SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Ontario Assembly

43rd Parl. 1st Sess.
June 3, 2024 09:00AM

I want to rebut something that the member has raised and I’ve heard—inaccurately, unfortunately—in this chamber a few times now. The overall acreage of arable farmland in Ontario is growing each and every single day. If you look at the great northern clay belt—and this is from the Grain Farmers of Ontario—they look at 16 million acres that are coming online up in the Timiskaming–Cochrane region. If you look, since 2008, we’ve seen that the acreage in northern Ontario has increased from 53,000 acres to over 102,000 acres.

There are obviously downfalls and challenges to the rise of climate change across this land, but one of the impacts of climate change in the north is actually that there is more arable land coming online today than there ever has been. There is more farmland available to farm in the province of Ontario than there ever has been at any point in our history. Because if you look at the amount of acreage in places like eastern Ontario and northern Ontario, there is now land that, before, they were not able to grow on; the heat units have increased to such an extent that they’re actually able to grow beans and corns. I was even just reading this morning, they’re looking at growing potatoes in some of these places—

Again, I think one of the pieces that I spoke about in my debate as well was that is an iterative process, right? It builds on the 13 previous red tape—sorry, 11; 11 or 13—reduction packages that have come forward, and each of those have sought to make, perhaps, individually, not enormously consequential changes, but when taken as a whole, a really positive step forward to streamlining that process for home builders and also for providing certainty to municipalities. One of the pieces that was a challenge for some municipalities was uncertainty, and this is about providing that certainty and good governance.

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