Narwhal Week, Episode 1: Why is Doug Ford slicing up Ontario’s Greenbelt?

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<bClip pack We will open up the green belt. Not all of it. We’re going to open a big chunk of it up and we’re going to start building unlike other governments. So don’t listen to people. I’ve heard it loud and clear. People don’t want me touching the green belt. We won’t touch the green belt. The province is proposing to remove 15 areas of land, totalling approximately 7400 acres, from the edge of the Green belt. Where are we going to put 3000 people a year? Almost a million people in three years because of the inaction of previous governments that didn’t want to take the bold steps to get housing built.

Fatima Syed Okay, so that was Doug Ford flip flopping on one of the hottest issues in Ontario, the Green Belt. It’s a large green space that protects 2 million acres of forests and farmland around the greater Toronto area and Niagara Peninsula. More than 9 million people live within 20 space it’s bigger than Prince Edward Island, and it’s a global conservation success story. Like, it’s actually won an award Ontarians go for hikes here. They get food from here, and there are so many animals that call this space home. Everything from 800 year old cedar trees to 100 year old turtles. This particular green belt moment has been years in the making. It started when Doug Ford was running to be premier in 2018. He pitched casually that it should be open for development at an event, he said that’s what developers wanted. We later found out the same developers had donated large sums of money to his party. People got angry. Doug Ford backed down, and he promised repeatedly to never, ever touch the green belt. Fast forward four years, and that’s what he’s doing. And that’s not all. In a new massive piece of legislation, they also want to remove other environmental protections. Critics in Ontario often say that the big climate battle in Canada’s most populous province isn’t about oil. It’s about land. How we develop it, what we do with it, and how much of it we change. Doug Ford has made housing his core mandate. But can Ontario build more homes without destroying the environment? I’m Fatima Syed, sitting in for Jordan Heath-Rawlings. Welcome to Narwhal Week on The Big Story, a week where me and my friends at the Narwhal will bring you deep, interesting conversations about climate issues and solutions across Canada. Joining me today is my friend and journalism partner, Emma McIntosh. She and I are the Ontario reporters for the Narwhal, and for the past few weeks, we’ve both been deep in the weeds of Doug Ford’s climate policies. Hi, Emma. Let’s talk about the OG, Ontario’s green belt. That’s what we call it colloquially, but this has been a really interesting time in Doug Ford’s Ontario, Emma, especially when it comes to the OG. Let’s start there. Why is the green belt so important?

Emma McIntosh Well, the green belt, aside from being pretty much everybody’s favorite, like, fall instagram location, I’m talking Rattlesnake Point and Mount Nemo. Amazing hikes. Aside from that, the green belt is super important for a bunch of things. It’s not just hiking. It’s also where we grow our food. It’s also where we protect our waterways. And it plays an important role in sequestering carbon and making sure that waterways don’t flood. And we can get into the mechanics of that later, but in a big picture way, the green belt is this giant ring of protected land that kind of loops around the greater Toronto, the Hamilton area, kind of following the Niagara’s Garden and some other stuff. But that’s the gist of it. It’s like this great, wonderful thing. And like you said, it’s award winning. Most places don’t have this.

Fatima Syed And what is Dumb Ford trying to do to the OG?

Emma McIntosh Well, okay, so the big picture is this is like a massive landslip, so Doug Ford wants to remove these 15 snippets of the green Belt, 7400 acres of it, and in their place, he wants to swap in 9400 acres from a bunch of other places. And the idea is that, yeah, he’s taking some stuff out, but he’s putting some other stuff back in, so it’s fun. And the goal is to build 50,000 homes on that land and, like, fast. They want to see progress on this by next year, and they want to see shovels in the ground and construction started by 2025, which, like, that is lightning speed in the development world.

Fatima Syed Yeah. Look, you and I know that this is a government that wants to build highways. They want to build bridges. They really just want to build, to use a Ford quote. The math on the surface seems good. They’re adding more land than they’re taking away. So why are we worried about it? Well, I think the core of it is that not all land is equal in terms of its ecological value. So, for starters, one of the things that Doug Ford wants to swap back in are a whole bunch of urban river valleys. He actually already announced this earlier this year and just kind of lumping it in here. The problem is that these urban river valleys were pretty much already protected through other mechanisms. So, yeah, it’s cool to have them in the green Belt, but it doesn’t really add to the overall amount of protected land in the province, and the government won’t even tell us how much of the 9400 acres that is. The other chunk is important. It’s the Periscope moraine, which is kind of northwest of Toronto. It provides drinking water for a lot of people, and this is just one tiny piece of that. But it’s hard to say whether it has the same value as all these little things that are being taken out in a big picture way. The green Belt was designed really thoughtfully. It was the result of, like, years of negotiations, and it was really designed looking at the way that our landscape is not, like city boundaries or regional boundaries, but, like, watersheds and landforms. And that’s important because, like, water flows and animals move, these things can’t really be interrupted or else, like, the whole system seems to fall apart. So even pieces on the edges are really important.

