Ontario’s Greenbelt here to stay

Some say developing green space would cool GTA housing market

Premier Kathleen Wynne warns the Greenbelt will not be loosened to alleviate the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area’s housing challenges.

Wynne said Wednesday that Finance Minister Charles Sousa’s budget — which could be delivered April 27 — will not do anything to undermine the 800,000-hectare Greenbelt of lands protected from development.

“We’re committed to growing the Greenbelt, not shrinking the Greenbelt. So that’s not something that we’re looking at,” the premier told reporters at Toronto’s Bishop Marrocco/Thomas Merton Catholic Sec- ondary School.

Real estate industry experts have said that Toronto’s skyrocketing home prices are in part due to a lack of supply so new ex-urban housing is needed.

But environmentalists, who welcomed Wynne’s stance on Wednesday, say there’s still plenty of land for housing without touching protected areas. Wynne, whose predecessor Dalton McGuinty created the Greenbelt in 2005 to protect sensitive land from being paved over, said there are no plans to lift the restrictions.

“The Greenbelt is a hugely important swath of land that is like the lungs of this highly populated part of the province,” Wynne said.

“So that’s not something that we’re looking at. But we recognize that housing affordability is a huge, huge issue,” she conceded.

“It’s a huge issue right here in this part of the city that we’re talking about, but it’s also an issue outside of the core of the city,” she said at the school located at Bloor St. W. and Dundas St. W.

“The finance minister is looking at a whole range of supply and demand side issues, but we’re not yet ready to bring those forward.”

Wynne stressed Sousa’s spending plan, that likely will come next month, would have measures to tackle the affordability of GTHA housing.

“We believe that there are some other things that we should be looking at, and we’re doing that and we’ll be bringing forward some proposals on top of what’s already been done,” she said, referring to breaks that took effect Jan. 1.

Environmental Defence executive director Tim Gray said he was encouraged by Wynne’s remarks.

There are more than100,000 hectares of land available for housing within the existing urban boundaries, he said.

Meanwhile, homebuilders and realtors, who have been warning about a housing supply crisis, say they have no beef with the Greenbelt.

They say it’s the government’s antisprawl growth plan, designed to create denser population nodes around services such as transit and health care, that needs tweaking to address the issue. With files from the Tess Kalinowski