Nearly all volunteer citizen representatives are being forced off the boards of Conservation Authorities across Ontario as further impacts of last December’s provincial legislation take effect. The Ford government now has proclaimed the governance section of Bill 229 that amended the Conservation Authorities Act and which now requires that a minimum percentage of members of Conservation Authority (CA) boards have to be mayors or councillors.
Developers and their hired agents have been lobbying councillors on growth plans that could affect thousands of acres of farmland south of the current urban area. A crucial staff report and council decision is scheduled for the end of March that is expected to determine the extent of Hamilton’s residential expansion over the next 30 years.
McMaster’s president announced last week that he is directing the university to eliminate fossil fuel corporations from its endowment fund investments. This caps years of petitions and faculty appeals for the university to stop making money off the climate catastrophe facing the planet.
Governments across the GTA are challenging the climate-threatening policies of the provincial government. Mississauga has joined other municipalities seeking federal intervention on the proposed Highway 413 recently revived by the Ford administration, while Halton regional council is pushing back against pro-development rule changes that force municipalities to accept more sprawl on prime agricultural lands. The Halton move is particularly significant to Hamilton whose planners are grappling with the same rules and deadlines.
Action by a neighbouring municipal government may block the provincial government push that is threatening to convert the rest of Hamilton’s unprotected farmland to residential subdivisions. While Hamilton has accepted that new provincial sprawl rules make inevitable a massive expansion of the city’s urban area, politicians in Halton are determined to fight the Ford government.
With the public distracted by a pandemic, it may have seemed a politically smart time for the Doug Ford’s Conservative Party to dramatically overhaul Conservation Authorities with new rules buried in a budget bill, but evidence suggests that calculation was dead wrong. Bill 229 was met with a public outpouring that included 45,000 emails to government officials and formal opposition from all of the province’s Conservation Authorities as well as nearly forty municipal councils
Anger and opposition continues to grow against the provincial changes to Conservation Authorities (CAs). Only a small part of the Ford government’s legislation has come into force so far with the coming year to see more changes via regulations that may threaten ecological protection, recreational trails, education programs, permitting, and other activities.
The single largest change this year is a jump of nearly $5.6 million in the police budget. That along with an extra million in capital allocation will push annual spending on policing over $177 million. Perhaps in response to the city hall encampment and other protests linking homelessness to police funding, the executive summary of the budget highlights “affordable housing”.
Provincial rules forcing the converting of all remaining Hamilton farmland, outside the Greenbelt, to residential subdivisions to accommodate predicted population growth.
