Global Courant 2023-05-30 13:00:00
Under pressure from farmers, Prime Minister Doug Ford’s government is considering backing out of proposals to build more homes on Ontario’s dwindling farmland, CBC News has learned.
Leaders from a range of agriculture and farming groups met with senior government officials last week to express concern over proposed changes to provincial land-use policies that Ford and his ministers have said will boost new home construction.
The controversial proposals are part of the Ontario government’s review of land use guidelines, submitted last month by Secretary of Municipal Affairs and Housing Steve Clark. At the time, Clark called his plan “housing-focused” and said it would create more homes in both urban and rural communities.
On Monday, Clark told the Ontario Federation of Agriculture in a letter obtained by CBC News that he “heard the concerns clearly” and promised to “look at alternatives” to the changes he had proposed.
Farmers say the proposals as they stand now have the potential to lead to hundreds of thousands of homes on prime farmland.
Mark Reusser is a turkey farmer in the community of Wilmot, southwest of Kitchener. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
“That’s an awful lot of city folk moving to the countryside and facing farming challenges they’re not used to,” says Mark Reusser, a turkey farmer in Wilmot Township, less than 10 minutes’ drive from the western edge of Kitchener.
Reusser says farmers are concerned that putting more homes on and next to farms would lead to conflict with new non-agricultural residents over the smell, dust and noise associated with raising livestock or growing crops.
“Farming works better when it keeps some distance from people, especially people who originally come from an urban environment and are not used to those things,” Reusser said in an interview at his farm.
“We are also concerned that (building housing) is probably not the best use of agricultural land,” he said. “It will never be farmland again once a house is built on it.”
Ensuring that houses do not remain with farm families
The most controversial change would allow farmland owners to carve out up to three residential lots on each farm lot, a policy known as severance.
Ford and Clark indicated that their intent is to make it easier for farmers to build homes for their adult children on their land.
Steve Clark, Ontario’s Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, speaks in the legislature on May 18, 2023. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press)
“The number one complaint I get when I go to the farm is, ‘I want my kids to stay on the farm,’ and there are certain jurisdictions that won’t allow you to build an additional home,” said Ford against the legislature. on Monday.
“It was never our intention to transfer or sell severed parcels to non-family/farm owners,” Clark said in his letter Monday. “Any ambiguity about our intentions will be clarified, eliminated and resolved.”
Farmers say the problem with the proposed policy is that there is no way to ensure that such houses remain in the farm family. They also say it would have the ripple effects of increasing the market value of farmland, enticing more farmers to sell home lots to make a profit, and reducing the amount of land available for farming.
“I don’t think it’s a really smart plan,” says Zac Cohoon, who grows corn, soybeans and wheat on his family farm near Port Perry in the Durham region.
“It makes little sense to me — if we have urban centers that are well serviced, that can handle public transportation, sewage and water — to move (housing) to a rural area,” Cohoon said in an interview.
Cohoon says current planning policies are already “destroying some of the best farmland in Ontario and Canada for housing.”
Placing more homes in agricultural areas would put pressure on farm ecology because of new wells and septic systems, he says.
Ontario’s land-use policy reforms, coming from Prime Minister Doug Ford’s administration, would allow farmland owners to separate three parcels from each parcel of their farmland for housing. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
A quarter of Ontario’s farmland could be gone in 25 years
Ontario lost more than 580,000 acres of farmland in the five-year period from 2016 to 2021, according to Statistics Canada. If that rate continues, 25 percent of the province’s existing agricultural land will have disappeared within 25 years.
Cohoon says a much better solution is to place homes on marginal land near cities, closer to services that can handle population growth.
“Moving to farmland with (house)lots doesn’t solve the problem. All it does is spread it,” he said.
The Ford government has set a target of 1.5 million new homes to be built in Ontario by 2032. The proposals that have angered farmers are currently out for public feedback. On Monday, Clark said he will extend the consultation period, which was due to end next week, until early August.
The proposals led to an unusual show of unity among the major agricultural organizations in the province. The associations representing beef, chicken, dairy, egg, pork, sheep, turkey and veal producers joined with the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario and the National Farmers Union to support the planned policy changes. on land use.
Zac Cohoon climbs into the cab of his sprayer in a field of soybeans on his farm near Port Perry, Ontario. (Mike Crawley/CBC)
“We do not support policies that will increase the creation of residential lots in key agricultural areas or in rural areas under active construction,” their May 19 joint statement said.
“Ontario has some of Canada’s richest and most fertile agricultural lands and these policy changes are jeopardizing the sustainability of that country and the food system it supplies.”
While that statement came from the organizations that represent farmers, individual farmers like Cohoon and Reusser also wanted to speak out.
“Farmers, like everyone else, recognize the need to find places for people to live,” Reusser said. “It shouldn’t be on farmland, it should be somewhere else. A country’s ability to feed itself is incredibly important.”
Still, Reusser says he is encouraged by signs that the Ford administration is willing to reconsider its plan.
“I look forward to working with the government… and finding a way to provide people with a place to live while protecting agricultural operations,” he said. “I think that’s achievable.”
