It’s easy to take the Greenbelt for granted. A mere 10 years old, the 1.8-million-acre swath has fundamentally changed how we grow and develop.

Instead of a 10th birthday bash, the Province of Ontario is conducting a large-scale review of the Greenbelt Plan as well as the accompanying plans for protecting the Oak Ridges Moraine and Niagara Escarpment and also its Places to Grow anti-sprawl legislation that enshrines the need for more intensification and less greenfield development.

A decade on, the time has come to look at what’s working and what isn’t with these interlocking, game-changing plans. This policy review has largely flown under the radar. Just before the summer, for example, the deadline came for local municipalities and other stakeholders (e.g., farmers, developers) to offer their input, and what happened here raised a few eyebrows.

It started with several of the local councils endorsing requests by individual landowners to have their parcels removed from the Greenbelt. One Vaughan councillor submitted a last-minute motion (handwritten, according to the Toronto Star), supporting an exemption for one specific landowner. By the time the review came to York Regional Council, more than 60 developers had requests of their own. 

A motion asking York Region to support the local municipalities’ redesignation requests was shot down (in a 10 to 10 vote, decided by the chair, Wayne Emmerson) and replaced with a watered-down motion asking for a municipal review process to deal with minor boundary shifts. 

On the one hand, it makes sense. It’s hard to expect bureaucrats down at Queen’s Park to know the provenance of every parcel, and who would know better than the local planners and councils? On the other hand, the entire point of the Greenbelt is to draw a hard line in the proverbial sand and take development matters away from councils that are more subject to the influence of political and monetary forces.

The avowed purpose of the review is to strengthen the Greenbelt, and even if the province removes bits and pieces of land as part of the review, I expect their goal is to end up with a net gain of land. If they don’t, following the first review, it doesn’t bode too well for the plan’s long-term future. The same goes double for a process that would allow individual municipalities all over the Greenbelt to start chipping away at the edges, potentially a near-literal death by a 1,000 cuts.

I’m sure if I owned acres of land just inside the Greenbelt, I’d also be champing at the bit for the opportunity to argue why it should be opened up, but the whole point of the Greenbelt is that it functions as a single ecosystem, environmentally and even fiscally.

As far as I can tell, surrounding municipalities (e.g., Durham and Peel) didn’t use the review as an opportunity to list pieces of land for removal from the Greenbelt: just York Region.

Now, the Greenbelt isn’t perfect; something so game-changing could hardly be perfect out of the gate. I’ve heard convincing arguments from farmers: it does a lot to protect agricultural land without actually protecting agriculture. 

It’s worth noting one developer sued the province, arguing the Greenbelt’s borders were determined politically rather than scientifically, and he lost, but it’s to be expected there may well be parcels here and there that might be on the wrong side of where the line was drawn.

It’s amazing to realize more than two-thirds of York Region is within either the Greenbelt or Oak Ridges Moraine — the latter led to dozens of development battles for Richmond Hill a decade ago. In 2015, we’re increasingly growing upwards, but people still want those single-family homes, after all, and we need to provide within these constraints. The building industry has argued restricting the supply of land for housing has contributed to the rising house prices in the GTA. 

A second phase of consultation is set to take place in the new year and will give all of us a chance to re-engage with the Greenbelt and remember that establishing it was a big leap, but sustaining it, realizing its vision — and dealing with its consequences — are ongoing challenges.

Post City Magazines’ columnist David Fleischer is a long-time journalist and currently an urban planner living in York Region.