The Greenbelt: settled, or still the argument?

The Greenbelt is the largest permanently protected green space of its kind anywhere, and it is also the outer wall of the region’s housing market. Both of those things are true at once, which is the whole difficulty.

In 2022 the province removed protection from a number of parcels for housing; in 2023, after an Auditor General’s report and considerable public reaction, it reversed the decision and restored them. That episode is settled. The pressure that produced it is not. In August the Ontario Land Tribunal ordered Hamilton, next door, to add at least 1,600 hectares to its urban boundary, farmland between the current edge of the city and the Greenbelt line. The line held. Everything up to it did not.

The argument against opening it is that this region does not have a land shortage, it has a permission shortage: there are hundreds of thousands of approved units not being built, and vast tracts inside the existing boundary zoned for nothing denser than a bungalow.

The argument for is that the parcels nearest the existing edge are already surrounded by suburbs, that some of them are not farmland in any working sense, and that the boundary was drawn in 2005 for a region that has since added well over a million people.

Sources: The Public Record, the tribunal orders Hamilton to expand · Ontario, the Greenbelt Plan