Fatima Syed Yeah. And once you develop this land, you can never get it back.

Emma McIntosh Right. I think the saying we’ve heard time and time again is, if you pave over farmland or if you pave over wetland, you lose that land forever to concrete, and you can’t reverse that change.

Fatima Syed The green Belt decision wasn’t the only thing the Ford government dropped in the last few weeks, and I want to get, you know, string all these pieces together. But let’s talk about this big housing bill, Emma, that we spent days just reading and trying to understand. It’s all part of the bigger picture. We want to build more houses in Ontario. Doug Ford’s vision. We talked about how he wants to take parcels of the Green Belt land to develop it, but he also wants to do more than that. Tell us what’s in the housing bill. I think the better question is what isn’t in this housing bill?

Emma McIntosh It is enormous. So big. It’s so big. But I think one of the big things in an already big bill is the watering down again, of conservation authorities. Both of us have been covering environment in Ontario for a while. Conservation authorities are like one of those things we are always hung up on, because Doug Ford has tried to water down their powers and successfully done that a few times now. Not their first rodeo with this, but Doug Ford now is looking to almost entirely remove them from the development process, limiting their ability to weigh in on projects, except when it’s like a natural hazard. There’s all these questions about what that will mean, but that matters because conservation authorities oversee sensitive watersheds, and we can have all sorts of issues with, like, water quality and flooding when these agencies don’t have the ability to do what they do.

Fatima Syed Do you want to get into where they come from?

Emma McIntosh I mean, they’re 50 years old. They were created because we had a huge hurricane in this province, Hurricane Hazel, that devastated so much, including Doug Ford’s own neighboUrhood, where a bunch of people died and the land was expropriated to become a park because it was deemed too dangerous to ever build there again. And because of that, because of that never again attitude, they created conservation authorities to literally ensure that never again would flooding in Ontario create that much havoc and damage. And now we have a government that is saying that they are serving as a brick wall to use a development fund between developers and our need for houses.

Fatima Syed Let’s debunk that. Who is at fault for the fact that Ontario doesn’t have enough houses?

Emma McIntosh The government is blaming conservation authorities. They’re blaming a lack of land, blaming the Green Belt, they’re blaming the OG who’s actually at fault. Well, that gets really complicated. But I think that we can kind of rule out conservation authorities and the Green Belt from the main list of main suspects when it comes to Green Belt to start, Ford’s own Housing Affordability Task Force told him earlier this year that land supply is not the problem. That’s something that environmentalists have been saying for many years and planners have been saying for many years. There’s more than enough land set aside already to develop as long as we do it smartly. And that’s the other thing. Conservation authorities might be an extra layer of approval. They might sometimes be annoying or expensive. They might just add to their list of to do because they require so many checks and balances to make sure that nothing is harmed. While the thing is being built exactly, but they only do that for places that are near the sensitive landscape. Other stuff elsewhere, they’re not even involved. So I think some of the bigger culprits are probably zoning, which is how densely we build, what’s allowed to be built in certain places. If we do those things more wisely, we don’t really need to do any of this. According to people who know much more about it than me, there’s so many moving parts and players in the entire development process and so many environmental implications of every little decision. But I think what’s notable to you and I is all of these things add up to one thing that a lot of our natural spaces are under threat from development. You know, everything from the Green Belt land swap to the big housing bill that weakens conservation authorities as well as municipal powers to actually dictate how they can develop. And there’s also other bits that we should talk about. So this bill included a million things, and we’re still kind of going through it now, but some of the things that it included were changes to green building standards to remove them. So that means the development will perhaps not be as sustainable as it could have been. The province is looking to limit the public’s ability to appeal planning and development decisions. So you people who are listening to this will have less of a say than you did before. If this goes through, there’s a million other things. They’re rewriting the manual that the province uses to protect certain wetlands and making it harder to protect wetlands and easier to open them up for development. Like, we could go on for a while.

Fatima Syed Yeah. I think the main takeaway that we’ve had in all our reporting is when you put all of these things together and you zoom out, it looks like this is a government that is just saying, develop wherever you want, however you want, as quickly as you can. And that’s a dangerous message. Right, Emma?

