PC housing Bill limits environmental protections, scraps complete communities but farmers win key fight against developers

By Rachel Morgan  Local Journalism Initiative Reporter At Queen’s Park Thursday, farmers won a crucial battle, pushing back decades of relentless growth that has seen much of Southern Ontario transformed into one of the world’s largest stretches of urban landscape. This connected built form that spans the Greater Golden Horseshoe arcing around Lake Ontario has been shaped over the past 150 years, as agricultural life was swallowed to make way for an industrial future. Despite the victory by farmers Thursday, to prevent agricultural land from being easily divided for further development, the PCs’ proposed Bill 97 still promises to erase almost two decades of planning progress that combatted the sprawl that had defined Canada’s only mega-region, where approximately one quarter of the country’s population resides. Since the late 1800s a…

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