Communities that rely on…

Communities that rely on groundwater for drinking water need their regional aquifer-fed landscapes to be protected from development and other perturbations which could interfere with the structural integrity of water-supplying aquifers and/or pollution of the water contained within them.

Landscapes where this aquifer groundwater bubbles up to the surface, and other floodplains that form the headwaters of rivers which provide important drainage through agricultural and urban areas, need to be protected from development and other perturbations.

Landscapes which provide important watershed ecosystem habitats upstream of urban areas whose water supply is drawn from lakes that are fed by those watersheds, need to be protected from development and other perturbations.

All legal instruments and government policy aimed at opening Ontario up for business by local municipalities, must be diligently reviewed and comprehensive checks and balances included to protect the water supply from local development, to assure that all Ontarians have safe and sustainable water supply for generations to come. If we perturb our water-producing and water-filtering watershed landscapes, we will also compromise all downstream cities and communities that rely on lake water for drinking water.

The Gov of Ontario should be aware that southwest and central Ontario is really a single watershed & great lake system, and that development in one landscape can have impact on the water supply hundreds of kilometers away.

Don't permit opening up municipal development decision-making on the "Greenbelt" headwater-watershed ecosystems, since there is simply no safe way to prevent further permanent damage to our water supply. For this reason, I believe the Gov of Ontario should also rethink the Places to Grow legislation, to restrict growth in areas that are dependent on groundwater from aquifers, as some of the current population targets will ultimately serve to permanently deplete the groundwater and turn our current agricultural lands into a desert that won't be able to support any of us (and that is definitely NOT good for business)!

Think again about all this PLEASE. We need our provincial government to plan for much longer term sustainability than our municipal governments.