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Housing Minister Out and the Greenbelt Lives to See Another Day
Surprising announcement from Premier Doug Ford
ONTARIO, Canada — On the heels of Housing Minister Steven Clark’s resignation on Monday, Premier Doug Ford announced this morning that he has decided to accept the 14th recommendation of the Auditor General’s report, to reconsider the decision to change the greenbelt boundaries.
He made the announcement at Queens Park today, taking no questions after delivering his remarks.
How did we get here?
The Ontario Greenbelt, established in 2005, is the largest of its kind in the world. It is comprised of 2 million acres of protected farmland, forests, wetlands, rivers and lakes. The proposed Greenbelt plan sought to open a collectively 810,000-hectare area of land, of which much is prime agricultural land.
The provincial government has been mired in disrepute this year over the decision to open the Greenbelt to housing development. What’s more, their process of site selection was recently revealed to have been heavily influenced by the same developers who already own most of the land that was opened up to development last November. In fact, many developer acquisitions of protected Greenbelt lands all happened in the past few years — and in some cases…
