• Protecting Water and Farmland in Simcoe County

Sprawl, highways and gravel pits: ‘Where I live, the Greenbelt is broken’

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In Bradford West Gwillimbury
Jun 23rd, 2022
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From the Toronto Star, June 18, 2022
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Kate Hepworth lives in the Greenbelt. But by her own account, you wouldn’t know it.

When she moved here years ago, she thought living in the Greenbelt would mean being surrounded by idyllic landscapes, quiet ravines and sprawling farmers’ fields.

But Hepworth says her neighbourhood in Caledon Village is increasingly a messy collision of urban development and rural living, where tree-lined homes face multi-lane roadways, back on to aggregate mines and are surrounded by more proposed developments than she thought possible for the protected area.

She says her community is being shaped by the Greenbelt, but not with what she would describe as good planning or good environmental policy in mind.

“The way we are approving projects in and around the Greenbelt seems haphazard and frantic. There is more land for sale up here than there isn’t. We don’t have sewage up here, but developments are being approved,” said Hepworth.

“People always say, ‘you live in the Greenbelt, that must be great,’” she said. “I say, ‘come stay here for a while, and you will see how not green it is.’

“Where I live, the Greenbelt is broken.”

Today, there are few things as universally loved and valued in southern Ontario as the 800,000-hectare landscape of forest, farms, woodlots and wetlands that stretches from Niagara to Port Hope. While its conception in 2005 was fraught with conflict, recent polls have placed support for the Greenbelt as high as 90 per cent in Ontario. Even Doug Ford, who vowed to open up large swaths of the greenbelt to housing in his first campaign for premier four years ago, has since backtracked on those calls — and recently even added 13 urban river valleys to it.

While the environmental benefits of creating a buffer of natural green space and farmlands around our burgeoning cities are numerous, including mitigating climate change, some fear the cracks in the Greenbelt are starting to show.

Like Greenbelts worldwide, development pressures and political agendas are nibbling at the edge of Ontario’s protected land. Legislation that created the protected space included loopholes that allow for large infrastructure projects like highways and gravel mines to be built through its heart, and existing settlement areas to be developed. While the Greenbelt has helped control sprawl in suburban GTA cities, even its most fervent supporters admit it has sped up sprawl in cities on the other side of it.

Municipalities have been tasked by the province to finalize their growth plans to handle a growing population until 2051. This will take many cities to the edge of the Greenbelt, raising questions about whether the area will survive and in what form.

When the Greenbelt was created in 2005, it built on the Niagara Escarpment Plan and the Oak Ridges Plan, which were implemented under previous Progressive Conservative governments. It had several goals: to slow urban sprawl in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, to preserve the best farmland in the province and to protect environmentally sensitive areas in perpetuity.

But the Greenbelt legislation was never meant to stand alone, experts say, and was paired with Places to Grow legislation in 2006 that pushed for more dense and complete communities.

“The Greenbelt tells people where they cannot grow … while (Places to Grow) tells people where they can grow,” said Ray Tomalty, founder of Smart Cities Research Services, which focuses on urban sustainability. “You need both to work together to build a complete picture.”

For the most part, the legislation worked well, according to Mark Winfield, a professor of environmental and urban change at York University. “It got municipalities on the inside to think about development quite differently … and they realized their only way forward was to increase density and intensify, and make better use of the land they have available.”

But outside the Greenbelt it has been a different story.

“If the goal was to control urban sprawl, it’s been a profound failure, because … those who want single-family detached have leapfrogged the Greenbelt to Barrie, Innisfil, Bradford and all the places beyond the Greater Toronto Area,” said Tom Dolson, president of the Peel Federation of Agriculture. “It certainly hasn’t cut back on commute time or emissions of greenhouse gases — it’s probably contributed to that.”

Dolson said the vision for the Greenbelt was “short-sighted.”

“One has to wonder why the Greenbelt was put here,” said Dolson. “Did we look 50-100 years on, where the growth of the GTA was going to be? And where did we think that growth was going to go?”

The Greenbelt only covers 20 per cent of the Greater Golden Horseshoe, which spans the coast of Lake Ontario to Lake Erie in the south and Georgian Bay to the north.

Many have questioned why it didn’t incorporate areas far outside the GTHA, including Waterloo and Perth County where “there would be less pushback” and farming is expected to continue for generations.

In Peel, Dolson said there are only 360 to 370 farmers left. He said that local farmers, working smaller parcels of land, have had a turbulent relationship with the Greenbelt, which has ensured the preservation of their farms but has put strict conditions on how the land can be used and what can be built on it.

“We need to provide farmers with more diversified uses for the properties so they can survive in the Greenbelt,” he said. The legislation forbids development on prime agricultural land in the region.

He believes that the Greenbelt is “probably good for 20 to 30 years of growth and then we will probably have to push into it in a big way with all the growth coming here.”

But those behind the Greenbelt say the plan was meticulously created and designed to last for generations.

Victor Doyle, a former planner in the Ministry of Municipal Affairs who is widely considered the “architect of the Greenbelt,” said his team had wanted to study the entire Greater Golden Horseshoe but was directed by the government to focus on the GTA, Hamilton and Niagara.

He said staff did extensive mapping, plotting the best agricultural area, wetlands, forests and determined “most of the region was either farmland or important natural areas,” said Doyle. “My professional opinion was that there is no reason to differentiate it, so we should include it all.”

He said knowing that cities would need to grow, the province left some “white belt” lands to ensure there was space for further urban development up until “the next century if we ever needed it all.”

Doyle also admits that by being left out, Simcoe County and Brant County have seen their communities sprawl.

