On a recent nighttime flight home from a trip out West, I looked out the passenger jet window. Our landing approach toward Pearson took the flight across terrain northeast of the GTA. In the darkness, I spotted a cluster of lights I knew to be Uxbridge. A calmness came over me. The darkness around that cluster of lights reassured me that our Greenbelt looked safe. Untouched. Protected.
Then this week, I heard the municipal affairs minister at Queen’s Park describe a land swap to reporters.
“It’s a bold action to ensure that we meet our housing target,” Steve Clark said.
Bold indeed. But in my view not in a positive way. Despite all of their promises to protect and preserve such environmentally sensitive and life-giving areas as the Oak Ridges moraine, the provincial Tories announced this week, they’re going to allow developers to build on our Greenbelt. In his Bill 23, Clark has pledged to build 1.5 million new homes in 10 years “to alleviate the severe housing crisis.”
To be sure, according to a Statistics Canada study in 2017, as many as 300,000 Canadians live without adequate housing. But, on whose watch has this Ontario housing crisis arisen? During whose administration have homeless numbers skyrocketed to 40,000-plus in Ontario? Under whose governance has death by a thousand cuts hurt health, education and affordable housing investment.
Theirs! And their solution? To renege on a promise made in 2001 by their own Conservative brethren. And I quote the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Act passed by the Mike Harris government that year.
“The Act (allows) the establishment of an ecologically based land-use plan that would provide for future protection of 100 per cent of the significant natural and water features on the Oak Ridges Moraine,” Chis Hodgson, then minister of municipal affairs and housing, stated in 2001. “The plan preserves agricultural land and limit(s) almost all development.”
The bill declared the horseshoe of parkland around the GTA – stretching 160 kilometres from the east around Cobourg right across the Niagara Escarpment in Caledon – development-free.
But the Doug Ford government appears to have misplaced a copy of Bill 122 as well as Hansard documenting those very words voiced in the Ontario Legislature, in lieu of what some critics call cronyism – rewarding developers who donate regularly to the Ford Conservatives.
To boot, the province’s Bill 23, the so-called “More Homes Built Faster Act” (Who comes up with this stuff?) has lots of fine print, including the removing of fees that developers pay for the privilege of building affordable housing.
In other words, those ancillary costs to install sewers, roads and easement for transit – formerly borne by developers – will now have to be paid by municipalities, i.e. taxpayers. That could mean a $5.1 billion revenue shortfall for Ontario towns and cities.
If this all sounds vaguely familiar, I remind readers what another Conservative administration did in 1997 when it passed Bill 160, the equally perversely named “Education Quality Improvement Act.”
That bill transferred funding control (and I might add curriculum control) from local school trustees to the Ontario cabinet. That Conservative initiative translated to nearly $1 billion removed from public education funding and at the same time transferred the burden of responsibility and funding for social services to the municipalities.
Towns and cities in Ontario are still reeling from the impact on local school budgets, not to mention the strain of having to deal with everything from mental health patients on the streets, to abused spouses, to youth unemployment.
I remember as well at the time the then education minister, John Snobelen, caught on film arguing that the PC government needed to create a “useful crisis” in order to initiate reforms.
I don’t for a minute minimize either the plight of citizens who are homeless or the struggles of those Ontarians trying to find affordable housing. But when I hear Minister Clark declare “a severe housing crisis” on one hand and his plans to open up 7,400 acres of protected Greenbelt for 50,000 homes on the other, I’m as suspicious as ever.
I’m also wondering whether another of the Ford initiatives might be our only salvation. What if the provincial government’s new Better Municipal Governance Act to give greater powers to Ontario mayors backfired?
What if every municipal leader in the province chose to use her/his newfound power to reject Minister Clark’s land grab and fee-removal incentives to developers? What if Ontario mayors invoked their legislatively granted equivalent of the Not Withstanding Clause to fight back?
It may be our only chance to save the Greenbelt – that sanctuary of darkness around the cluster of lights I saw flying over Uxbridge the other night.