At a time when everything is…

At a time when everything is more expensive, and people are struggling, it's not helpful to remove developer fees from developers who make millions in profits on private developments, especially when they're often green lit anyway by Ford's OMB/OLT, and will be pushed onto municipalities in the most probable form of property tax increases. Also, pushing fees and increasing taxes onto lower tier areas that aren't experiencing growth isn't helpful to those places either.

Before the election, your government transferred more power to regions for their conservation areas, rather than a holistic provincial standpoint that worked in tandem to try to connect different natural zones. This piecemeal approach was not good then, because nature interacts with nature and not in isolated bubbles. But now, you want to take away the powers of multiple regions, so that you can fast track this destructive housing policy. With the proposal to remove the planning policy and approval responsibilities from certain upper-tier municipalities (regions of Durham, Halton, Niagara, Peel, Simcoe, Waterloo, York) you want regions to have power, but only when they agree with you. Your government is "for the people," but not if they disagree with you. You taking away officials that are already appointed people in these areas shows the clear corruption and favouritism of your government's brand.

At a time when our forests are being decimated by the emerald ash borer, and our urban forests by condos that chop down old growth trees and push out to the curb with no space for green, removing the architectural and landscape architectural standards of areas is disastrous to carbon sequestration, and promotes a boilerplate look of ubiquity that is already happening in many areas with no distinction between cities. With the way that suburban sprawl has been encouraged in this province, I can go from Oakville, Mississauga, Woodstock, Newmarket, Whitby, Ajax, Pickering and on and be in a subdivision, or at a "Smart Centre" and not know which city I'm in because they all look the same.

The suburban sprawl of this province has joined Hamilton, Burlington, Oakville, Mississauga, Etobicoke, Toronto, Ajax, Whitby, Pickering and Oshawa into an amorphous blob with few distinctions of boundaries. The Greenbelt is there to stop that from happening to the rest of the province. We need it for flood protection, carbon sequestration, for our health and well-being, and various other environmental processes. The purchase of Greenbelt lands secretly by developers assisted by your government is corruption at its finest.

"Changes are proposed to re-enact provisions that are not yet in force but would limit conservation authority (CA) appeals of land use planning decisions. CAs would continue to be able to appeal matters where they are the applicant." This essentially limits conservation authorities in all aspects of appeal. They are there to protect our environment, our air, our water. Why would they themselves submit development proposals? This is by far in the minority of cases, and will achieve your goal of decimating our land.

This bill only allows about 50,000 units at this time that will be close to transit options. This bill doesn't address housing affordability at all, with most of these plans being towards private single family homes. There seems to be no enforcement on caps on how many units a corporation can buy, foreign investment, or help for first time home buyers that want their families to have a stable home. Market value is not affordable. $800,000 houses and above are not affordable. And these prices are in some of the smallest, more remote towns of this province. You can't even get a cottage, or bare land for under $300,000 it seems. And we all know that incomes aren't keeping up. Your government is trying to see to that for a lot of public sector employees, but also other sectors by suppressing minimum wage.

This bill doesn’t address the development of affordable housing. Toronto has thousands of units being added every year and their rents and homes keep getting more and more expensive. Market value isn’t affordable in Toronto, and it’s not in the rest of the province, and it’s not in a town like Woodstock, or other small towns and cities.

We have an exploding homelessness problem, which can be directly correlated to increasing rents and over-priced units, and the selling off previously regulated affordable housing. And homelessness is not just growing in the big cities. Evictions are seemingly at all time highs. In fact, in most of the province, we have a rental affordability crisis, not a private, single family dwelling problem. But all the money and ownership, both foreign and local, being stored in Toronto and other big cities and suburban developments in this province is having devastating rippling effects on the rest of the province's affordability. Toronto's problem is the province's problem and we witnessed that aggressively during the pandemic. The slow trickle became a flood.

If you were to actually address the problems at the base of the real estate crisis in this province there'd be more regulation on how many units someone, and corporations, can own, especially numbered companies, increased taxes on empty units, urban growth boundaries for cities to use infilling and use things like parking lots for new housing, and on and on.

Your government is getting rid of rent controls in some places, has already doubled the yearly rent increase, and has no new plans to build regulated affordable housing. This is on top of the fact that we have an epidemic of homelessness already. It seems like your government really dislikes the poor and vulnerable. 

Getting rid of public consultations on the matter of suburb design is unjust.
We should know what it is that's coming into our neighbourhoods.
Your government removing the appeals process for third parties like neighbourhood groups and community organizations to have a say in what things should be developed and where, or halt development, is undemocratic. People should be able to speak and intervene and consult. 

Speaking of undemocratic, the ability to pass things in municipalities with one third of the vote is NOT democratic. People voted for their candidates to represent them. Not to have such sweeping changes implemented without their voice being counted. Democracy is the rule of many, not the few, but in Ford's Ontario, that's rapidly evaporating. Ford’s attack on our municipalities with his threat to replace already existing members is disgusting. But his gerrymandering that he accomplished with reducing the councillors in Toronto is how he started his first term, so I shouldn't be surprised.

