I would say that if we’re going to talk about examinations, I would send you both back to school, but hey. Because frankly, to simply parrot “supply and demand” without any understanding of the rest of the market is to show a lack of understanding of what people are actually dealing with.

Interjection.

I noticed that the bill did correct some drafting errors—reminding us, frankly, of Bill 23’s draconian elimination of planning appeal rights for conservation authorities and upper-tier municipalities, a reminder also of the broken promises about the greenbelt and certainly the appearance of widespread corruption in regard to the greenbelt—

The questions about who is benefiting certainly haven’t come from me alone. Those questions are widespread in the media and amongst people throughout the province who are very, very concerned at how easy it is to say one thing one day, and the next day say something completely different and do something completely different.

In terms of the greenbelt, in order to put luxury homes on conservation land—it certainly doesn’t make sense. And then, of course, this idea of taking even more farmland and subdividing it—well, we know that the farming community has organized itself and spoken against this, and it sounds like the government may be listening. I hope that’s the case, because we need that farmland. We need that food.

I am coming to the end of what I wanted to talk about. Again, I think that we have such an incredible problem with people being kicked out, with rents made completely unaffordable, and there is so little here to help. The problems keep getting worse and worse and worse, and then even when solutions are offered, there’s no support for those solutions.

Honestly, it boggles my mind that there is nothing there to support Suomi Koti or Giiwa on Court. Suomi Koti could even be coming out of a seniors’ fund for housing. Do we not have any funding available to support more seniors’ housing? Supportive housing? It doesn’t have to be fully staffed with PSWs. It might have one PSW. There’s a whole range of different levels that seniors are looking for when they can no longer—and no longer want to—manage a home and everything that goes with a home. What is the plan for that? Because I can tell you again, in my region—seven-year waiting lists. Well, in my mother’s case, she probably will be dead by then, I imagine.

So there are very, very clear problems that are not addressed in the bill. And there is so much more that the government could be doing to support housing so that everybody can afford to get into the market to get a place, to rent a place, to keep a roof over their heads.

Again, you point out that this is the fourth bill, and yet there’s no help for renters and there’s no help for seniors, for example. So I hope that the government will do more.

Thank you to the member from Hamilton West–Ancaster–Dundas for her presentation.

During the pandemic, the conservation areas in my region, in Thunder Bay–Superior North, were the mental and physical lifelines that helped people get through the pandemic. They are beloved spaces, and I can’t see anybody wanting to give them up.

Is it your sense that the incredibly beautiful conservation areas in your region—I’m thinking of Webster Falls, for example, a stunning place. Do you believe that people in your region would be happy to see these conservation areas turned into housing developments without any consultation from local organizations?

Oh, sorry. I am quoting something—

I’ll continue: “To be honest, it would mean a death sentence to the greenbelt as a whole.”

Apparently, Minister Clark says the class 1 agricultural lands will be swapped out for 9,400 acres that will eventually receive greenbelt designation.

“Used in conjunction with Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act ... which upends conservation authorities’ powers and the province’s wetland protection system, the Ford government is playing a dangerous shell game with ecologically sensitive areas and precious farmland. Progressives and environmentalists know that this is not going to end well.

“As if those changes weren’t bad enough, the provincial government overturned Halton region’s official plan amendments ... which contained development within the existing settlement boundary to 2051.”

So the concern that’s raised in this article, primarily, is sprawl—the spreading of housing and creating very expensive houses that require more transportation, more infrastructure and more cost to municipalities to actually provide that infrastructure, while doing nothing to actually produce affordable housing and have more dense housing within already existing planning zones

I’ll go back to the letter that had so many signatures:

“The government’s proposed changes would damage our existing neighbourhoods, towns and cities as well as the farmland and natural areas that sustain them, which in turn, would harm our ability to feed ourselves, protect ourselves from flooding, and address climate change risks.

