Greenbelt tightening a fleeting gift to PC opponents
Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford may earn applause when he promises to rip wind turbines out of the ground and abolish sex ed. But his recent vow to pave the Greenbelt is a folly his opponents should cheer.
Sadly for them, Ford soon realized his error and pivoted sharply into a heartfelt friend of the Greenbelt.
His friends informed him that he could only wound himself by taking aim at the Liberal government’s single most popular legacy in the suburban ridings most crucial to electoral victory. And if he managed to win the election nonetheless, keeping the promise would have plunged his government into a political tar pit sticky enough to swallow up the brawniest political predators.
In any case, the Greenbelt would have survived. And so would the housing crisis that paving it was meant to solve.
Ford should have consulted former PC premier Mike Harris before ad-libbing his signature land-use policy. When Harris assumed power more than 20 years ago, his government made an identical move against the picturesque Oak Ridges Moraine, now part of the Greenbelt, in response to pressure from developers. The resulting backlash was so severe that a chastened government reversed itself and went on to enact groundbreaking legislation to protect the moraine from development.
The moraine was virtually unknown when suburban activists first rallied to save it. By contrast, the Greenbelt is a long-established legal reality underpinned by immense institutional as well as popular support. All the municipal- ities it touches have adopted local plans and zoning in accordance with the Greenbelt and the provincial legislation that supports it. The regional governments experiencing the greatest development pressure are the same ones that are most committed to conservation.
The lesson is that no mere fiat from Queen’s Park will “disappear” the Greenbelt. Actually opening it up for development would require gruelling hand-to-hand combat against deeply entrenched local opponents armed to the teeth with legal and political ammunition. Should it happen, such a comprehensive invasion of municipal authority would be unprecedented in the history of the province.
But even managing to blast open a few safe spaces for developers in the Greenbelt would do little to actually create new housing.
There are currently more than100,000 hectares of open land adjacent to and within the Greenbelt that is pre-zoned for development, according to the Neptis Foundation, and no evidence whatsoever to support the contention that the Greenbelt’s existence has begun to restrict the supply of developable land. As the development industry itself has pointed out, the Greenbelt is not the problem.
The Ontario Home Builders Association was notable for its oft-repeated support of the Greenbelt throughout the recent 10-year review of the legislation conducted by David Crombie, calling only for minor adjustments.
Yesterday, OHBA president Joe Vaccaro issued a statement once again repeating his association’s support, emphasizing that “an attack on the Greenbelt” is not one of the reforms the industry is advocating in order to boost the supply of suburban housing.
What progressive builders and politicians all realize is that the golden age of sprawl is over. Single-family units now account for only a third of new housing built in Canada, even less in the GTA.
No housing type has lost more value in the past year than the new single-family home in the outer suburbs. Developers are discounting new houses from their presale prices, and “closing defaults” are surging as would-be buyers struggle to sell their existing houses.
The problem is that the newest subdivisions today are too expensive and too far away, and the infrastructure needed to support them is either overloaded or non-existent. Setting aside the statutory restrictions, the free-market appetite for sprawling even further into the Greenbelt is diminishing daily.
What’s growing is the public’s appetite for preserving the GTA’s natural borderlands, something that became amply apparent during the 10-year review. The much-anticipated Greenbelt opposition never showed up.
Instead, Crombie’s committee struggled to stay afloat amid a deluge of plaudits. No political party or interest group opposed its ultimate recommendations to strengthen and grow the Greenbelt.
Ford is lucky that his allies intervened before he launched the most foolish, destructive and futile initiative of his career.