Archive for May, 2010
John Laforet Campaign Community Townhall Planned for June 14th
I am pleased to announce that I will be hosting a community townhall meeting for Ward 43 voters at Jack Miner School (407 Guildwood Parkway) at 7:00pm on Monday June 14th.
It will serve as an opportunity for residents of our community to come together, share ideas and concerns and talk about the priorities the next Ward 43 Councillor must address.
I will speak specifically about Toronto Hydro’s offshore wind proposal, transit priorties for Scarborough and addressing the City’s fiscal woes as a means of addressing the growing tax burden facing residents.
Please bring your questions and thoughts!
You can RSVP by calling 647 724 0600 or emailing campaign@laforet.ca.
All are welcomed and encouraged to attend.
No Comments »Sprawl Wins: Markham Council Votes Against ‘Food Belt’
It amazes me that in 2010 that we’re still allowing low density urban sprawl to eat up the rich agricultural lands of Ontario. The soil around the GTA is some of the best, yet cookie cutter homes and the infrastructure needed to service these homes win time after time. There are a lot of problems with urban sprawl that demonstrate the incomplete thinking that goes into the approval process. As a general rule, where one is building housing, one ought to create jobs, local opportunities to shop, and develop the kinds of public infrastructure able to service the new community. The problem is they don’t and instead create massive, multi generational headaches and increased costs for all levels of government to deliver services.
As treeless communities pop up where food used to be grown, two cars appear in the driveway where trackers used to plow, to allow the new homeowners to get to work on low capacity roads built for their use. Effective public transit isn’t an option, fire, police and ambulance coverage becomes more stretched and demand for new schools and hospitals that is based on distance and geography and not capacity occurs.
For this reason, I was hopeful when Markham Councillors began discussing creating a ‘food belt’ to encourage intensification as part of new development proposals (more people living on a smaller footprint) and the preservation of local farm lands for future generations. This is visionary municipal leadership and sadly today it failed 7-6 in a tight, hard fought vote.
Opponents pointed out that food grown in Markham is rarely consumed by people in Markham. The solution isn’t to not grow food in Markham, but instead to find ways to better market this food to the local community through farmers markets, deals with local grocery stores and for use by local government agencies (daycares, schools and hospitals). I personally won’t buy in season non Ontario produce when I shop for my groceries, and with enough pressure large grocery stores could be encouraged to buy local first and import only when demand exceeds local supply.
Much of my beloved Scarborough was built on agricultural lands at a time when subdivisions were all the craze. I can attest as someone whose grown up and Scarborough, and loves my City that residents do suffer from a lack of service and infrastructure our population is worthy of and geography and population spread is part of that challenge even though we are home to 600,000 people. I do like to think however our leaders did a better job, with less expertise or experience to guide them over fifty years ago than the outer suburbs are doing today.
Scarborough may not have preserved farm land, but we have protected our green space and are by far the greenest part of Toronto. I must say as a resident, I am forever thankful to those leaders that sought to protect our ravines, and large swaths of urban forest for future generations, and feel for those in Markham who were hoping their Councillors would act to set their community apart from the rest, and develop a responsible, sustainable development policy that would ensure future generations food security.
Food security and local agriculture are both extremely important factors that have not been addressed head on for some time. There seems to be a view that someone else will grow the food to feed cities and the Canadian census data showing farming in decline is routinely ignored. The short term gains don’t even come close to the long term negative impacts here and seven Markham Councillors did their residents a real disservice with their opposition to preserving farm land within the GTA.
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