This bill concerns me for…

This bill concerns me for several reasons:
Schedule 10 would allow municipalities with the open for business zoning by-law to permit development in the Greenbelt and Oak Ridges Moraine without notice to the public. This is a serious threat to our democracy, compromises transparency and public engagement, leaving citizens with little recourse for appealing the by-law to the Local Planning Appeal Tribunal. And I suspect that this could open up the municipalities to lawsuits should developments negatively impact the public good. Following this logic, municipalities could be then be found liable and potentially be bankrupted. Would the province swoop in to the rescue if this is the case? Somehow I think not. Have the legal ramifications of this bill been clearly thought out? Really, this bill is just another form of downloading and passing the buck to the municipalities. It is a really terrible idea.
We have so much to be concerned about with climate change impacting our environment, the last thing we need to do is to permit development of our farmland (on what little we have left) leading to more sprawl. We have more than enough sprawl that is not paying for itself. This bill would only bankrupt future generations even more while threatening our food supply. That is soil we will never get back if it’s used for subdivisions instead.
I'm worried that OFB by-laws will threaten our drinking water supplies by overriding policies in approved source protection plans which are there to protect existing and future sources of drinking water against landfills, sewage systems and improper handling of fuel, manure and pesticides.
Several aspects of this bill demonstrate extremely short-sighted thinking and are indicative of economic interests trumping human rights to both a healthy environment and a functioning democracy. It would not be in the best interests of the people of Ontario for the legislature to pass this bill.