“Taken together, the changes would:

“—do little or nothing to address the shortage of truly affordable housing;

“—facilitate expensive urban sprawl and inappropriate high-rises at the expense of more diverse housing types designed for all stages of life and ranges of incomes;

“—divert limited construction materials and labour away from building mixed and affordable housing, and direct them instead towards sprawl development, creating fragmented agricultural and natural landscapes;

“—remove from the greenbelt thousands of acres of valuable natural areas and agricultural land, and turn them into sprawl development;

“—undermine the protection of wetlands, woodlands, rivers, streams and wildlife habitat across Ontario;

“—destroy key land use planning processes that Ontario municipalities, conservation authorities and residents need in order to protect, manage and plan for climate-resilient ecosystems and communities.”

I’m going to move ahead to a specific concern from a lawyer in my riding:

“I ... want to bring to your attention the Lempiala gravel application to insert a new industrial use of aggregate extraction next to the cottage/residential uses at Trout Lake.... Removing existing rights of appeal by Trout Lake landowners will mean that our fight against this proposed intrusive use will be at an end, and the peace, serenity and natural beauty now enjoyed at Trout Lake will be forever lost.

“Premier Ford is saying that our multiple-year battle with Lempiala is retroactively wiped out as of Oct 25/22, all for the purpose of building houses faster in southern Ontario. It makes no sense. It is a long-standing principle of planning law in Ontario that neighbours have the right to comment and appeal proposed new uses nearby their lands. Buffering between conflicting uses is an important planning principle that will lose all meaning if citizens lose their appeal rights.

“Adjacent to the McIntyre River (Trout Lake is the source lake) ... is an area that has been noted as provincially significant wetlands.... The proposed Lempiala aggregate operation will no longer have to set back its extraction operations from the potential PSW lands which are partially found on the Lempiala lands. It is quite obvious that the Ford government’s Bill 23 favours land developers instead of residents nearby and entirely disregards PSW lands.”

I will move to conclude. I’d like to think about the International Plowing Match, where we had the opportunity to meet with so many farmers. One of the strong messages that I certainly heard from farmers was the need to protect farmland, to not lose any more farmland to development, and to do whatever we could to stop urban sprawl. We are seeing exactly the opposite of that taking place with Bill 23 and then with Bill 39.

We have a responsibility to our constituents, to our citizens, to be thinking about climate change, to be really protecting the future—for our children, for our grandchildren, for ourselves—from environmental degradation. Climate change is a real threat. We need more parkland. We need more wetlands; we need to preserve those wetlands. They protect us from flooding. In my region, flooding is a very serious concern, and we can’t pretend that it’s not there.

So I respectfully request that the government retract those elements of Bill 23 that undermine democratic participation, that undermine commitments made to protect the greenbelt, and that undermine the capacity of communities to manage their own flood lands and land planning processes.

My office has been overwhelmed with phone calls and emails from organizations and residents of Thunder Bay–Superior North expressing their deep concern at the environmental damage that Bill 23 will bring. I will read an excerpt from one of those constituents:

“By far the greatest and most significant threat facing Ontario today is the threat of climate change and loss of biodiversity. Sacrificing wetlands to provide more housing start locations is a very short-sighted solution to an immediate housing issue but will result in much more significant long-term impacts on the future of the Earth for us and for my children and my grandchildren.”

Will the Premier remove the parts of Bill 23 that undermine regional conservation authorities’ ability to protect wetlands needed for everyone’s survival in the face of climate change?

Bill 23 is a direct attack on the well-being of all communities for the short-term benefit of those who will profit from building where they should not build. I can tell you, the builders will be long gone when the consequences of these bad decisions come knocking.

Again, I ask: Will the Premier restore the ability of conservation authorities to fulfill their mandate to protect the integrity of local watersheds?

