A couple of weeks ago, the
Ontario provincial government put its money where its mouth is. After
designating the Oak Ridges Moraine, the long strip of forest and
marshland that runs across the top of Toronto shown in green and beige
on the map above, off-limits to further development, and getting
elected on that platform over the howls of real estate speculators
whose land promptly plunged in value, the government has decided to go
even further, and protect the farmland caught between the Greater
Toronto Area's exploding urban sprawl and the Moraine.
The protection of the Moraine was a bit of a surprise in the first
place. The Moraine is not only critical to the remaining wildlife in
South-Central Ontario, it is also the source of most of the area's
unpolluted water and, through the photosynthesis in its dense plant
cover, most of the area's oxygen as well. With the Greater Toronto Area
becoming home for 50% of all new Canadian immigrants and 40% of all net
new population growth in the country, even the most short-sighted
planners agreed that a 'buffer' was needed to keep Toronto one of the
world's healthiest cities, considering its size.
In Canada, municipalities create their own land use plans, but they can
be overridden by provincial authorities unless they "make sufficient
provision to accommodate the needs of the larger community". In
Ontario, the provincial authority is the Ontario Municipal Board, which
is dominated by friends of developers and which has never rejected
an appeal by a developer to overturn a municipal rezoning denial. The
OMB seems to believe that the very act of appealing a municipal
rezoning denial proves that
the rezoning denial was 'unreasonable'. In other words, municipal land
use plans are largely a waste of time and energy, and the 'market'
determines when and where development will occur.
Until a couple of weeks ago, the resulting battleground was on the
Moraine lands themselves. As the Moraine Act was promulgated, many
unscrupulous real estate developers and speculators were furiously
bulldozing land, even without zoning approval, in the expectation that
once development had started, the province wouldn't dare force the
developer to undo what they had done. When the province refused to back
down and ordered immediate cessation of Moraine development, the rich
developers hired armies of sleazy lawyers to intimidate the government
with threats of multi-million dollar lawsuits for unreasonable
restraint of trade. In most cases this bullying succeeded. The
government was unwilling to face the wrath of angry taxpayers if they
lost the lawsuits, even though their own legal experts said the risk
was small.
You can probably guess what happened next. With the possibility of
development being blocked on the Moraine lands (development was already
blocked on the Niagara Escarpment, protected as a world nature
preserve), the value of the farmland (light pink) between the city
(dark pink) and the Moraine and Escarpment was soaring, as real estate
speculators exploited this new scarcity of developable land to bid the
price of farmland up. This has been happening for years, and, as I
suspect is true in many urban areas of North America, a lot of farmers
and a lot of developers got very rich very quickly just by sitting on
land and waiting for urban sprawl to reach it. After all, the OMB
virtually assured that development would proceed. The population of the
GTA is growing at a rate of 100,000 people per year, and that rate is
accelerating. Various projections suggest that by the end of this
century the GTA's population will grow from today's 6 million to
between 30 and 50 million people, a single urban agglomeration that
will stretch from Niagara Falls to Muskoka and from Kitchener to
Peterborough and beyond.
Most of the agriculture at the frontiers of the GTA is subsistence:
grain, silage, corn and grazing land. Twenty years ago the ROI on this
land was already poor, and many farmers sold out to the
steadily-increasing offers from developers and real-estate speculators.
Many of them have undoubtedly banked their profits, reinvested it in
other farmland a little further out, and continued to farm the land for
its new owners until it is rezoned for subdivisions.
On November 14, the government introduced
a new bill freezing almost all agricultural lands in the Golden
Horseshoe, the area stretching from East of Toronto around Lake Ontario
to Niagara Falls. This bold legislation was designed to do two
important and visionary things:
- Protect the Niagara fruit and wine areas, one of the most
lucrative and valuable agricultural areas in the country, from urban
sprawl.
- Force developers to increase density by redeveloping existing urban areas and brownfield
(abandoned industrial and warehouse) areas to meet future residential
growth needs instead of continuing urban sprawl, to save the Moraine
and Escarpment and to reduce the costs of transportation, roads and
commuting.
