Bill 23 only seems to promote the most expensive and least sustainable housing options, while making housing more expensive for everyone especially in rural areas.
Bill 23 puts undue burden on rural municipalities that would force them to raise property tax and thus make housing less affordable.
There are much cheaper and more sustainable housing options that can significantly reduce tax burdens of rural and agricultural municipalities while significantly increasing farm product output. Such as Homestead Farming.
Based on what I heard at Grey County Council on 2022-11-10
Bill 23 removes many conservation authority roles, which would necessitate municipalities providing those roles in house, meaning they would have to hire additional staff, and raise taxes as a result.
Bill 23 has stipulation to waive development fees of development which are 80% or less of market value, that would reduce municipal incomes by as much as 30% and thus raise the taxes a similar amount.
In Grey County affordability is based on income and not market value, as these market value based affordability metrics are not affordable to most people.
From my own understanding.
While I understand this Bill may make some condo developers with ties to the premier wealthy. Urban housing options are much more expensive to build and maintain than their rural counterparts, because they require municipal services such as electrical, water, sewage, and possibly even natural gas.
Urban housing also greatly increases load on municipal services related to policing, mental health and addiction services. It also increases the burden on already stressed rural areas for providing ever more food, wood and rural products with fewer people and ever higher cost of inputs. In Vancouver their affordable urban housing Single Residence Occupancy (SRO) program is effectively a euthanasia program with more than one occupant per unit dieing per year. Do checkout the footnote links for more extensive anaylsis and explanation of the science of why this occurs. 1
The majority of these urban housing builds will likely be abandoned within decades as we run out of fossil energy, and growing food using tractors and transporting it with trucks to stock urban grocery shelves becomes unviable. 2 Roughly 90% of people will then need to move to rural areas to grow their own food or use the Federal government’s euthanasia services. If we wait too long, it may be too late to transition the majority of urban dwellers to rural areas, and they may not like the euthanasia option, in which case things may get rather unsightly in urban and peri-urban areas.
Promoting urban growth at the expense of rural is famine waiting to happen. Holodomor famine that killed millions was a result of reducing rural farmers. Great Chinese Famine killed over 20 million was due to gross mismanagement of agriculture. And neither of those famines had to deal with reduced energy inputs.
The Great Famine of 1315-1317 is a better analog, as they had reduced solar energy for a couple years, about 10-25% of people died. Though considering fossil fuels once done are done, it’ll be more than a couple years, and civilization ending energy deficits can have mortality rates as high as 94%, typically over the course of 6-7 years, or until carrying capacity is reached.
Building more urban homes is squandering limited fossil and mineral resources into what in future will be little more than massive scrap yards.
Throughout most of Ontario a person only need between 1-2 hectares (5-10ha for family of 5) of land to meet all of their food, firewood and shelter needs, and have some surplus to trade for products at the market.
Wigwams (hot tents) have been used for thousands of years in this area and are an appropriate, accessible and affordable housing option. They do not require any municipal services, minimizing property tax burden. And they free up much time for agricultural and forestry work. Given people have enough land to grow their own firewood, they can also grow their own lumber to upgrade their homes to a log house, or w/e they deem fit as means allow.
Admittedly simply letting people have enough land to meet their basic needs is not going to put money in the pockets of condo developers that are linked to Doug Ford. However it will drastically increase their survival chances considering the current fossil energy deficits are only going to increase.
If the provincial government truly cared about providing affordable housing, then it would open the door to sustainable rural homestead farming.3
Perhaps the condo developers would be interested in building village infrastructure instead, such as a library, meeting house, maker space, and-or other community buildings for a village of around 300-360 people. There are ways of organizing the land and people that would be viable in a post fossil energy world 4.
Respectfully if the provincial government wants to build urban concentration camps where it will be easier to euthanize people that’s their prerogative, though a more open and frank discourse would be appreciated. Please stop pretending urban development is "affordable", "sustainable" or anything of the sort when all evidence points to the contrary.
Also please limit these frankly suicidal urban growth plans to the GTA area if you really need to satisfy those condo developers or WEF depopulation targets. We don’t need Bill 23 raising property taxes while adding no discernable benefit.
If the province would be willing to change course or at least considering adding a sustainable option such as rural homestead farming lots, then that would be a kind and compassionate thing to do, and there will be more people in the future, and we could save more knowledge and technology after fossil energy becomes uneconomical.
There is more than enough land in Ontario for every Ontarian to have a permaculture homestead farm. The main thing we need is people with hearts open and kind enough to be willing to give each person that wishes it a homestead farm so they can meet their own food/firewood needs and produce surplus for others.
No food, no life.
Please accept a delegation from Grey County.
Thank you.