Accelerating urban sprawl ‘critical’ election issue, say farmers


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Mere months after a provincial election in which Ontario’s farmers urged candidates to consider farmland preservation, the growers of our domestic food supply say slowing down the rapid pace of urban sprawl is also a “critical” issue in this fall’s municipal elections.

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And the speed at which Ontario’s best farmland is being paved over is only accelerating, according to new Census of Agriculture figures released by Statistics Canada.

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Just over a year ago, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) spoke of a crisis as it warned that 175 acres of prime agricultural land was being lost every day to urban development in Ontario.

But that calculation was based on figures up to 2016. Based on the newest numbers from 2016 to 2021, that figure is now 319 acres of Ontario farmland disappearing every day, the equivalent of nearly 800 hockey rinks.

“It is a huge leap — I think this should really worry people,” said OFA executive director Crispin Colvin, who farms in Middlesex County east of London. “What we’re losing is the most productive farmland in Canada.”

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“It’s a big concern,” said Kevin Girard, a fourth-generation Lakeshore farmer who grows just over 600 acres of cash crops in Essex County and Chatham-Kent. He describes as “crazy” the amount of rural real estate being gobbled up in recent years by “speculators and out-of-town investors” just in the local area.

OFA, the voice of 38,000 farm families across the province, wants voters to begin asking municipal candidates to commit to helping preserve one of Ontario’s biggest and most important industries. The challenge for farmers, said Colvin, is that less than two per cent of the population is engaged in the multibillion-dollar agricultural sector, which gives it a smaller political voice.

Candidates should be asked, for example, about how strongly they feel that municipalities set long-term growth plans and limits for urban boundaries, and then stick to them, rather than looking at those as “nothing more than a flexible guideline,” easily adjusted depending on whatever new housing or industrial development proposals come in.

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“We know they want to develop the outskirts of every town, but the outskirts of every town is farmland,” said Leo Guilbeault, another Lakeshore cash crop farmer and the current president of the Essex County Federation of Agriculture. A new subdivision “can eat up a 100-acre farm pretty quick … we’re losing three of those a day in Ontario,” he said.

“We can’t grow cheap food if we don’t have the land to grow food on,” said Guilbeault.

Lakeshore farmer Leo Guilbeault is shown at his home in this May 20, 2021, file photo. He is among Ontario growers worried over the rapid pace of disappearing farmland due to urban sprawl.
Lakeshore farmer Leo Guilbeault is shown at his home in this May 20, 2021, file photo. He is among Ontario growers worried over the rapid pace of disappearing farmland due to urban sprawl. Photo by Dan Janisse /Windsor Star

The pressure now on the province and municipalities to build more homes, and to do so faster by getting rid of ‘red tape’ has Ontario’s farmers even more concerned. OFA wants candidates grilled on their position on Minister’s Zoning Orders, a special tool increasingly being applied by the Ford government to accelerate urban development by bypassing a municipality’s typical planning process and reducing opportunities for community input.

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OFA’s constituency is rural by definition, but it also wants candidates pushing for more and better urban public transit as an essential ingredient to encourage densification and ease development pressure on farm areas.

Another OFA suggestion is to push for more municipal incentives to support new development within existing urban boundaries. That would help, for example, “encourage developers to look at rehabilitating a brownfield within the urban area as opposed to targeting a greenfield farm.”

Local governments are “the first defenders of farmland,” says the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.

“When an application comes forth that would dig up or pave over land that is currently growing food, fibre, fuel or flowers in order to build homes, a shopping plaza or new school, municipal councillors are the ones who get the first opportunity to say ‘yay’ or ‘nay’,” said OFA president Peggy Brekveld.

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According to farmer Colvin, whose background includes 16 years as a Thames Centre municipal councillor and a term as warden of Middlesex County, it comes down to the type of future we envision for our communities.

“How we live, that’s something we have to start thinking about,” he said. That might also mean focusing on building new factories and economic centres on the plentiful land Canada boasts that is not also its best land on which to grow foods domestically.

Spreading new urban development across South Ontario’s prime farmland “is the easiest thing to do, but it’s also the wrong thing to do,” said Colvin.

The Ontario Federation of Agriculture isn’t endorsing any candidates, but it wants voters to think about those issues ahead of casting their ballots on Oct. 24.

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New homes under construction near farmland just east of the Renaud Line in Lakeshore is shown in this file photo from May 20, 2021. Area farmland is increasingly being purchased by investors and speculators interested in developing those lands.
New homes under construction near farmland just east of the Renaud Line in Lakeshore is shown in this file photo from May 20, 2021. Area farmland is increasingly being purchased by investors and speculators interested in developing those lands. Photo by Dan Janisse /Windsor Star

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