Preservation of agricultural land “fundamental to life itself,” meeting told

By Kate Harries AWARE News Network March 23 2013

One of the leaders of the fight to stop the mega-quarry has issued a clarion call to preserve our most vital resources – food and water. 

“We’re living way beyond our means,” Carl Cosack of the North Dufferin Agricultural Task Force told an AWARE Simcoe meeting in Bradford today. “We’re using up land, land, land, in a way that is not recoverable and we will pay a price.”

Cosack, who raises beef cattle on a ranch near Shelburne in an area that was to have been the site of Canada’s largest quarry, described the “Food and Water First” campaign that NDACT is launching on April 10.

It will link urban and rural people, Bay St. and the environmental movement, First Nations and politicians. All will be asked to take a pledge to protect prime farmland and source water regions. 

“It’s time that we show folks that this crosses all borders of political stripe, this is fundamental to life itself,” Cosack said. 

The first step will be to “reset the clock” so we can all work out how to stop the runaway loss of farmland that has occurred (14,000 km2 from 1971 to 2001, 600,000 acres from 1996-2006, the meeting was told).

Cosack said there should be a freeze on new rezoning applications on Class 1 farmland, except for food producing operations, and as for Class 2-4 farmland, there should be an evaluation of whether the rezoning is of greater benefit than seven generations of food producing. 

Cosack said NDACT had learned from the Dump Site 41 battle – which was won despite all levels of government being opposed, and only First Nations prepared to join the cause. 

The advice from the Site 41 leaders was for NDACT to get in ahead of any approvals – and that’s the lesson that needs to be learned by citizens everywhere, Cosak said: Pay attention to what’s going on, look at what is proposed in your municipal and county Official Plans.

We need to get an alternative valuation “that gets us out of our ‘I want it now’ craziness,” Cosack said, “because we can build all the buildings we want and pave over all the land we want, but if we rely on food from Chile, something is wrong in the equation.”

AWARE Simcoe members presented a vision of of how Simcoe County can progress in the next 50 years to provide good lifestyles in vibrant communities without exhausting resources.

Planning in Simcoe County consists of managing projected growth, said growth committee chair Sandy Agnew. But there is no attempt to evaluate whether the results of the projected growth will be positive or negative, or whether it is sustainable in the long run.

“Growth is assumed always to be good – it’s a new concept that some day we may have grown enough,” Agnew said

Committee member Bill French noted that Places to Grow and the Provincial Policy Statements that provide the legislative framework for land use planning in Simcoe County are award-winning documents that protect farmland and guard against sprawl. 

If municipal governments understood this framework legislation and followed it, “we wouldn’t be having this meeting,” he said. “Our vision is exactly what the government intended, but got lost in translation.”

Bernard Pope of Ontario Farmland Preservation talked about how “politicians and planners in this onslaught of development need to understand the consequences of losing food producing farmland and make holistic decisions that protect that farmland.”

Many farmers approaching retirement are often anguished to reaize they have to sell the farm, he said – a farm that has been a constant companion for life. “The pain is further enhanced by the possibility of selling to a speculator or a developer, which although solving lingering financial issues, will eventually lead to the death of the soil.”

Bernard advocated a tax on land purchased by land speculators that would be retroactively applied to the time of purchae, if farmland (taxed at a lower rate) is converted to another use. 

Both French and Pope spoke of a key element of the AWARE Simcoe vision – the concept of net benefit that would apply to any proposal that would remove land from food production. 

Both also dismissed the idea that local government should feel obligated to change land use to accommodate land speculators who have assembled agricultural land at low cost in the hope of development profit. 

Environmental lawyer Laura Bowman was among those present – she echoed speakers’ observations that in many cases, protection for farmland and the environment exists in law. 

The problem, unfortunately, is enforceability. Bowman said she had that fear when the Lake Simcoe Protection Act was brought in, and it turns out to have been justified. “I can tell you right now that the model that Ontario currently uses, it’s not enforceable and it’s not accessible for many people.” 

The system is set up for planning experts to make decisions, Bowman said, urging that AWARE Simcoe include in its vision statement a mechanism to enable citizens to uphold the hard-won principles that get enshrined in legislation. 

Cindy Hillard of Severn Township, an AWARE Simcoe board member, agreed with Bowman that there is no enforcement of policies protecting farmland. She pointed to the lax application of outdated classification (dating back to the 1960s) of agricultural land in the approval process for solar ‘farms.’

“Why isn’t it just a matter of asking that alll developers have to do site-specific soil studies before they go onto the land?” said Hillard, who added that in Simcoe County, solar farms are being put on Class 1-3 farmland every day. 

(That’s prohibited under the Green Energy Act, but even the mayor of Severn has been frustrated in his efforts to get those provisions enforced). 

Alec Adams, an AWARE Simcoe board member from Orillia, noted that the province expects the county to grow by 50 per cent by 2031 – an extra 210,000 people on top of the present 420,000. “The notion that we can keep growing endlessly is truly insane. It’s not a matter of belief, it’s a matter of arithmetic.”

David Strachan of the Midhurst Ratepayers Association said that when his group looked at the municipally approved plan to add 10,000 homes to the village of 3,500 people, they found so many violations of provincial policy and legislation that “we were elated. 

‘We thought, this is completely illegal and they’ve got no chance of pushing it through. And we find out with a lot of skepticism and cynicism that the laws mean nothing… there’s all kinds of ways around the laws.”

The studies used by the municipality were carried out by a consultant retained by the developer, Strachan said, and “they rubbish the soils that people have farming on for 150 years,” concluding that “urban development would be a reasonable alternative use” of the farm land around Midhurst

Suzanne Howes of the Chippewas of Georgina Island said that her First Nation has been working with Ontario to get aboriginal content – much of it exactly what was discussed at today’s meeting – added to provincial policy statements. 

But when provincial bureaucrats are told that “everybody’s going to have a house to live in, but they’re not going to have anything to eat and they’re not going to have anything to drink, so how do you propose to fix that?”

The answer, said Howes, is, “we’ll get back to you.”

Feedback from the meeting will be incorporated in the draft vision and a finalized document will be presented at the Collingwood AGM, April 27