In your role as public…

In your role as public servants, I ask you, the Ontario government, to respect and approve the Waterloo Regional Official Plan as it is written and submitted to you. It was put together over many months of hard work and consultation with our indigenous peoples, by the residents, Councils, and municipal staffs within our region. It is the plan we want. Two letters written by indigenous leaders were appended to Waterloo’s official plan in an unprecedented endorsement of the plan.
It is a plan that accommodates more growth than provincially required and achieves this by creating complete 15 minute communities with a range of housing types and affordable housing. As the Region of Waterloo is one of the largest urban areas in Canada which depends on ground water, it is critical to the safety and health of our people that this plan prioritizes and protects our groundwater. The official plan also recognizes that we are located in one of the most fertile regions in the world. Our farms, ranking just behind Florida and California, produce a broad spectrum of produce. With flooding and drought, fires and severe storms threatening agricultural production south of our border, preservation of our nutrient rich, highly productive farms will become more critical for food security in Ontario and very likely become an important export as climate becomes hotter and more chaotic.
The Plan is the product of local knowledge, hard-won experience, and awareness of the impacts of climate change already happening around us. We want Ontario to benefit from the fact that we, one of the fastest growing economies in Canada, have a tradition of innovation, collaboration and cooperation which has created this thriving community. We have used our barn-raising attitude, gained from our Mennonite and farming past, to do the visioning and hard work to invest in future growth as required by the Province.