Liberals vow to expand Greenbelt if re-elected
Wynne says she doesn’t know exact amount of land plan would add
Premier Kathleen Wynne is suddenly promising to expand the Greenbelt if re-elected in the wake of PC rival Doug Ford’s flip-flop on a controversial backroom promise to sell “a big chunk” of the protected land to developers.
“I’m here, yes, in reaction to that,” Wynne acknowledged Wednesday at a hastily called west-end news conference near the Old Mill, with a picturesque Humber River waterfall in the background. “When Doug Ford looks at the Greenbelt … he doesn’t see prime farmland, he doesn’t see clean drinking water; he sees dollar signs. That’s what this land means to him.”
Ford’s promise to developers, revealed in a Feb. 12 video released Monday by the Liberals, raises questions about what other pledges the PC leader has made in private, Wynne said.
“To say something behind closed doors to a group of developers and then to say something different when people find out about it … really does demonstrate the measure of the man. Doug Ford cannot be trusted to protect the Greenbelt,” she said. “If his secret deal with developers hadn’t been exposed, can we really believe that he would have backed off?”
Ford initially stood by his comments on Monday, but changed his tune Tuesday, saying in a statement “the people have spoken — we won’t touch the Greenbelt.” His reversal came amid widespread criticism, including from his own PC candidates who were getting an earful from voters over remarks in the video in which he dismissed the land as “just farmer fields,” a line that did not play well in rural areas where the Tories are strong.
At Queen’s Park on Wednesday, Tory MPP Vic Fedeli, his party’s interim leader in the Legislature, downplayed Ford’s gaffe and evaded repeated questions on Wynne’s allegations of more “secret deals.”
“The fact that Doug Ford has said we’re not going to be touching the Greenbelt, I think that’s where we need to be,” said Fedeli, who 24 hours earlier was defending Ford’s promise to sell off some of the land.
New areas to be protected from development if the Liberals win re-election are moraines in the Waterloo, Paris, Galt and Oro areas, the Nottawasaga River corridor north of Toronto, and wetlands in Dufferin and Simcoe counties.
Wynne said she did not know how much the plan would add to the 800,000-hectare Greenbelt, which stretches from Niagara to Port Hope and north along the Niagara Escarpment.
The Greenbelt protections were passed into law by the previous Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty to limit urban sprawl and preserve environmentally sensitive lands such as watersheds and prime agricultural areas. The Neptis Foundation, which studies the Greenbelt, says there are already 45,000 hectares of land around the GTHA ready to be developed without impinging on the Greenbelt.