Greenbelt status would protect our drinking water
Most major cities in southern Ontario get their drinking water from one of the Great Lakes.
But in Waterloo Region, we get most of ours from under the ground.
Rain falls on certain parts of the region where there’s lots of sand and gravel in the soil. That filters the water, which then stays underground until wells pump it out for drinking.
If that water gets contaminated with salt from driveways and roads, or with chemicals from industrial activity, we’re all in trouble.
That’s why Waterloo Region’s Official Plan is fiercely protective of places like the Waterloo Moraine, on the west side of the cities of Kitchener and Waterloo. The socalled “countryside line” in the plan kept those areas, which take in rainwater, free from development.
But after the Ontario government announced last week that uppertier municipalities such as Waterloo, Niagara and Peel will soon lose their planning authority, the big question now is: “How can we protect our water?”
When the region’s planning authority is removed, the protections provided by the Official Plan won’t be worth the paper they’re written on.
“We have no protection,” says Kevin Thomason, vice-chair of the Grand River Environmental Network.
“This is an absolute nightmare,” he said. “Our region is totally dependent on this groundwater.”
Thomason and other environmental advocates are concerned that if planning is left to lower-tier municipalities like the cities and townships, they will have a harder time resisting calls from developers to build on these sensitive lands. There is enormous political pressure to provide more housing so that its cost can go down.
Other cities such as Brantford and Barrie have even annexed surrounding countryside in an effort to accommodate growth. Thomason and others think the same thing could happen here.
And he thinks our best protection for the future is to ask for our environmentally sensitive areas and prime farmland to be protected by the Greenbelt.
This is the same Greenbelt that covers the Niagara Escarpment from Niagara Falls to Tobermory, and which also creates a ring of protected land around Toronto, including the Oak Ridges Moraine.
The idea of having it was to protect vulnerable natural areas from the pressures of growth around Toronto.
In Waterloo Region, we were considered to be too far away from Toronto to have Greenbelt protection, except for a tiny part of North Dumfries Township.
When the Greenbelt was first created by former premier Dalton McGuinty in 2005, Waterloo Region’s Official Plan actually had even stronger protections for farmland and environmentally vulnerable areas than the Greenbelt provided.
And when, in the dying days of its 15 years in office, the Liberal government proposed expanding the Greenbelt to include sensitive lands in Waterloo Region, some local leaders didn’t like the idea.
“What we have is actually stronger than the current Greenbelt legislation in terms of groundwater protections, in terms of gravel extraction” said Ken Seiling, then the regional chair, back in 2018.
Back then, we couldn’t possibly have imagined what would happen next.
Two weeks after Seiling’s comments were reported, Doug Ford became leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party.
He won two elections, in 2018 and 2022. He tried to take the Greenbelt apart so developers could build tens of thousands of homes there.
After ferocious public opposition, he admitted he had been wrong, and he returned it to protected status again.
Thomason thinks Ford likely doesn’t even know about the threats to groundwater in Waterloo Region, or the protections we have for it in the Official Plan.
But Ford is a consummate politician. When the anger from the public gets too intense, he reverses course. He understands that people want to keep certain agricultural and natural areas protected. He won’t provoke Ontarians again on this issue.
The original Greenbelt legislation mandates a review every 10 years.
We should be lobbying hard when that comes up, in 2025, to expand the Greenbelt to Waterloo Region, so that we can be included under its protective umbrella.
It may not be as strong as what we had before. But it’s a whole lot better than nothing.