Emma McIntosh And let’s unpack that. Like, can we build houses quickly and make them affordable without destroying the environment? I think that we can. But we have to strike a balance here. Right. Just because we need houses now, and we do. Both of us really knew. Both of us have looked for housing in the last year. We don’t own a house.

Fatima Syed Me neither. Never will.

Emma McIntosh We want to. We want to, but we know we need more housing. That’s like a given. But just because that’s a crisis doesn’t mean that we should worsen another crisis, I think, is what many critics are saying right now.

Fatima Syed So who stands to benefit from all of this if it’s not the public and the people looking to actually buy houses? Who’s actually benefiting from all of these complicated policy decisions?

Emma McIntosh Well, there is a common theme here.

Fatima Syed You obtained a leaked document last week from Doug Ford’s cabinet where they acknowledged that developers were probably going to love a lot of the things that they were proposing, whereas, like, first nations, environmentalists, conservation authorities, and even cities, and even cities would probably really not like it.

Emma McIntosh The same thing comes up with the green belt. There are some developers that have been lobbying against the green belt since it was created. Even before it was created. Some of them have been holding land for decades at this point, hoping that one day someone would open it up again and that they would be able to develop it and make a ton of money. Doug Ford said it himself in 2018. Opening it up for development was their idea. And so, yeah, there’s some dots that could be connected there. I really think that it’s good for us to take a step back and look at this. It’s possible, it is totally possible that there is evidence that cutting into the green belt and weakening all these environmental protections will not be that risky and will be worth it in terms of building houses that we need. But if there is that evidence, the government has not showed it and they are refusing to show it. And that’s, I think, the problem.

Fatima Syed Yeah, look, I’ve been reporting on Doug Ford’s environmental policies since he got elected, and I have reported on the cancelation of the cap and trade program, of the energy savings programs of endangered species law cuts. We don’t really get details from this government. Why are you doing this? What evidence do you have? What are your justifications? How will you fund it? What’s your vision? Like, what actually is your vision? Because building more homes isn’t a vision. It’s a to-do list. It’s on a todo list. It’s an action item. How are you actually going to do it? Do you have environmental protections in mind? These are questions we’ve been asking time and time again and not getting any answers. And I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this. What are you most concerned about moving forward? Do you see more things coming down the line or do you think this is all set in stone and we’re heading towards an era of massive development in Ontario?

Emma McIntosh I think that you’re right that we’re heading into a massive era of development. You know, we see very similar themes with what’s happening with Doug Ford’s highway projects. Highway 413 in the Bradford Bypass, which also, we know, thanks to a lot of reporting, would benefit land developers. Those things with shovels plan to be on the ground within the next, like, four years will definitely drive more construction around them. But if we could get like a little nerdy for a second, I think that I’m really going to be little, just a little. Not that we haven’t been already. I think it makes sense to look at, like, what’s coming. So, I mean, we’re in an era of climate crisis. We know that, like, it’s Narwhal week. Hello? And we know that at least in southern Ontario, that means that we are expected to experience more floods and that they will be worse when they happen. And this is in a region that has a long history of flooding. In 2013, before I lived here, the Dawn Valley flooded, and there’s like, pictures of people way steep on the highway. And we have problems with that now because generations ago, our political leaders allowed unfettered development to happen. We lost a lot of the natural places that we used to have, which, like, aside from being wonderful and green, also absorb water when rainfalls, pavement doesn’t do that, it deflects it and keeps it above the ground where it can flood and cause problems. And right now we have an opportunity to make different choices, and we are not. And if we’re going to make this choice to open up the green belt and risk having those issues with flooding get worse, we need to have a fulsome examination of the evidence and we need the public to understand it and be on board. I think the big question for Ontario is what kind of cities do we want? Right? There have been so many scientific studies that say that the most climate friendly option for cities to grow is to create walkable, transit orientated cities that have housing of all kinds for various different groups in society. You know, all socioeconomic levels, all ages, all mobility types. That’s what science tells us. And those kind of cities have the least emissions produced. They are the most sustainable in the long term. But even that’s under threat. To add another thing to the list of things that the Ford government dropped in the last few weeks, growth plans. This is something Ontario does, where every five years, municipalities in Ontario review their growth plans. And Doug Ford has rushed that process. He made cities do that in four years. And they did. They met that deadline. And there’s two cities in particular that decided they didn’t want to expand their boundaries. They wanted to develop within the land that they already have. Those two municipalities were Halton Region and Hamilton, which are both to the south and west of Toronto. And on a late Friday afternoon, a week ago, the Ford government released decisions that ordered them to grow anyways, even if they didn’t want to. And to put that in perspective, these two regions went through a very detailed, collaborative, cohesive public participation process where, you know, Hamilton even mailed out physical surveys to every single resident and got back 18,000 responses, 90% of whom voted that they didn’t want to expand their boundary. They wanted to protect farmland, and they wanted to become more dense, they wanted to build more in the land that they already had. And it all just keeps coming back to that, right? What is the best use of our land? So the reason that cities might not want to sprawl outward is, well, OK, first of all, it’s kind of expensive to service all of those lots, like deliver them water and stuff, so that can be a lot. But also that kind of really spaced out development does contribute to the climate crisis because you need cars to get around, and those cars create emissions. Not to mention the emissions just from like the construction or from paving over areas that were sequestering carbon before. That can be kind of a tricky thing when we’re trying to curb our emissions everywhere else.

