Your Greenbelt controversy questions answered

The months-long Greenbelt controversy plaguing the Ontario government made waves this week following Steve Clark's resignation Monday as municipal affairs and housing minister.

In the days since, Paul Calandra has replaced Clark, the province has announced plans for a review, and that review could mean even more land removed from protected areas to develop homes.

CBC has received many audience questions about the ongoing situation. Here's what you wanted to know:

The Greenbelt is a vast 810,000-hectare area of protected farmland, forest and wetland stretching from Niagara Falls to Peterborough. It's meant to be permanently off limits to development.

The reason the government's Greenbelt plans are being called a land swap is because when the original decision was made in December 2022 to remove 2,995 hectares of protected lands to build housing, there were also 3,804 hectares added to the Greenbelt elsewhere.

The province has to offset removals from the Greenbelt because the Greenbelt Act prohibits an overall reduction in protected area. The province added 13 new river valley areas and lands in the Paris Galt Moraine, a unique landform northwest of Toronto. 

"Ostensibly, the goal is to provide developers with an opportunity to develop land currently in the Greenbelt," said Chris Cochrane, an associate professor and interim chair of the department of political science at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

At the same time, Cochrane said the goal is to add lands to the Greenbelt that are "less suitable for development" — meaning it could be difficult to implement infrastructure like sewers, water or electricity.

But, "the ultimate implementation of that plan didn't actually transpire as it was supposed to," he said.

As Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk revealed in her report, a small number of real estate developers used access to a high level staffer — Clark's former chief of staff Ryan Amato — to get the land they wanted opened up. 

Instead of assessing the infrastructure availability of potential sites, the team of bureaucrats making selections simply checked if they were adjacent to an already developed area, according to Lysyk's report.

Plus, environmental advocates say simply swapping Greenbelt lands defeats the purpose of the Greenbelt. But we'll get to that next.

In February 2022, a provincially commissioned housing task force found a shortage of land is not Ontario's issue when it comes to creating more housing. 

"Land is available, both inside the existing built-up areas and on undeveloped land outside greenbelts. We need to make better use of land," the report read.