As an Ontario resident, I…

As an Ontario resident, I wanted to share my thoughts about current proposal to amendment the Greenbelt Plan.

From the Ontario governments own webpage about the Greenbelt: "Ontario’s Greenbelt protects farmland, communities, forests, wetlands and watersheds. It also preserves cultural heritage and supports recreation and tourism in Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe.".

The importance of the Greenbelt only increases with time as climate change causes more risk to the benefits we get from these lands.

1. Food Security and the Economy:

- Growing our own food is great for many reasons. Providing local jobs, improved food availability with less supply chain risk for less cost than importing.

- The ecosystems that are part of the Greenbelt provide lots of benefits, for example the production of honey requires some of the ecosystems Greenbelt that bees need to survive.

- Removal of lands will affect recreation, tourism and cultural heritage, such things that bring money into the ecomony.

2. Climate Change:

- Water is one of the essentials for living things to survive, we need to preserve the water systems that keep our water healthy for Ontarians and wildlife.

- The trees provide a way to deal with Carbon Dioxide (which traps heat which warms the auto-sphere) and return Oxygen into the air, the air which we all need to breathe.

To address the concern about the need for housing:

- There is so much existing development land that already has the infrastructure or is close enough to be upgraded that we do not need to touch the Greenbelt. Providing more denser housing such as condos and apartments with larger square footage might help meet demand for more space that residents usually look at detached or similar housing types for.

- Just "trading" existing Greenbelt land for new land is not something that can done without any impact. There are reasons why the current lands are Greenbelt are designated as they are. For example the water system is not something that can just be replaced. Climate change already is putting our way of life at risk, there is no reason to make it worse instead of better.