Bill 23 is going to be a…

Bill 23 is going to be a disaster for the province of Ontario, for its people, for the flora and fauna, for the land and waters. As Environmental Defense says, it is “inflicting a fatal 7,400 acre wound on the vital and wildly popular Greenbelt”.

It is not going to help with our province’s housing crisis. There is such a vast supply of unused “greenfield” land already open for development within existing municipal settlement boundaries (350 square kilometres as of 2019), that opening up Greenbelt lands will not deliver a single net new home. As More Neighbours Toronto organizer Bilal Akhtar puts it, “The last thing we need is to squander labour, materials, and equipment that we need to add compact family homes in existing built up areas and settlement areas – and especially in Toronto– on greenfield sprawl in northern York Region and Pickering.”

This is why I urge the Premier to:
* withdraw the plan to remove lands from the Greenbelt;
( get on with a meaningful Greenbelt expansion that reflects public input - repeatedly promised but never delivered by the Ford government;
* follow the advice of the government’s own Ontario Affordable Housing Task Force and focus efforts on developing affordable housing on lands that have already been designated for development and have the necessary infrastructure in place. As the Housing Task Force noted, there is plenty of land within urban areas ready for development.