To the Government of Ontario…

To the Government of Ontario:

As the implications of Schedule 10 of Bill 66 sank in, it felt as if hope had died.

The reasons given for imposing such damaging legislation on Ontario’s land-use policies, so as to render the province “open for business,” are demonstrably false, as I’m sure many commenters will have gone to great lengths to demonstrate. It seems as if the government has set out to intentionally mislead Ontarians. Either that or it is seriously misinformed or seriously compromised. None of these possibilities is reassuring.

The proposed legislation is draconian and offensive. Ontario’s government was (I hope and trust this to be true) voted into office by the public, the people of this province; it is in power thanks to public actions. Yet in Schedule 10 of Bill 66, that government would put in place a policy allowing land-use decision-making that risks harming many fundamental aspects of citizens’ lives and the environment – with no requirement for public notice or consultation and no right to appeal a decision once it has been made public.

Such a policy might be expected from the governments of North Korea or Russia or China. But Ontario?!

Schedule 10 purports to be about removing “excessive red tape” and “burdensome regulations.” But most, if not all, regulation is in place to protect health and safety. And removing excessive red tape does not require keeping the activity secret from the public. So what is behind Schedule 10? The only possible explanation, if we eliminate incompetence and contempt for the public, is that this government is bending to pressures it knows are not in the people’s best interest, pressures that involve harming our environment, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil we rely on to sustain us; pressures that want yet more scattered, low-density, costly-to-maintain urban sprawl at the expense of natural spaces and farmland; pressures that involve permitting industry to set up operations in inappropriate locations; pressures that ignore or dismiss the difficult future we all face if we do not drastically cut our carbon emissions and start thinking like a species that is rapidly destroying its only home (and will succeed in doing so if it doesn’t start doing things differently).

It has been reassuring to learn that many municipalities have made public their disagreement with this proposed legislation and will refuse to make use of the open-for-business bylaw. But not all councils are as ethical or as able or willing to foresee the serious consequences of Schedule 10. This is legislation that would create a patchwork mess of policies and practices in no way better than those now in place. There may well be good reasons for a little more flexibility in current policies, to avoid serious unfairness in certain locales and conditions. But such matters can be analysed and corrected without introducing draconian measures that risk doing irreversible harm across the province.

Premier Ford, during his campaign, promised Ontarians that he would not touch the Greenbelt. I live on the Greenbelt. It was the right decision. This grand sweep of rich farmland and unspoiled nature so close to Canada’s largest population centre, is an asset and resource that other cities and countries of the world would give their eye-teeth to have and protect. Why would any Ontario government try to weaken or damage this envied jewel? Yet Schedule 10 risks doing just that.

With this submission, I ask that Schedule 10 be removed from Bill 66 now. Its potential consequences would leave a legacy that no thinking government should ever want to own.