PelhamToday received this letter to the editor concerning farmland issues beyond just the Greenbelt controversy.
The Executive Director of the Ontario Farmland Trust makes an unassailable argument for protecting our diminishing farmland from the increasing threats of ever-increasing developments policies that make no sense, unless you actually believe that enabling developers to make even greater profits serves every community’s best interests?
Policies that reduce any nation’s ability to be self-sustaining in feeding its own population are insanity.
And planning policies that will guarantee that ‘affordable housing’ can never be attainable, without a full 100% subsidy from government, (i.e., more taxation), even more so.
However, in all these reports, making a case for opposing these draconian development solutions, at every level, federally, provincially, regionally and even municipally, few, if any, seek to answer how this situation has ever been allowed to arise over the past several years and more.
Where do all proposed developments start?
Developers are supposedly constrained by existing planning policies, federal, provincial, regional and particularly municipal, it’s basic to all official plans.
Each and every planning proposal submitted lands on a planner’s desk for appraisal. If it conflicts with official plans and so, zoning bylaw, a planner has only one decision to make, to reject it.
Now development is a dynamic process, and it is right that OPs and ZBs should be subject to change and amendments from time to time. However, existing planning policies direct that such changes should be incremental, and even in a planner’s dictionary that should mean primarily, minor changes, and subject to public discussion. Is there anyone in Niagara, after the past years of a growing number of bad planning decisions being steamrollered through by planning staff, on behalf of developers, who believe this is what their own Councils even attempt to do now?
Blame the federal government for failed planning policies, blame the province and especially Ford, for what they are allowing to happen. Similarly, the regional planners, who seem to have no problem with municipal planners ignoring their ‘upper tier’ regional planning policies.
But, to accept what is happening within our own local municipalities, without understanding that it is our own planning staff who have been ignoring basic planning policies in their own OPs and ZBs for years, in order to force development that conflicts directly with those same OPs and ZBs, we only need look in the mirror. If we can’t get the Council’s we elected, to even question the many bad planning recommendations they are asked to approve by our planning staff, then we only have ourselves to blame.
Our agricultural and rural lands have been threatened by bad planning for years and we are only now seeing the awful results. Ford’s planners are amongst the worst offenders today, Ford wasn't even a part of it 10, 20 and 30 years ago! The only permanent and consistent group associated with development, in all those years, have been planners.
Forget the loss of our ability to feed ourselves, forget ‘affordable housing’, forget ‘walkable and friendly communities’.
‘Urban Sprawl’ is no longer the scourge of new development, it IS all new development, and more and more of it.
Andrew Watts
Wainfleet
