Doug Ford government ignored Greenbelt expansion consultations, say critics

Thestar.com
March 29, 2022

The province ignored public consultations calling for the “meaningful expansion” of the Greenbelt, say environmental groups, opting instead to protect smaller urban river valleys that aren’t in need of protection.

The province launched consultations last year, seeking feedback on how to grow the 800,000 hectares of protected land that extends across the Greater Golden Horseshoe.

Thousands of members of the public wrote in, asking for further protections of wetlands and moraines, as well as specific regions, like the addition of the headwaters of the Carruthers Creek in Durham Region and the Paris Galt Moraine near Guelph.

“When you go through the submissions received ... they are almost all overwhelmingly in favour of Greenbelt expansion. It’s such a clear message being delivered by citizens, and organizations and farmers saying that is exactly what we need,” said Kevin Thomason, spokesperson for the Greenbelt West Coalition, a group looking to expand the Greenbelt in the Waterloo area.

“And the government arrived at the polar opposite conclusion … and didn’t consider any of them.”

The province said it decided to focus on the inclusion of 13 publicly owned urban river valleys that serve as “a foundation upon which additional public lands can be added,” said Nazaneen Baqizada, a spokesperson with the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. She said the province is still seeking input on adding or expanding existing urban river valleys until the end of April.

The addition of the Paris Galt Moraine into the Greenbelt had been one of the province’s goals. However, during the consultation process, the province said that local municipalities and landowners expressed “concerns” that any decisions on the moraine could conflict with local growth planning.

The province did not answer questions on how much total acreage it would be adding into the Greenbelt through the river valley proposal.

“This is basically putting a new label on land that is already in public ownership and protected,” said Tim Gray, executive director with Environmental Defence.

The province said “they would do a meaningful expansion ... they ignored all the input about additional areas that needed to be included and they even dropped the one they were consulting on -- the Paris Galt Moraine.”

Thomason said it’s hard to believe a yearlong consultation amounted to the addition of a “few tiny creeks one could hardly find on a map.”

He said the Greenbelt expansion doesn’t even include any river valleys outside of the GTA.

In a statement, the Greenbelt Foundation, an independent charitable organization, said that while it “appreciates” the government’s commitment to protect existing Greenbelt areas, it said the province was still deliberating proposals from municipal governments like York Region to open up the protected land for development projects.

Thomason said Greenbelt expansion announcement is simply “greenwashing.”

“It’s one thing to have inaction, but it’s another thing to have purposeful deception and that’s the concern here,” he said. “The addition of few urban river valleys isn’t going to address any of the issues on the ground … or provide any balance to the tremendous growth we are seeing.”

Last year, the province added the 890-acre parcel of North Gwillimbury Forest to the Greenbelt. At the time, Housing Minister Steve Clark said the province would add two acres of green space for every acre of land developed through the use of a Minister’s Zoning Order, or MZO.

Environmental groups says it’s unlikely the numbers add up, given the roughly 80 MZOs the government has approved this term.