ELORA – The impact on the Greenbelt was the focus as dozens of local residents rallied here on Sunday afternoon to protest the provincial government’s Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act.
Backed by a rap beat, a recording of Ontario Premier Doug Ford stating “We won’t touch the Greenbelt” played loud on a loop as the crowd waited to hear from Centre Wellington Mayor Shawn Watters and Ontario Green Party Leader and Guelph MPP Mike Schreiner in advance of a march through downtown Elora.
One of the organizers, Mike Nagy, dismissed the idea that taking more than 7,000 acres of protected land out of the Greenbelt would somehow alleviate the province’s housing crisis.
“Yesterday on YouTube I came across something from (Ontario Premier) Doug Ford in a private-room gathering from four years ago, talking to his friends, announcing how he was going to carve up the Greenbelt,” said Nagy.
“He (Ford) says ‘It wasn’t my idea.’ The biggest developers in the country told him it would be a good idea to give them more land and they’ll build more houses.
“We all know that carving up the Greenbelt and handing it over to private development will not build one attainable house, one affordable house in any community.”
“There’s a million things we can do other than carving up green space, taking up watersheds,” said Nagy, adding statistics released recently by Environment Canada show one in five species in Canada is now at risk of extinction.
“Are we going to wait until we are one of those on the list to start protecting the places and keeping the places that we have publicly funded for years and years, for generations, to keep in for clean water, biodiversity, to keep the green spaces that we all enjoy when we have 88,000 acres of housing lands already in reserve?
“Yeah, it is a ruse and it’s a lie and I call it profiting off of misery. And it is disaster capitalism at its worst.”
Several of the signs carried by rally-goers targeted Conservative Wellington-Halton Hills MPP Ted Arnott, some asking “Yoo hoo Ted, where are you?”
Introducing Schreiner, Nagy noted, “Ironically we have Guelph’s MPP, not our own MPP here today and I actually firmly believe … I don’t have an MPP. I don’t have someone that represents me. I don’t have an MPP partner in Queen’s Park that is supposed to be here for me.”
Schreiner, who has asked the province’s integrity commissioner to investigate the process that led to the Greenbelt conversion plan, said the environmentally-sensitive tract of land isn’t Ford’s to do with as he pleases.
“This isn’t a Greenbelt that was designed for him to basically hand over to a handful of land speculators to turn millions into billions …” said Schreiner.
“It doesn’t pass the smell test when somebody takes out a $100-million loan at 21% interest for land that you can’t develop. Who does that? So that’s exactly why I asked the integrity commission to investigate this.”
Though Bill 23 has already been passed into law, Schreiner said it’s not too late to speak up.
“Just a few weeks ago, when (Ford) tried to take away our Charter rights with the abuse of the notwithstanding clause, people stood up and said ‘No.’
“So we can do it again if you keep speaking out. Write the premier, put a sign in your yard, write your MPPs, go to these rallies – because it’s going to take people power to get the premier to back down.”
A rally opposing the impact of Bill 23 on Ontario’s Greenbelt was held in downtown Elora on Dec. 4. Participants marched through the downtown area after hearing from Centre Wellington Mayor Shawn Watters and Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner. Photo by Patrick Raftis
While regulations for implementing Bill 23 are still being developed, with some hoping that process will take some of the sting out of the legislation, another rally organizer, Peter Varty, said the group is aiming higher.
“The number one choice is that the bill is repealed, just as (Ford) did with the notwithstanding clause. So, if we get enough pressure he will hopefully take heat and repeal Bill 23,” said Varty.
“This is not about affordable housing,” Schreiner insisted.
“There’s already 88,000 acres, as Mike said, already approved for development within existing urban boundaries that Doug Ford’s own hand-picked housing affordability taskforce said was enough land to build the homes we need.”
Schreiner continued, “We do not need to touch the Greenbelt, we do not need to pave over the farmland that feeds us, the wetlands in nature that clean our drinking water and protect us from flooding.
“We don’t need to attack local democracy and raise people’s property taxes by taking the development charges away.”
Watters, during his turn at the microphone, was critical of the timing of the legislation, which was pushed through quickly on the heels of a municipal election.
“What really bothers me is how fast this has gone through,” said Watters, noting newly-elected councils did not have time to absorb the bill’s implications before it was passed.
“It’s been a brutal kind of thing to sort of get up to speed on this.”
Watters added, “Part of the issue is going to be how we’re going to deal with this growth and how we’re going to deal with … all the infrastructure issues. Really what they’re doing is, they’re moving towards … getting rid of, possibly, DC charges.
“That’s going to roll back onto the taxpayers. You guys, in many cases, have already paid for your house, paid for your roads and that kind of stuff … and that may come back to haunt all of us and we may be paying for this growth.”
Watters noted Wellington County council members spoke out against the legislation at the Dec. 1 council meeting.
“And county council tends to be very a conservative lot,” Watters observed.
“The anger coming out of county council was really pretty amazing. I’ve never seen that in 17 years that I’ve been involved with politics. So that tells you that something’s not right about this.”
After the speakers finished, rally-goers headed out for a march through the downtown, chanting “Doug Ford – hands off the Greenbelt,” many carrying signs urging the premier to “Keep your Greenbelt promise.”
Varty said organizers include members of Save Our Water and local Green Party volunteers, the event was not held under any particular banner.
“It is nothing really official. They’re just a bunch of citizens that come together in opposition to this,” he said.
