Coordinated land use review - Ontario’s greenbelt

NRU
May 31, 2017
By Dominik Matusik

While experts generally support the recently released amendments to the greenbelt plans, which put in place new protections and expand the protected areas, they stress the importance of coordinated implementation.

Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation research and policy vice president Kathy Macpherson told NRU that the amended plans represent a step forward in terms of provincial policy, but only time will determine the effectiveness of their implementation.

“We really felt that the province reinforced the permanence of the greenbelt by adding the 21 urban river valleys and the seven coastal wetlands,” Macpherson says. " ... and there’s still to be a process of consultation to look at where permanent protection can be provided to important watersheds and other important hydrological areas.”

Macpherson is concerned, however, that changes to the rules for settlement area boundary expansion could lead to a chipping away of protected lands in some areas.

“Although they’ve really constrained the opportunity to extend those settlement area boundaries, they’ve opened the door. It places those local councils in awkward positions and they often get influenced by the landowner...even if it can’t happen under the [Growth] Plan, there’s that pressure that local councils are facing.”

She says it is critical that the province coordinate implementation of the Greenbelt Plan, Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan and Niagara Escarpment Plan, with the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe.

“The plans need to work really well together...The extent to which they’re implemented just means less pressure on the greenbelt. We already know that there’s decades left of land to develop but despite that, people are able to say that there isn’t, we need more land-it just isn’t true. You can imagine that those calls will become greater over time, so Growth Plan implementation as outlined is really important.”

Conservation Authorities Moraine Coalition coordinator David Burnett told NRU that the coalition is pleased that the province resisted pressures to shrink the greenbelt and kept it intact by approving only a few minor takeouts on the edges. He says the challenge now is implementation on the ground. For example, parts of the greenbelt are still seeing the dumping of fill. There are policies in place to manage this, but it is yet to be seen how effectively these will be implemented.

Burnett says that, on the whole, the amended environmental plans introduced a number of positive policies.

“Some of those [policies] are requirements for science based watershed planning to ensure that growth occurs in an environmentally sustainable manner. There also seems to be some increased protection for water quality and quantity through the policies for low impact development, green infrastructure, enhanced stormwater management and climate change, so those are certainly things that the conservation authorities feel are very positive policies.”

Macpherson emphasized the importance of having a transparent monitoring framework in place early on.

“When you monitor things I think it’s important to monitor how implementation is actually happening as well, at the next 10-year-review you have data that actually shows if it’s been effective. There’s nothing worse than getting to a 10-year point or a 15-year point where you’re looking to see actual results and the results are what you expected, but you have no idea why because you weren’t monitoring all along.”

Malone Given Parsons president Don Given told NRU that the flexibility found in the amended plans represents a good compromise.

“I think the province made a genuine effort to give us more flexibility of how to use the greenbelt. That’s something that was requested not just by industry but by most municipalities as well. The agricultural community is benefitting from the changes, the municipalities are benefitting from it. I don’t think it benefits the land development industry in any significant way but it’s nice to see that there are changes that are being made.”

Given would have preferred more harmonization of the plans.

“I feel like they didn’t take enough time to revisit the basis of the [Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation] plan to harmonize it with the Greenbelt Plan. We’re still stuck with old designations in the Oak Ridges Moraine Plan for linkage areas, as a prime example, that really make no sense and could have been revisited to give us more latitude to more properly use some land.

While the province’s consultation efforts were extensive, Given commented that they could have been more effective.

“I felt that until late in the process that they were really not full consultation exercises as much as they were explanations of what the province wanted to do.

It was not until we rallied as an industry jointly with the mayors and chairs that I thought we started to have some kind of significant impact on the direction things were going in.”

The updated Niagara Escarpment Plan comes into effect tomorrow while the other three plans take effect on July 1.