Fatima Syed So, Emma, is there any sort of hopeful direction we can leave listeners with on what to do next, how to look at these decisions that are coming down in extreme legislative jargon on late Friday afternoons and in great big policy documents?

Emma McIntosh Well, I think that the real power of the situation is in people who are listening to this, who care one way or another, whether you like it, whether you don’t like it. We all have the chance to weigh in right now on pretty much all of the things that we’ve talked about today. The reason that the Green Belt wasn’t open up sooner is because people very quickly let Doug Ford know that they would not like it. And so I think now is a great time to start getting involved in local politics, if any of this stuff is interesting to you, because there’s a lot going on. But I also think that sometimes with multiple, overlapping crises like this, like climate, housing, COVID still going on, by the way, like labor rights yes, it’s really hard to slow down and make good decisions, but we have to. And there’s a lot of smart people working on this issue who have ideas on how we can do things better. And there’s also a lot of evidence that maybe if we just slow down a little bit and figure out the right way to do things, we can maybe be in a safer position in the future. Yeah. Because not to sound like a broken record, but once that farmland is paved over, it’s not coming back. And we might not even know what we’ve messed up until it floods. So in case we’ve overwhelmed you, I want to do a recap of all the things that have happened over the last few weeks that could have environmental implications for Ontario. I’m ready. Okay, go. Doug Ford wants to develop on the green belt. Doug Ford wants to weaken conservation authorities. Doug Ford wants to change how we classify special wetlands. Doug Ford doesn’t want the public or environmentalists to appeal planning decisions. Doug Ford wants to force cities to expand their urban boundaries and eat up more farmland. Doug Ford wants to weaken the rules surrounding park planning so that a courtyard outside a building with a fountain and maybe a potted plant could also be considered as a park. Along with that green park with swings and stuff that we consider a park. Doug Ford is proposing ways to make it easier and faster to get an aggregate quarry going. Aggregate is like the sand and gravel and crushed stone that is used to make concrete that fuels construction. And he wants more of that. Oh, my God. Did we do it? If we missed anything, we apologize. You can get into our DMs and emails and let us know. Emma, thank you for unpacking Doug Ford’s environmental policies with me on a podcast as well.

Emma McIntosh Every day in the Narwhal, always a joy.

Fatima Syed That was Emma McIntosh, the Narwhals Ontario reporter. And that was the first episode of Narwhal week on The Big Story. Look, we are climate nerds. We love talking about the climate emergency, and we love making sense of it and thinking about what solutions we need to get through these very, very challenging times. So I really hope you enjoyed that and learned something. I know I did. You can learn so much more by reading our stories on the narwhal CA, and we’ve linked to some of them in the show notes. For those of you who don’t know the Narwhal, it’s a nonprofit online magazine that covers environment and energy issues across Canada. We don’t have any ads. All our stories are free. And that’s thanks to the support of our more than 4600 members. So if you donate to The Narwhal and join our pod, you’ll get a tax receipt and maybe a toque or a t-shirt. We have lots of cool swag. So if you want to support award-winning climate journalism, visit The Narwhal CA member, and we’ll take whatever you can afford to be the price of a coffee. Whatever it is, we appreciate your support. And if you want more climate journalism on this show, tell them and then tell them again. The Big Story team loves suggestions, and there are so many ways you can contact them. They’re on Twitter at thebictoryfpn. They have an email hello at thebigstorypodcast CA. You can even call them and leave a voicemail 416-935-5935. They’re on all the podcast apps. So make your friends listen. Make your kids listen, make your grandparents listen. And if you have a smart speaker, you can ask yours to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening today. I’m Fatima Sad sitting in for Jordan Heath Rawlings. And we’ll be back tomorrow with another episode with one of my friends at The Narwhal. See you then.