Paving over top-tier Ontario…

Paving over top-tier Ontario farmland when the climate crisis is devastating western North American agriculture is reckless. Droughts, floods, wildfires and smoke from fires continue to reduce the west's agricultural output, and are only predicted to worsen.
As this food source for millions of North Americans diminishes, Ontario must ensure it becomes more self-sufficient in feeding itself, not more dependent on shrinking foreign sources. As we learned when protective medical masks were scarce, but in high demand in 2020, we cannot expect foreign countries to supply Canada when they are pressed to meet their own needs. Premier Ford vowed at the time that we must never again find ourselves in that situation. Yet now, with his proposal to allow developers to build homes on protected prime farmland, he is facilitating another shortage, this time of the most precious and essential resource--namely, food.
Large swaths of Ontario sit on the Canadian Shield, with shallow soil precluding productive farming. Rich Greenbelt farmland cannot simply be swapped for other terrain.
Circumstances surrounding recent purchases of portions of the Greenbelt by developers--after Premier Ford and his Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Steve Clark, repeatedly vowed the Greenbelt would remain off-limits for developments--are deeply troubling. Many developers bought chunks of the Greenbelt precisely where the government now proposes to allow housing developments. Records show those purchasers (along with members of their families and others involved in their businesses) made enormous political contributions to Mr. Ford's political party and campaigns. The company of one of these developers even borrowed $100-million from CIBC to pay for the purchase of some then-protected land in spring 2021 at the eye-popping annual interest rate of 21 per cent. Who would go into debt to that degree, who would be willing to pay $21-million annually in interest alone for land that, under its current protected status, could never recoup those costs? It stretches credulity beyond breaking point to suggest that these developers were not given prior knowledge that the protections afforded these Greenbelt lands would be lifted.
Not only is opening the Greenbelt to housing developments putting at risk Ontarians' ability to be fed in the future, the manner in which it has been opened cannot be understood other than as breaching rules of integrity.