'Absolutely destroying our community and our environment': Environmentalists rally north of Newmarket

Yorkregion.com
April 24, 2023

On Earth Day weekend, about 30 protestors rallied outside York-Simcoe MPP Caroline Mulroney’s Holland Landing constituency office April 23 to slam the provincial government for land use policies they say will “wreck Ontario’s farmland, its water and its communities in the service of expensive sprawl which will not solve the affordability crisis.”

The protestors are with a number of environmental causes including protecting Lake Simcoe, stopping the Bradford Bypass, preventing Hwy. 413, saving the Greenbelt from development and sprawl and protecting public health care.

“This was a rally for healthy York Region and Lake Simcoe and that is what we hope to achieve,” Claire Malcolmson, executive director of the Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition, said.

“We’re here because we want to protect the Greenbelt. At the end of the day, there are a lot of things for people who care about the environment to be mad about and very worried about. This is sort of a grab bag of issues here.”

The timing of the rally was important, Malcolmson said.

“It’s Earth Day weekend so it’s important at this time to allow people to come together to be together, to see who’s on their side and who’s thinking what they’re thinking about how we should be governing our commons in Ontario and to learn more about what’s going on.”

Premier Doug Ford’s government has changed land use legislation several times to the benefit of developers at the expense of the environment, Malcolmson said.

“There are so many land use planning changes that will facilitate more sprawl. It’s kind of been described as a libertarian fantasy, the land use planning changes that we have just seen from Easter weekend,” she said.

“It means, basically, if you have land, you can build. We have concerns about the sustainability of that model from a water supply point of view, from a water protection point of view. The Bradford Bypass is an ongoing issue for us. That, too, really affects water.”

Bill Foster, chair of Forbid Roads Over Greenspaces, doesn’t know if the protest will accomplish much but said he doesn’t know what else to do to stop the province’s anti-environment policies.

“We have a government that is absolutely destroying our community and our environment,’ he said.

“I’ve got grandkids. And talk to First Nations, they have kids and grandkids, too. This place is not going to be inhabitable if Ford keeps doing what he’s doing.”

Although Ford had previously promised not to allow the Greenbelt to be developed, last November he removed 15 parcels of land from the environmentally sensitive lands for development as part of the province’s push to build 1.5 million homes over the next decade to address what the government says is a housing shortage crisis.

The protest was one of 40 Earth Day weekend events by the Yours to Protect, a coalition of large and small environmental groups working on local issues in Ontario.