During my years as a graduate student at the University of Guelph, I was lucky enough to live in my Mum’s childhood home smack dab in the middle of Puslinch. Like many other small hamlets that dot the areas around Guelph, Puslinch was a creation of a bygone era when farmland was carved up willy-nilly for the creation of convenient housing.
In the 1960s when Mum was a little girl, there were still plenty of livestock farms that dotted the hills of Puslinch Township, but by the time I was traveling those same roads to head to class in Guelph there was only one beef farm remaining. Not only was the livestock gone, so was most of the crop production, and where the farmland once stretched there were pockets built up with sprawling rural mansions, complete with massive lawns and the occasional horse.
To make matters worse, the main artery connecting Guelph and Hamilton, Highway 6, couldn’t handle the traffic that now flowed through that area and it was a regular occurrence to see folks parked out in front of the house, about 2.4 kilometres away from the traffic light they would eventually get to one village over in Morriston. For a long time this has been a reality of that area, and now that area of Ontario is an excellent reminder of the danger that taking the lazy approach of fragmenting farmland for housing has on our food production system.
In April of this year, the Ford government released a proposed updated version of the Provincial Planning Statement (PPS) and coupled it with Bill 97: Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act. While the PPS doesn’t have a catchy name, it can be considered a municipal planner’s bible: a set of rules that guide how land is opened up for development… in essence dictating where and how we can grow, whether it be the smallest village or our largest cities.
Planning is not in my realm of expertise, but thankfully when I was back living in Puslinch I did manage to spend a great deal of time learning about agricultural economics. And, unlike most things in the field of economics, there is a very strong consensus that fragmenting farmland is a rather idiotic thing to do. Not only does it lower the economic output of the land itself, it leads to reductions in efficiency for operators and increases nuisance interactions with non-farming public that does not have the information or experience to be patient with occasionally noisy, smelly, and occasionally annoying farming going on in the neighbouring fields with the piece of toast they’re eating at the time.
Given that the agri-food industry is Ontario’s largest employer and the overwhelmingly strong consensus that fragmentation of farmland is not a good thing to do, it was very shocking to see that the proposed PPS will do exactly that, fragment the farmland. Every single farm in this province will be allowed to slice and dice up to three lots off themselves. This goes far and beyond the sensible policy that allowed surplus farmhouses to be severed off from farms, given in those cases the house is already there along with the supporting infrastructure a house needs; most notably septic, water, and utilities.
This province needs housing and lots of it. As much as many love to say it’s better to grow up and not out, we have to come to terms that this province needs to pave over some farmland to make room for everybody. Take Listowel for example – almost every urban brownfield of my youth has been infilled, often with multi-unit housing. Listowel has to grow out to make room, however it is far more efficient to build higher density housing in clusters around existing urban areas than carving up the rural backroads three lots at a time.
There are parts of both Bill 97 and the PPS that make sense; adding accountability to ensure municipal governments hit targeted approval deadlines for instance. But whoever came up with the idea to carve up farms, mixing a much higher number of non-farming people into areas like Perth County, one of Ontario’s largest livestock producing regions, has seemingly never left the towers of Toronto.
It is hard to understand the motivations for these changes without becoming cynical. Ontario needs affordable family housing that is built around important supporting infrastructure. Smart planning today in our small towns like Listowel means that in 50 years, when it is a town of 30,000 people, there will be dense areas to support things like transit without lowering the region’s capacity for economic output. These changes as they are proposed don’t lead to the creation of more affordable housing, nor do they keep development restricted to current settlement areas that already have the infrastructure needed to support them. Instead of focusing on supporting the strong agricultural production Ontario needs to support the tens of thousands of people who live and work in urban areas, these changes will instead lower farm production and over time will eliminate livestock production from fast-growing rural areas like Listowel, Fergus, and Orangeville.
The only benefactors are the people who have the wealth and desire to carve off an idyllic rural mansion and the developers that build them these oversized behemoth houses. Agriculture loses, affordable housing loses, the environment loses, while developers and rich asset holders win. In less than a year, Ford has ripped up the Greenbelt and even referred to it as a sham, despite promising to not touch it during the last campaign, and has proposed or passed a rash of legislation that may as well as been written by the highly-paid lobbying firms that developers send to Queen’s Park. It sucks.
As I sat in the tractor on Friday planting the last of our corn, I explained to one of our employees the true tragedy. If this passes, it will become inevitable that farms will get severed, even by people like me who understand the long-term ramifications. Farmers will not be able to afford to not sever lots once the new value of lots is priced into farmland values. It took only months from relaxed rules around Surplus Farmhouse Severances before the value of the house was added into the selling price of the farm. The same will go for lots, and if farmers don’t do it themselves, the developing community will do it for us.
The salt in the wound for farmers is that the Ford government chose to release these proposals on April 6 for public comment with a deadline of June 5 to weigh in. To release something that has such a huge potential impact on every sector of agriculture during the spring planting rush is either ignorant or shameful of the part of the Ford government, and neither option is excusable for a government that is beginning to act like it takes the support of rural Ontario for granted.
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Stewart Skinner is a local business owner, former political candidate, and has worked at Queen’s Park as a Policy Advisor to the Minister of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs. He can be reached at stuskinner@gmail.com or on Twitter: @modernfarmer.
