (of any kind, good or ill) when people offer you fawning flattery in hopes that you'll do it their way, you're unfit for governance. And public office is supposed to be about good governance. Take the feedback and have enough humility to accept that ONCE AGAIN YOU ARE OVERSTEPPING, and that some things fully deserve the legal and regulatory protection that you find oh so inconvenient.