The report says there are significant areas of the Escarpment not covered by the official plan that guides Escarpment land use, and that the plan allows for development that harms endangered species’ habitats
Ontario is not providing enough funding to allow proper protection of the Niagara Escarpment, where nearly all development permit applications have been approved in the last five years, the province’s auditor general says.
“It is obvious that the commission does not have sufficient resources for environmental monitoring to assess the state of the Escarpment,” auditor general Bonnie Lysyk wrote in her report earlier this month. In 1996, the province cut the commission’s funding by about one-third, Lysyk wrote. The commission’s budget saw cuts again in 2010-11, the next two years, and again in 2019-20.
Ford recently announced that he would remove 15 different areas from the protected Greenbelt lands so that 50,000 homes can be built, while adding acres elsewhere. That’s despite previous promises from both Ford and his housing minister that they wouldn’t touch the Greenbelt. For example, in 2019, an application was approved to take 20,000 square metres of earth, sand and gravel to level a field for a vineyard, but under the plan only topsoil can be used for that, the report said.
As part of the 2017 changes, the government also removed protecting an endangered species’ habitat as an explicit ground for refusing a development permit application.
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