I would like to express my…

I would like to express my opposition to a few proposed projects and policies around land use and development. These are: the construction of a new 400-series highway in the GTA; the removal of lands from the Green Belt for conversion to housing developments; and reduction in the powers of conservation authorities to prevent housing construction on risk-prone lands. I believe that these measures are short-sighted, and that we will come to regret them for a variety of reasons in the near to medium-term.

I oppose the construction of a new 400-series highway because it will enable increased use of private vehicles among new and current inhabitants of the region. This will ultimately lead to an increase in congestion, not a decrease, which will hinder economic development rather than helping it. It will also cause increased carbon emissions, which is opposite to what Ontario needs to be doing to avert climate change. Instead, we should be investing in mass transit in the GTA so that there are fewer private vehicles on the road and commercial traffic has less competition for road space. This will have the added benefit of reducing road accidents as well.

I oppose changes to the Green Belt lands because the Green Belt provides more short- and long-term services to the people of Ontario in its current form than the proposed housing developments and newly allocated lands will. These services include carbon sequestration, water filtration and recharge, recreation, flood mitigation, food production, and air purification. Farm land paved over is not recoverable. Replacement lands do not provide equivalent services because they need time to become able to provide them. Frankly, we do not have time to wait while we struggle to address the ongoing climate and biodiversity crises.

The benefits of the proposed housing developments on these lands also come at the cost of future opportunities. These developments are symptomatic of an old paradigm that unsustainably distributes people to the outskirts of the GTA. Money allocated to these developments is no longer available for projects that are sustainable and forward thinking.

A lot of thought has already been put into what sustainable urban and suburban communities look like; communities that are designed to address the climate and health crises that Ontario’s citizens are already living with and face in the future. For example, the Green Belt does this by mitigating health challenges like COPD and asthma by reducing air pollutants. Communities that depend on active and mass transit have lower carbon emissions and fewer incidences of diabetes and heart conditions. The current plan will not only harm future progress toward addressing climate and health challenges, it will undo important measures that are already in place. The province should be incorporating sustainability into development planning, rather than replicating old ways of thinking that we know are unsuited to 21st century challenges and beyond.

Finally, I oppose the changes to the powers of conservation authorities, because I believe they leave Ontarians vulnerable to immense safety and financial risks. We need only look to the 2013 flooding in High River, Alberta, to see an example of what happens when housing developments are built in risky places. After the floods, entire neighbourhoods in High River were bought out and turned into conservation land to prevent such destruction again. At the time, the Alberta government estimated the cost of recovery in Alberta as a whole would be over $5 billion. By opening up risk-prone lands to housing developments, we are setting the inhabitants and the Ontario government up for catastrophic personal and financial losses. Many of these losses will be uninsurable because the lands are known to be risky. On top of that, climate change is predicted to make extreme weather events more frequent, compounding the probability for costly disasters. Conservation authorities are doing a service for all tax-payers by preventing risky development on marginal lands, and we will all benefit from allowing them to continue their stewardship.

In conclusion, I oppose the creation of a new 400-series highway, changes to the Green Belt, and changes to the powers of conservation authorities because the future costs do not balance out the near term benefits. We need to be rolling out wise, considered, sustainable solutions on housing and development, rather than reaching for the quickest ones that will screw us over later.

Thank you for reading.