We need to protect farmers and protect our food security. We need more support for farmers and their food. The pandemic showed us how reliant we are on imports. We don't need to be. We have farms here in the province, and if farmers were given proper help, they wouldn't have to wait for a city to get close enough to just sell off all their land to suburbs as their only hope.

If anything, the pandemic also showed us how many of us needed to get out and enjoy the green spaces of the province. It showed us how we need to get out and enjoy fresh air. One of the contributing factors to the stressful lives in cities is because of the monotone colours, the oppressive buildings. If green spaces with developments were promoted how they were in '80's we'd have a happier and healthier city, but these are all being chopped down and removed to maximize profits.

There are so many problems with this bill, but hearing doctors talk about it really reveals more of the issues of creating more car centric neighbourhoods. We are stressed from staying in traffic. We waste so much fuel stuck in traffic jams. Highways just add more cars and more traffic jams. We are obese, have hyper tension, have diabetes, have heart problems, have respiratory problems and heart issues and a lot of this is due to our city designs and dependence on vehicles. If we had more walkable and bikeable neighbourhoods we'd be a healthier province. We could have cheaper healthcare and focus on preventative treatments if we moved around more. You wouldn't have to be starving our healthcare of money for highways.

This bill is also insidious in removing the powers of conservation authorities to actually conserve. 

For a name like the Conservatives, I don’t see much conserving going on, especially with the 413 going on. $6 billion dollars that could be spent on healthcare, and education, and existing infrastructure, when we have hospitals full of sick kids and we could prioritize better city design is a huge waste of money. 

This bill doesn’t seem like it’s going to help many people,
but sure is going to help Ford’s friends make some money. 

We should limit how many houses and units are purchased by numbered corporations, through foreign investment, and realtors, and house flippers and contractors. How can I compete with someone that owns 10 properties, or a foreign exchange student that comes here with $1 million in their chequings account? Affordable houses are bought and flipped and "HGTV upgraded" and people who want these places are squeezed out of the market.

There are also few houses being built anymore that are “granny houses” or “starter houses” that can actually be bought for reasonable rates. How is this bill going to make more economically viable designs in these private homes? It seems like everything that's being built in this province is in the design of the McMansion, massive homes with double the number of bedrooms and bathrooms than people that live in them. With the Ontario first policy for timber, we are going to lose a lot of forests for huge homes that are often not used space wise to their full potential.

Aim policies at building within cities in places like the massive parking lots that already exist, building more affordable units, changing the zoning to include low rise apartments in suburbs, creating smarter street design like grid systems in older cities that are more compact, expanding new transit within cities like with LRT’s, and NOT demolishing the Greenbelt and other farmland, which is there to protect us and absorb carbon emissions, and maintain food security, and using policies that actually respect democracy and the votes that were cast for councillors and other officials. 

The real slap in the face is that this bill was passed before the comment period was even finished.
Shame on your government! And shame on you for reducing the future health for our children. If we want safe communities where people know their neighbours, we need to implement smarter city designs with green space and actual boundaries between cities, and limiting their population sizes, or at least their expansion horizontally, and changing zoning from single family dwellings.

Everyone in this country seems to hate our province. They call it Onterrible, and with only highways and suburbs and warehouses dotting every corner of it soon, I'm not sure I can disagree.

Everyone in this province hates our capital city, Toronto, too. Unless one of our teams are playing.

They complain about the metal, the glass, the noise, the car exhaust, the construction, which all seems to come from this unchecked greed that's flowing into our city through real estate that allows every building and small business and architecturally significant building to be torn down. If our city had something like the Colusseum, it would have been torn down years ago and one wall would be there as a facade to three towers. This is also due to the fact that zoning is restrictive to one type of housing.

People come to Toronto for entertainment, but rapidly, many businesses and experiences are disappearing. Rapidly our entertainment district is getting demolished for empty ground level retail and 37 story units that are one third empty. We had a bill in place submitted by councillor Layton at the beginning of Ford's term that would have made it that condos would have to have amenities and other things at their ground floors. That was wiped clean and we're seeing the effects of that as the emptiness of these buildings fills the main street levels. We have many city blocks full of bars and restaurants and businesses that are institutions in Toronto that are slated to be demolished. There is no agreement to help these businesses transition, or that they'll have homes in these new developments. Your government is pretty clearly the enemy of vibrant and exciting cities.

Your analysis of your own bill says it all. "The anticipated economic benefits of this proposal overall would be positive in terms of impacts on the land development and construction industry and homeowners. The proposed changes to the land use planning system would expedite development (time savings), remove barriers and reduce costs (e.g., application fees) for the development sector and private homeowners."
And, "It is expected that any additional costs associated with planning responsibilities would be taken on by lower-tier municipalities."

There is not one moment you mention this helping people acquire housing. There is not one moment this helps address affordability, other than development fees. Your analysis also shows that costs are expected to go up for the public. Thanks for "helping" us little guys. Who would have known that "the little guys" are actually multimillion dollar corporations?

You don't care about us. Your government only cares about lining their pockets.
Shame on you for your greed, your short sighted plans, and jeopardizing our future.