Municipal leaders urge province: GROW THE GREENBELT

NRU
June 25, 2014
Edward LaRusic

With the Liberals gaining a majority government, municipal politicians are gearing up for their own elections with a plea to expand the greenbelt to combat urban sprawl.

June 23 the Municipal Leaders for the Greenbelt held a press conference urging the province to expand the greenbelt by one-million acres, create a 200,000-acre food belt and simplify the process for municipalities who want to grow the greenbelt within their borders.

Ajax mayor Steve Parish said that Municipal Leaders for the Greenbelt “supports the greenbelt as a permanent feature of Ontario’s landscape.”

“We are committed to protecting the greenbelt, encouraging the connection of natural heritage features, ensuring agriculture thrives and ensuring planning decisions adhere to the Greenbelt Plan.”

Parish is co-chair of the Municipal Leaders for the Greenbelt, along with Toronto councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker and Oakville mayor Rob Burton, who were also at the press conference.

De Baeremaeker said the success of the greenbelt at fighting urban sprawl is now being looked at as model for protecting lands internationally. But, he said, it needs expanding, saying that sprawl has “leapfrogged” over the greenbelt.

“The cancer that is urban sprawl continues. We thought that a two-million acre greenbelt would stop the paving over of farmland, would protect wetlands and improve our water quality. Yet, what we see all across the GTA on all the report cards of all of watersheds is that things are getting worse and worse… We will be submitting to the provincial government, as part of its review next year, [a formal request] to expand the province’s greenbelt by a million acres.”

The Municipal Leaders for the Greenbelt expect a significant portion of that expansion to occur outside of the GTA, particularly in Simcoe, Wellington, Kitchener, Waterloo and Kawartha Lakes. But they’re also targeting the whitebelt— which the Neptis Foundation defines as the “lands between the outer edge of the approved urban settlement areas surrounding the Greater Toronto Area and Hamilton and the Greenbelt Plan area”—for protection as well.

Burton said the whitebelt needs to be changed from an “escape value” for developers, into a food belt. Also, he noted that Oakville’s own experience with expanding the greenbelt within its municipal borders involved too much red tape, and he is looking to the province to simplify the procedure.

“As the mayor of a community that was the fi rst to expand the greenbelt with local environmental lands, I can tell you that the process took a lot longer than it needed to, and I’m confident that if the process can be streamlined, many more municipalities will follow with additions to the greenbelt.”

Speaking at the Land Development & Planning Forum June 18, Ontario Home Builders Association chief executive officer Joe Vaccaro said that the industry has understood that the whitebelt lands are to be where the next phase of development is going to happen. The major provincial investment in infrastructure projects through the whitebelt, such as new 400 series highways, would appear to support that understanding according to Vaccaro.

Parish said that the province needs to clarify its intent for the whitebelt lands.

“Are these lands waiting for development, are these lands that should go into the greenbelt, or both? There needs to be some clear policy direction as to how this should be addressed. There are certain people out there who think [the whitebelt lands] are the next phase of urban lands that will be absorbed. Th ere are others of us that feel no, these lands, or at least some of these lands, should be going into the greenbelt because they’re prime agricultural lands, or they have natural environmental features needs to be protected.”

Vaccaro added that while there is provincial criteria for municipalities to grow the greenbelt, there should be corresponding criteria for removing greenbelt lands. Although the greenbelt cannot shrink, he hopes the provincial government will be open to swapping parcels of land within the greenbelt that are well serviced by infrastructure for undesignated lands that are not.

This idea is not popular with the Municipal Leaders for the Greenbelt.

“I’m very suspicious of any landowner, speculator, or investor who says ‘the greenbelt is important, but not my hundred acres,” said De Baeremaeker. “I have yet to meet a developer who says to me, ‘Glenn I’m really interested in making sure farms are sustainable.’ Most developers see the most sustainable crop as single-family homes which they make oodles of money from.”

With the upcoming 2015 review, Parish suggested that the government needs to bring all the disparate pieces of legislation that govern the greenbelt such as the Aggregate Resources Act, into the review of the Greenbelt Plan.

“There needs to be focus on bringing those pieces of legislation into conformity because they need to have one consistent set of rules, and they need to eliminate overlap and conflicting regulations in those areas where they abut.”

The Municipal Leaders for the Greenbelt has begun a campaign to help voters identify which municipal candidates are “greenbelt friendly.” The signatories to the 2014 Election Greenbelt Pledge will be posted on the organization’s soon to be launched website. Vaccaro’s comments come from an event hosted by Insight Information.