I believe this decision by…

I believe this decision by the conservative government to be incredibly irresponsible. In particular to “Remove Schedule 10 from Bill 66, which allows municipalities to override provisions in the Greenbelt Act, Clean Water Act, Lake Simcoe Act, Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Act and Great Lakes Protection Act.”, is dangerous.

Humans as a species need to ultimately eat and drink in order to survive and if those resources are destroyed, it is unclear how the conservatives plan to provide for ALL the people in the province, not just the wealthy few whom you have crawled into bed with.

Also, my industry relies on natural spaces. People venture to my region for the freshwater lakes and green spaces. I am not too sure when the last time a Conservative MPP looked at a map or reviewed geographical concepts such as Watersheds -but as much as we might try to live our lives with separation, everything is actually connected. The rivers and streams in the Greenbelt areas connect to places like the Great Lakes Region, or the Saint Lawrence Seaway. If we allow factories and subdivisions into these areas, it is going to increase the risk of pollutants damaging our waterways.

My understanding that this will help get "rid of the red tape", well one of the reasons we have "red tape" is because people, unfortunately, make decisions either based on money or what they can get out of a situation. So businesses cannot be trusted to make the best environmental decisions. So we need regulations to help ensure that businesses are held accountable. What we need are more environmental incentives, more focus on developing sustainable and environmental solutions to our current problems. I think we can keep building, but where we have already built before rather than giving construction business blank cards in wide open spaces.

We as a civilization are at a critical time in the earth's history. We have little time to make life-saving changes for our environment. The conservative government should be striving to be a leader in this critical time, not setting it on fire faster.

The Greenbelt is home to 5,500 farms, 78 species at risk and 102 million tonnes of carbon storage, we don't need that carved up with factories and subdivisions.

Please try to think of the entire province, ALL the people and most importantly, the people who are children now and who will have to clean up your mess. So don't be short-sighted and profit-driven, we as Canadians are better than that.