Growth and the environment of Southern Ontario: Some final thoughts
| In 2007, the ECO undertook an examination of the challenge of creating sustainable communities in southern Ontario. The following articles are included: | |
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As argued above, and in previous ECO Annual Reports, the landscapes of many parts of Southern Ontario have reached their capacity to accommodate additional infrastructure, housing and human populations. Current land development pressures are gobbling up valuable greenspace and agricultural lands. Infrastructure corridors for highways and utilities are bisecting wetlands and other natural heritage areas. Clearly, we are placing increasing demands on a finite landscape that is already extensively built up with human structures.
Land use planning processes in Southern Ontario were designed primarily in the 1970s and 1980s when the challenges faced were less complex in scope and size; today, those processes appear unable to respond to the growing threats to the ecological fabric of our landscapes. The 2005 Provincial Policy Statement states that preserving wetlands, significant woodlands and agricultural lands are priorities, but it also asserts that the construction of highways, the removal of aggregates, and the building of pipelines for water supply are priorities. Moreover, the Planning Act and other planning processes mandated under the EAA and the ARA provide no effective mechanisms to reconcile these conflicting land uses.
In fact, most planning processes seem weighted in favour of extractive and destructive uses of the land over those that conserve natural or agricultural values. Approvals processes for a highway, a quarry or a pipeline often are deterministic by their nature. They start society down a path toward approving the proposed undertaking without sufficiently considering whether Ontario should be on that path in the first place. Following that path involves a tremendous expenditure of time and resources often focusing on attempts to mitigate the impacts of a permanent alteration of the natural landscape which may be beyond mitigation and unsustainable by nature. Meanwhile, the approval of the undertaking becomes increasingly inevitable.
Many municipalities across Southern Ontario are being required to dedicate an increasing level of resources to complex and intricate planning processes and projects that attempt to resolve these irreconcilable priorities. In some cases, they are being forced to begin planning for large water pipelines, major electricity transmission lines and other massive infrastructure projects in order to accommodate the projected population increases that federal and provincial agencies insist are coming.
To be sure, there have been many positive developments related to urban planning in the past seven years. The creation of the ORMCP and the Greenbelt Plan have steered growth away from these special resource areas and towards more appropriate growth centres in the GGH. The commitments announced by the Ontario government in June 2006 on reforming the environmental assessment process (discussed in this Annual Report in Missed opportunity on Environmental Assessment reforms?) should mean that municipal and private sector proponents are provided with early and clear guidance on the acceptability of particular infrastructure and projects. These initiatives are welcome and show that the Ontario government (as well as many municipalities) has recognized that the land development patterns that prevailed throughout the 20th century are not sustainable and cannot continue.
Unfortunately, most of Ontario’s environmental laws and policies are premised on a case-by-case review and approval for new projects, such as aggregate pits, municipal roads, sewers and highways. These approval processes have become intellectually dishonest because they do not include an a priori discussion of the need for the undertaking under consideration. Nor do they permit a similar public debate about the conflicting consumptive versus natural heritage priorities involved. Projects are often approved and proceed, sometimes with minor or major conditions attached, despite the efforts of environmental groups and local residents to challenge their efficacy and long-term sustainability. Often, the approval processes degrade into a battle where opponents of an undertaking pursue proxy issues, such as the possible presence of an endangered species, because the larger issues cannot be discussed. This is a path to frustration, waste and delay. The conflicts that emerge in these local planning battles often generate very high transaction and financial costs for the individuals, families, community groups and local officials involved, and mainly benefit the lawyers and consultants involved in the disputes or in the necessary approval hearings before the OMB, Environmental Review Tribunal (ERT) or other tribunals.
In addition, there appears to be no practical opportunities for local residents and environmental NGOs to challenge the inexorable logic of the land development process and the assumptions that it seems to be based on, including appropriate rates of population growth. For example, it appears be a foregone conclusion that development always generates societal benefits in terms of positive economic returns, employment opportunities, higher property values and so on. This means that it is often difficult to convince planning approval authorities that other values, such as the protection of natural heritage, are equally worthy of consideration.
Another prevalent assumption is that monitoring, mitigation measures and other environmental planning techniques can address the long-term problems associated with these large projects and human development pressure. While it is certainly true that mitigation can serve to reduce many impacts, environmental planning techniques cannot undo the long-term destruction of natural heritage features, greenspaces and agricultural land in Southern Ontario. As documented in previous ECO Annual Reports, the province probably already has permanently reduced its capacity to grow tender fruits and other valuable agricultural commodities (notwithstanding the recent GB Plan restrictions). Some groundwater aquifers are already tapped to their limit. Moreover, natural heritage lands in many Southern Ontario communities are under tremendous pressure as development encroaches.
In 1989, the Ontario Round Table on Environment and Economy developed guiding principles for future environmental and economic policies in Ontario. These include anticipating and preventing environmental problems, and not destroying Ontario’s environmental capital, such as its groundwater supplies or the soils and unique landscapes where tender fruits grow. The evidence presented here suggests that Ontario has not learned the lessons that flow from these principles, and it is time for a paradigm shift in its approach to environmental and economic planning. Many large projects in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, such as water pipelines and new highways, would be revealed as untenable when measured against the ORTEE principles. Indeed, the ECO believes that in the near future these projects should be subject to a reverse onus standard – they must be assumed to be problematic and inherently unsustainable unless a significant weight of economic and environmental evidence shows that they can be implemented in an environmentally acceptable and appropriate manner.
The challenge for society will be to integrate fundamental principles of environmental sustainability into land use and infrastructure planning, to measure proposed projects against them, and to abide by the outcomes in the event certain projects do not pass muster.
| Recommendation 4:
The ECO recommends that MMAH work with MPIR to increase the GGH Plan’s intensification and density targets above existing business-as-usual development targets. |
| This is an article from the 2006/07 Annual Report to the Legislature from the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. |
Citing This Article:
Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. 2007. "Irreconcilable Priorities: The Challenge of Creating Sustainable Communities in Southern Ontario." Reconciling our Priorities, ECO Annual Report, 2006-07. Toronto, ON : Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. 49-51.