You could hear the screams all the way out to where I live (the little
blue 'x' in the centre-left of the map). The agricultural land was
suddenly no longer worth its value as a suburban subdivision, but
instead only the value of the agricultural production it yielded. The
subsistence farmers who were holding out for higher offers from the
developers were suddenly out of luck -- this law will cost them
millions in lost profits. And the developers who had bought up
agricultural land in anticipation of rezoning and subdividing it were
also out millions -- their gamble, which thanks to the OMB had
previously been almost risk-free, suddenly wasn't going to pay off
after all.
Our local paper quotes farmers saying that if they aren't "compensated"
for the loss of speculative profit, they'll "riot" (their word, not
mine). Marches on the provincial legislature are promised. The
governing Liberals are being threatened with an orchestrated campaign
to defeat them in the next election. The armies of lawyer-whores are
being trotted out again to threaten the "constitutionality" of the new
bill.
How this will play out is unknown. The provincial Liberal government is
not politically astute (they were pilloried when they reneged on their
pre-election promise not to raise taxes, when they found out the
previous Conservative government's tax cuts for the rich had nearly
bankrupted the provincial treasury). But they're not stupid. They knew
what they were getting into supporting the Moraine legislation, and
they know that an agricultural land freeze is the only hope to achieve
the two bulleted objectives above.
On the other hand, the combination of skyrocketing population and
reduction in available land is creating a pressure cooker. Existing
real estate property in the GTA is soaring in value, a double-edged
sword. People want more land, not less, to raise their families on.
Many of the brownfield lands are polluted, and some of the pollution
was caused by public institutions and government departments --
reclamation will be very expensive, and no one is willing to pay for
it. And while most voters abhor the payoffs, kickbacks and other
corruption that commonly accompany real estate speculation, they may
not be prepared to give up their personal goals of affordable housing
to rein it in. And let's not forget most politicians are lawyers, and
know how effective well-paid hordes of lawyers can be at paralyzing
government action and extorting concessions from lawmakers.
As for the farmers, who lauded the Oak Ridges Moraine act, they've
shown their true stripes in their violent opposition to this new bill
which was designed to protect their livelihood.
Agriculture is already heavily subsidized by government, to the point
where the average citizen has no idea what the real cost of food is. At
best, the farmers whose land is now frozen will learn from their
Niagara counterparts and develop much more intensive and efficient
agricultural uses for their land, and expect the government to increase
subsidies for their crops (so that they can compete with the even more
highly subsidized American products). This of course will show NAFTA to
be the sham it is -- a fraud perpetrated by corporatists to allow them
to subvert government social and environmental regulations. At worst,
the farmers will sell out to agri-corporations like ConAgra, allowing
their land to be used for factory farms where systematic abuse and
suffering of animals, and massive poisoning of the air and water with
chemicals and animal wastes, will more than offset the benefits that
protecting the Moraine provided.
And even if brownfield development and intensification of both urban
and agricultural land succeeds without ruining the environment, where
then will the rest of the 30 to 50 million Ontarians live? Will the
sprawl just jump the agricultural band and the Moraine band and
continue unabated beyond them, chewing up other agricultural land and
making commuting times into the city even longer? Without a solution
for the GTA population explosion, no amount of responsible land use
regulation will be enough.
It's a grim situation, and I'm not optimistic. Government, agriculture
and real estate developers are among the least innovative sectors of
the economy, and they're more likely to give up than face the enormous
challenges that this new legislation poses, in order to realize the
huge one-time opportunity it presents. The fact that farmers want
one-shot "compensation" for the loss in speculative value of their
property demonstrates this lack of imagination and agility.
My guess is that the provincial government will relent in the face of
massive orchestrated opposition by farmers, developers, lawyers and
real estate speculators, and only protect agricultural land in the more
productive and less population-stressed Niagara region. Sprawl with
then resume and continue for another 20 years until it bumps up
everywhere against the Moraine, and then it, too, will be sacrificed.
The outcome is important not just for Ontarians, but for the whole of
North America. It will tell us whether courageous legal and political
actions will be part of the reforms needed to save our world from
catastrophe, or whether politicians, lawyers and law enforcement are
just part of the problem.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
