To: Whom It May Concern I am…

To: Whom It May Concern

I am writing to express my disgust that you are proposing to remove lands from the Greenbelt. It is a betrayal of public trust when Premier Ford promised to not touch the Greenbelt and shortly after the election he is doing just that.

I was the public member on the Greenbelt Task Force back in 2004 and am very familiar with the principles that guided the designation of the Greenbelt. It is folly to be considering pieces of land in isolation as the Greenbelt was developed to be a holistic approach to protecting Watersheds, Environmentally Sensitive Lands, Threatened Species Habitats, important Corridors between habitats, forest tracts, farmlands and farm communities, unique landforms, and rural communities. We made sure any land already designated for development was excluded from the Greenbelt, even if it was significant, so as to respect developers' rights.

As a former Local & Regional Councillor for Vaughan, I am very aware of the pressure brought to bear on politicians to try and stack the deck in developers favour at the expense of the environment and current taxpayers. What you are doing is a betrayal of the principles of fairness and you are falsely using the housing crisis to push this injustice through. You know that there is ample land slated for development already identified for houses in Municipal Official Plans. You can pretend that intensification is not going to happen to the levels needed, however the past 15 years in Vaughan, Markham, Richmond Hill and across communities in the GTAH has proven this to be false. You know by removing development charges from new home construction you are downloading the cost onto existing communities that already paid for growth infrastructure when they bought their homes, forcing municipalities to raise the property taxes to provide the needed infrastructure expansion to accommodate the new growth. You have no guarantees that the development charges not assigned to new home builds will be passed on to consumers, as home pricing is market driven. This is false advertising. You also use the vague term that all this is necessary to build affordable housing, which is a pipe dream. No housing to be built on the Greenbelt will be affordable, as it will be more sprawl type development built around the car. Even new dense townhome complexes in Vaughan are selling units for over a million dollars. In no way could you describe this as affordable. Even small condos in the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre are not affordable to most. Another fact that points to Bill 23 failing to deliver real results is the significant downturn currently in the market causing many developers to slow down their plans and for those that are forging ahead they are having significant challenges getting the labour and products to complete the projects. All this points to real challenges building traditional homes quickly.

Please repeal Bill 23, as it is pitting municipalities, residents and organizations against the Provincial Government. This is not the way to fix the housing crisis. We need to have all levels of government and civil society working together to really solve our housing crisis. It can be done, but not through Bill 23.

Hon. Deb Schulte