This article was written by Burkhard Mausberg and was published in the Toronto Star on June 11, 2024.
BURKHARD MAUSBERG HAS WORKED ON ONTARIO’S GREENBELT FOR OVER TWO DECADES AND IS THE AUTHOR OF “THE GREENBELT — PROTECTING AND CULTIVATING A GREAT ONTARIO TREASURE.”
It’s hard to imagine what happened in Doug Ford’s mind when he decided that the stench from the Greenbelt fiasco had dissipated enough to welcome back Steve Clark, the second-most-responsible person behind the debacle — and as house leader no less.
Maybe he thought the public would believe it was a different Steve Clark, who just looked and sounded like the old one?
Or maybe he saw the May 22 Abacus Data poll numbers, which showed his Ontario PCs were up by 13 points over the Liberals. But he may have not looked hard enough: undecideds were up to 28 per cent, and increase of seven per cent.
For many people, however, their opinion was formed nine months ago, when the wrong guy resigned. Clark took a bullet for Ford. But few of us thought it was a rubber bullet and that less than a year later Clark would be back in the cabal.
For those of us watching Ford with one eye and the Greenbelt with the other, this is merely the latest proof that the Greenbelt battle is far from over. After Ford was forced to retreat, the PCs let the public enjoy what they rightly deserved: democracy. Then in no time, their attack on the Greenbelt resumed.
One by one, they have been pursuing new measures like the development of Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass, two highways that will destroy hundreds of Greenbelt acres in Halton, York and Peel regions and in Simcoe County.
The new approach is “Death to the Greenbelt by a Thousand Cuts,” instead of the previous attempt at one big slash.
Ford also knows that the RCMP investigation into the Greenbelt scandal is still ongoing, so it’s no wonder he is talking about holding an early election.
This all means that two right things need to happen extremely fast — because as we have seen, this government will do the wrong thing even faster.
First, the RCMP must release its review before the next election, which could be as early as next spring, so that Ford and Clark and everyone else possibly implicated can be judged by voters.
And second, the Greenbelt must be expanded.
The public won the last battle because the premier was told to keep the Greenbelt promise. But now we can see, by this Clark move and others, that his promises are empty, so it’s time for us to take over and make one.
It’s time for all of us to make a new Greenbelt promise and pledge to do everything we can to make the Greenbelt even larger.
From the time you began reading this oped, Ontario has lost nearly one more acre of irreplaceable farmland to urbanization, gravel mining and other developments (350 acres a day to be exact). The Ford government is in support of it all. And while they want more people to move here, more people means growing more food — which means growing the Greenbelt.
The Greenbelt must be expanded in order to continue to meet Ontario’s growing agricultural, climate and nature needs, encourage appropriate housing construction within the existing urban boundaries, and once and for all, tell this government that no means no.
And while the RCMP ultimately may tell them that, we can’t sit back and wait for it. (Although the surreal but entirely possible prospect of Clark having to resign twice for the same thing would be unique in Canadian political history.)
The premier is clearly putting the pieces and players together for another Greenbelt attack. The people of Ontario need to remind him who the buck really stops with, by acting instead of reacting, and demanding more Greenbelt, not the cuts he tried to give us once. As the song says, we won’t get fooled again.
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