GuelphToday received the following letter to the editor from reader Donna Jennison regarding the provincial government’s proposed Bill 23: The More Homes Built Faster Act:
What is Doug Ford doing to Ontario? Our much-loved public health care and education have each had $1 billion of funding withheld to pave the way for privatization and impress Ford's donors. And now, using the massive and multifaceted Bill 23, he's going after the greenbelt and the rights of citizens and cities to control when, where and how critical housing is built.
Before newly elected councils were even sworn in the provincial government announced massive changes to housing policy through Bill 23 – The More Homes Built Faster Act. This bill imposes a single-minded focus on new, single family homes and highways and will have enormous, long term negative implications for land use in Ontario. It opens municipalities and critical green space up to unlimited development, places the burden of carrying the costs associated with growth onto municipalities and eliminates the right to appeal major decisions. Profit hungry developers in the premiers inner circle must be celebrating.
Here is a very abbreviated list of what Bill 23 promises to do:
1. repeal 36 regulations that Conservation Authorities use to steward and protect watersheds and waterways and protects our homes and communities from flooding
2. erode local democracy and local planning authority by overriding community developed official plans for Hamilton, Halton Region and the Greenbelt
3. limit the amount a city can charge for parkland and cut the land being required for parks in half
4. push development outside urban boundaries onto areas of ecological significance including the Greenbelt
5. open up critical natural infrastructure for development including farmland, wetlands and woodlands at a time when the impacts of climate change and the need for healthy resilient natural ecosystems are paramount
6. limit citizen participation in planning and decision making
7. deny appeals
8. gut local efficiency standards, make future homes less energy efficient and therefore more expensive and make it impossible for cities to meet building emissions targets
The outcome: Developers will reap huge profits by paying less for growth and leave cities and citizens to deal with the economic and environmental costs of ravaged landscapes and poorly designed and built housing stock… all while having less say in the planning process. We can achieve growth targets while maintaining farmland, green-space, food security, access to nature and nature-based flood control. We have to. But we can't do it with Ford's Bill 23.
- Donna Jennison, Guelph
