BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is from Claire Malcolmson, executive director of the Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition.
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The Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition and our allies are engaged in municipal comprehensive review (MCR) processes across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). What is different about Simcoe County’s MCR is that the work is mostly being done by consultants. Intentions aside, the result is that communication is disjointed, the presentations have lacked detail, and it is extremely difficult to get answers to questions.
Our organization is trying to get information from staff, at the county and the municipal level, so that we can get the very interested and concerned but non-technical public to provide comments.
But it is not easy to get information, in part because the level of accountability and lines of communication are not clear.
On the other hand, the development industry has many people employed and trained to engage in these technical processes. They are well represented at public meetings and consultations. They can spend hours of their work time waiting to be called to speak before council.
This is not usually the case for members of the public.
Let me be clear. There is no level playing field between the development and environmental or community lobbies. There never was and there will never be, because the development industry earns profits which they spend deploying lobbyists to pressure decision-makers to approve sprawl.
On the other hand, environmental, affordable housing and community health interests are not for profit. We fund-raise from nice people to hire people to help organize interested community volunteers to write letters and delegate, mostly with our hearts on our sleeves. To ignore this unfairness in representation is convenient for pro-development interests.
But when elected officials voting on behalf of their constituents ignore this structural imbalance and then lean on “market preferences” and NIMBYism to defend their vote, it is deeply disturbing.
We have seen this play out in York Region this fall. Before the council votes happen in Simcoe County, we want councillors to carefully consider who they are representing.
Based on what we are seeing in other regions, we know that development industry representatives lobby councillors and staff, telling them that it is undesirable and virtually impossible to change the style of development Ontario has embraced for decades.
This concerns us because single-family home development has the biggest impact on air and water pollution, and because new single-family home prices are out of reach for families earning less than around $200,000 per year. There will be, of course, some single-family homes approved moving forward. The battle is over how much?
If the MCR results in a greater share of single-family homes, people in service industries and other low paying jobs will need to continue looking further, driving farther and spending less time with their families, just to have a roof over their heads.
This is bad for families, children, health, the environment, community engagement and participation in volunteer activities, and for local economies.
Claire Malcolmson
Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition, executive director
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