The big question is, how long is long?
Last week, the city of Ottawa announced its willingness to release several hundred acres of prime farmland from the green belt for development and housing. The green belt is a large belt of very good farmland surrounding central Ottawa. It was created to keep development more centralized in the old city of Ottawa and prevent urban sprawl. Many of Ottawa’s residents are quite happy to have . . .
active agricultural green space surrounding their city.
Most of Canada’s large cities, (Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver, etc.) are built on the best farmland in Canada. Less than five per cent of Canada’s land mass is arable.
From the top of the CN Tower on a clear day, you can see over half of the number one land in Canada. Over half of that is now under buildings, roads, and parking lots.
Most of these large cities were started where they are because that was where the fur traders and timber merchants were strategically located, close to where large boats and ships could carry away the exports to foreign lands. The timber was floated down rivers to these soon to be cities much faster and with less cost than transport by teams of horses. The native trappers also used the rivers to transport their furs by canoe. These cities continued to grow because that was where the centres of commerce and jobs were.
Now many city dwellers want to spend time fishing, hunting, skiing, hiking or just driving and spending time at the cottage? Now that many people can work from home by computer and our internet access is improving an increasing number of people are happy to spend more time outside the cities and have a more relaxing lifestyle. At several future planning sessions held by our regional government it was clear that the two most wanted items in our county were better internet and cell service and improved roads.
We have seen too much short term economics that only look at who has the cheapest food and everything else today with very little thought of where, who, and how our food and other goods will come from tomorrow. Even our land is being mined out and like a bank account, when it’s gone it takes years to build it back up. There are millions of acres of beautiful places to build on and live in Canada that will never be useful to grow crops on. Even if a remote location may mean installation of a drilled well, a septic bed, and some road access work, the money saved on that lot compared to a serviced city lot will more than pay for a well with water that doesn’t need to be purified, a septic bed that lasts a lifetime or more and an access road.
We have too much short term planning with very little vision of what we want to leave for our grandchildren to fix. China has scouted the world and bought millions of acres of prime farmland in Canada, the USA, Africa, South America, and even Europe for future use when their own homeland cannot feed their ever growing population. That is long term planning.
It is and always was less expensive for developers to build on choice farmland than in rocky, mountainous cottage country; but remember that less than five per cent of Canada is any good to grow crops on. Let’s demand some long term planning.
Forty years ago, I was at a land use planning session in our county and a mayor wanted to change a strip of land on each side of the roads from green zone which is land protected for agriculture to white zone which can be used for housing or commerce. When the farmers and the CPTAQ (Quebec Farmland Protection Commission) objected the mayor said, “How much land do you need for the next 50 years?” Let’s plan ahead for a lot longer than 50, 100, or even 1,000 years. We are the caretakers of this earth for our descendants.