“This has been one of the byproducts, which is unfortunate, because if we had the mandate, we would have introduced these areas into the Greenbelt,” he said.

He said the real driver behind the sprawl is not the protected area itself, but land speculation — when you buy cheaper land expecting to sell it for a higher price in the future.

Doyle said there has been little if any speculation inside the protected area, “but that has fueled and accelerated even more speculation in the outer ring outside,” he said.

“And now there is fear that it’s open season for the 80 per cent of Ontario that is not in the Greenbelt, which is frankly just as important as land in the belt.”

Doyle said that the legislation always included infrastructure such as highways, rapid transit, pipelines and hydro lines in the protected area “because we couldn’t isolate the GTA as an island,” he said.

But that may end up being its biggest flaw: “The infrastructure needs to cross the Greenbelt, but when … it’s just facilitating more sprawl, the pressures will be even greater within and from the outside,” he said.

For Hepworth, the loopholes in the legislation have allowed for a “frantic” sort of planning that is being done without any thought to creating complete walkable communities.

“When I moved here, a short walk away was a village, but now it’s just an intersection for Highway 10,” said Hepworth. “The council at the time was like, once we expand the road, the traffic will get better. It just got worse.”

For York professor Winfield, Hepworth’s experience comes as no surprise.

“This … was a major concern from its inception,” he said. “That eventually everything around the Greenbelt would be urbanized and all the big linear infrastructure would just run through it … and that’s the direction we seem to be moving in now.”

The GTA is not alone in its fraught relationship with its Greenbelt.

Across the world, cities have struggled to maintain protected areas near their urban centres for much of the same reason as Ontario.

Among the oldest in the world is the one in London, which was established in 1955 and spans 405,000 hectares around the city core.

Despite its longevity, the merits of keeping green space three times the size of London has been up for constant debate, with many arguing it’s time to retire some of it as the government pushes for ambitious housing targets.

According to the London Greenbelt Council, which tracks “threats” to the protected land, it’s facing hundreds of development proposals, as local councils contemplate opening protected land to meet housing targets, and the growing reality of leapfrogging.

Greenbelts in Copenhagen, the Netherlands, Frankfurt and Sao Paulo are all feeling the pressures of urban growth.

“A number of places have given in to the pressure of constantly changing boundaries of their Greenbelts … as they face the same affordability challenges we have here,” said Edward McDonnell, the CEO of the non-partisan Greenbelt Foundation. “But touching the Greenbelt hasn’t made things better for them.”

Closer to home, Ottawa’s Greenbelt, about 20,000 hectares surrounding the downtown core created in the 1950s, has largely been held up as a failure of the concept — in part because of its inability to stop car-dependent sprawl and forcing growth away from the city centre.

Ottawa’s green space “is so cherished and valued, that it doesn’t really matter now that it didn’t prevent urban sprawl,” said Paul Johanis, the chair of the Greenspace Alliance, based in Ottawa.

In southern Ontario, McDonnell said the protected land has remained intact because of the province’s commitment to maintain hard boundaries. There is currently no mechanism for cities to request land be removed from the protected area.

But the threats to the edges of the GTA’s Greenbelt are present — and growing.

The province has yet to decide on a request from York Region council to allow for active recreational uses on Greenbelt lands adjacent to new subdivisions. A number of gravel mine applications within the protected area are under review, and developments within the urban settlement areas of the Greenbelt are regularly being approved.

The mayor of Whitchurch-Stouffville, which is 95 per cent in the Greenbelt, has spent much of this term petitioning the province for a mechanism to remove protected lands along the east side of Highway 404 so they can be used for employment.

“It’s a site-specific request. It’s not a wholesale opening of lands. We just want to be in a position where we can pay our bills … and plan for our future,” said Mayor Iain Lovatt.

Lovatt said he would use some of the money from the tax revenue to buy additional lands to bring into the Greenbelt.

“You can build a 400-series highway through the Greenbelt, but you can’t take a few hundred hectares out … to allow a municipality to prosper?” he said. “That makes no sense.”

Phil Pothen with eco-group Environmental Defence said that the survival of the Greenbelt will require a changing of the mindset of the public and politicians alike that the land is permanently off-limits to being opened up for development.

Besides, he said, there are still 35,600 hectares — more than the size of Mississauga — of land already approved for development within the current boundaries of the GTHA.

During a review in 2017, the province received more than 700 requests from developer landowners to remove land from the Greenbelt. In the end, they rejected most of them and made only minor adjustments.

Pothen said it will take this kind of continued political will to keep the Greenbelt intact.

Last year, dozens of environmental groups offered the province a blueprint for protecting the area in a report, asking for further expansion to ensure the protection of water resources, the creation of policies to ensure the economic viability of farmers, and the cancellation of highways that would lead to further incursions and speculation of land around them.

McDonnell said the vision of the Greenbelt was “forward thinking” and its importance will only increase over time, given the expected impacts of climate change, the need for local food security, and protecting water systems.

Doyle said he’s optimistic about the future: “The Greenbelt is so large and robust, I’m certain it will be able to withstand all the challenges coming at it,” he said.

But for Hepworth, the expectation of the region is far from the reality around her.

“To say ‘some land is in the Greenbelt, it’s protected’ means very little these days,” she said. “It’s a superficial statement.”

She also worries it won’t be able to handle what’s being thrown at it: “it’s being pecked at like crows peck at a carcass. And I fear what will be left will only be Greenbelt in name.”

Noor Javed is a Toronto-based reporter for the Star covering city news with interest in 905 municipal politics.

Read the article here

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