During the last session, this government already undermined the ability of conservation authorities to manage where development takes place in relation to wetlands and watersheds. In this new legislation, they’ve further undermined their ability to fulfill their responsibilities by removing the ability to monitor potential development for pollution. No community is going to be happy with development that threatens the health of the land, air or waterways. So it’s beyond me that they would remove this ability from conservation authorities.

Second, they are pressing conservation authorities to offer up conservation lands for development. We have these lands for a reason. They’ve been fought over, fought to attain. So I’m wondering why the government is creating conflict within communities over revered conservation areas, and equally, why they are asking conservation authorities to abandon their responsibility to monitor for pollution.

I would like to focus my time today on talking about the failure to seriously address climate change and the lack of environmental protections in this bill.

During the previous Parliament, this government made significant changes to the province’s environmental policies: for example, a 70% funding cut to the Anishinabek/Ontario Fisheries Resource Centre, a 30% cut to the Canadian Environmental Law Association and a 100% cut to the Ontario Biodiversity Council. The budget of the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks was slashed, and in 2019, without any consultation, the Ford government gutted the province’s 36 conservation authorities, removing their ability to protect crucial waterways and wetlands.

In November 2021, the Auditor General accused the government of deliberately undermining its own rules by not following the province’s Environmental Bill of Rights, by passing changes to environmental assessment procedures without consulting the public. These cuts were not about saving dollars. In 2018, the Ford government killed the Green Ontario Fund, which included 227 clean energy programs. Okay, they didn’t agree with anything designated as clean energy, but it cost the people of Ontario more than $230 million in fines and legal fees to shut down these projects, and then there was the enormous cost of taking cases to the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada, only to be found guilty of acting illegally by cancelling programs without public consultation. Note the pattern here of refusing to have public consultations whenever the government doesn’t want scrutiny of its plans.

Now, regarding Highway 413: The people of Thunder Bay–Superior North do not support the government spending billions of dollars on an unnecessary highway that will, not incidentally, pave over 2,000 acres of farmland, cut through 85 waterways, damage 220 wetlands and disrupt the habitats of 10 species at risk. Claiming that new highways will reduce emissions because there will be fewer idling cars is a case of magical thinking. Decades of research show that new roads do not resolve traffic problems in the long run; rather, they attract even more drivers with even more cars.

The government has also not been able to answer the question of how the food production lost through this significant loss of farmland will be replaced. The last environmental review of these highway projects actually took place in 1997, and it found that they posed significant risks to groundwater, surface water and air quality and were not worth pursuing. However, this government has exempted both highways from undergoing another full review before construction begins.

My concern is thus that while there are many projects to expand the development of natural resources, environmental protections have been gutted, leaving nothing in place to protect the land, trees, air and water that are also under our care.

Growth that doesn’t have environmental stewardship at its centre risks burdening present and future generations with the long-term poisoning that we have seen in Grassy Narrows and Indigenous communities in the Sarnia area. In southwestern Ontario, we had the devastating explosion in Wheatley that has drawn attention to the thousands of abandoned oil wells in the province, an issue the province is currently ignoring.

Climate change mitigation, environmental protections and respect for Indigenous rights needs to be baked into every single government project from the outset. Between this government’s silence on climate change, their record of abandoning injured workers while repurposing the WSIB as a cash cow for employers, and their record of dismantling environmental protections, I cannot support this bill.

Thank you for the comments on both sides of this room.

First of all, our objections are not about building homes or not building homes; they’re about responsible development and observing democracy.

During your last term, you undermined the ability of regional conservation authorities to manage the lands under their trusteeship and that are part of their mandate responsibility, and because of that, developers are able to go in and build where it is not necessarily wise to build. In other words, they can ignore the local knowledge, which is the best knowledge of every place, and build regardless.

So what we are looking for is responsible development. When the members talk about red tape, they forget that environmental protections are often brushed off as a form of red tape.

The question is, will this government guarantee that environmental protections will be observed when local people with local knowledge will be silenced by not consulting fully with municipal councils?