Bill 66 is environmentally…

Bill 66 is environmentally harmful and undemocratic for the following reasons:
1. It threatens drinking water across Ontario through circumventing policies that are put in place specifically to preserve clean drinking water for municipalities. This is harmful for the environment, including aquatic life, and will also cost more money in the long-run by creating the need for more intensive water treatment methods across the province.
2. It threatens important animal habitats for species across Ontario, such as wetlands and woodlands, through bypassing vital regulations for environmental protection.
3. It allows industry to ignore agricultural protections, which will lead to urban sprawl, and is completely unnecessary considering there are unused land plots in most municipalities in Ontario that could be converted into usable land for business.
4. It threatens the Greenbelt, which is an area in Ontario important for both the environmental health of the province and its citizens, and also within the culture of Ontario as being a place of natural beauty and heritage.
5. It overrides efforts to make Ontario communities more livable, sustainable, and resilient through allowing industry to ignore policies that support active transportation, affordable housing, green infrastructure, and climate resiliency, which is especially important currently as climate change will continue to create more drastic environmental situations within Ontario that communities must contend with.
6. It compromises transparency and public engagement through allowing by-laws under the Act to be passed without public notice. It also leaves citizens without the ability to appeal the by-laws, which is extremely concerning within a democratic system.
7. It allows municipalities and industries to bypass more than a dozen environmental regulations that have been created within the last two decades, which is completely undemocratic. If the government believes those regulations to be no longer necessary, then they should repeal them through proper procedure, in a way that is transparent and open for debate, rather than create an Act that allows these regulations to simply be circumvented.