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Ontario’s Disappearing Farmland

Mike Schreiner, leader of the Ontario Greens, was interviewed recently by Doreen Nicoll on her Substack feed, Small Change. Listen to it here.

The topic was the Ford government’s threat to Ontario’s farmland. Schreiner painted a stark and powerful picture of the damage being done by the Ford administration to our food security.

We thought it worth highlighting a few points and statistics from the interview. (This is our interpretation of the message rather than direct quotes from the interview.)

mike-schreiner

  • While Ford pontificates about standing up to Donald Trump, he’s doing nothing to protect our food security from threats from the US. Quite the opposite, in fact.
  • The US provides two-thirds of Canada’s vegetable imports and a third of our fruit. If this were to be used as a weapon, our major grocery stores have about a three-day reserve.
  • Our agriculture industry is a huge part of Ontario’s economy, both in terms of dollars and jobs. Yet while Ford fixates on the auto sector, he’s undermining our ability to feed ourselves.
  • Only 0.4% of Ontario is prime farmland. Yet since 1990, we’ve lost 2.8 million acres—18 percent—of our farmland. We continue to bleed it at a rate of around 320 acres a day. Once paved, it’s gone forever.
  • Ford seems to think that his pie-in-the-sky target of 1.5 million new homes by 2031 is synonymous with expensive, low-density sprawl that chews up farmland at an alarming rate, does nothing to address affordability, and puts a huge burden on municipalites by requiring new infrastructure: roads, sewers, fossil gas lines, fire stations, etc.
  • That infrastructure already exists in towns and cities that are being hollowed out by e-commerce, with shops and restaurants boarded up and buildings left empty and in disrepair. Why not prioritize the revitalization of our urban centres and leave farmland to the farmers?
  • The disaster that is Bill 5 gives Ford and his cabinet the exclusive and incontestible right to take us in the opposite direction from where we should be heading. In just one example, Ford’s proposed highway 413 would pave over 2000 acres of farmland, 400 acres of Greenbelt, and endanger over 100 waterways.

Ontario (and Canada as a whole) needs both energy and food security. Energy security from cheap and plentiful renewables rather than importing technology and refined uranium from the US. And food security by preserving our farmland and supporting our homegrown agricultural sector.

For more information, listen to the interview and check out Bill 21, Protect Our Food Act, 2025, a private member’s bill by Independent Haldimand—Norfolk MPP Bobbi Ann Brady and Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner.

Don Brown Recognized in the House of Commons

On January 29, MP Aslam Rana made the following statement in the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa.

“Mr. Speaker, on December 19, we had the great joy of celebrating one of my constituents, Mr. Donald Brown, as he turned 100 years young.

“Mr. Brown is a treasure and inspiring member of our community. It was a true pleasure to welcome him to the office to talk about the environment and the clean energy topics that he remains deeply passionate about.

“I am delighted to stand here in the House of Commons to wish Mr. Brown a happy belated 100th birthday and another year filled with happiness and health. I send my congratulations to Mr. Brown.”

H350 Focus Group

On Wednesday, August 6th, we held a meeting at the Norman Pinky Lewis Recreation Centre, along with representatives from partner organizations Environment Hamilton, Stop Sprawl, the Wilderness Committee and the Council of Canadians. The objective was to build on the momentum generated by the Kill Bill 5 rally at Hamilton City Hall and to brainstorm how to raise our profile through campaigns that would have greater visibility in the Greater Hamilton Area.

This was the first of a series of meetings that will refine the ideas that were captured. When these have been defined, we’ll post the details to this website. We’ll also put out a call for volunteers to the wider community.

In anticipation of this, if you are interested in taking action on the climate crisis and you have any of the following skill sets, we’d love to hear from you!

Art and graphic design • audio-visual technology • music (playing an instrument, singing, harmonies) • dance/choreography • theatre • website development.

Should city buses be free during heat waves?

Our objective of having the HSR provide free transit during heatwaves is gathering momentum. Check out these recent stories in:

Imagine…

It’s not just the provincial government that’s the problem. Under the Trump-imposed NATO defence spending target, Mark Carney has suggested that it would require an additional $45 to $50 billion a year to comply. Even at the lower figure, that’s $1121 for every person in Canada.

Pro-rating that to Hamilton’s current population would result in a boost to the City budget of $638,510,525 a year. That’s more than a quarter (26.6%) of the $2.4 billion tax-supported budget for 2025.

It would be a fascinating exercise to contemplate what additional services could be provided for that amount of additional funding.

The Kill Bill 5 rally at City Hall

The Kill Bill 5 rally at Hamilton City Hall was a great success! It touched on multiple areas that will inevitably be impacted, should Bill 5 not be repealed, including climate change, Indigenous self-governance, the housing crisis, labour and human rights, and the very essence of our democracy.

  • Courtney Skye: Protect the Tract
  • Sandy Shaw & Robin Lennox: MPPs, Ontario NDP
  • Marit Stiles: Leader, Ontario NDP
  • Mike Schreiner: Leader, Green Party of Ontario
  • Craig Cassar: Hamilton City Councillor, Ward 15
  • Katie Krelove: Wilderness Committee, Ontario Campaigner
  • Anthony Marco: President, Hamilton & District Labour Council (HDLC)
  • Mike Wood: ACORN Hamilton

There was a sense of excitement at the coalition that’s starting to emerge around Bill 5, from activist groups to municipal and provincial politicians. We at Hamilton 350 are planning to convene some planning meetings to set goals and objectives for the rest of the year. We welcome input and participation from everyone in this process, members of allied organizations and individuals alike. Keep your eye on this space and on our Instagram account for more details. 

Check out media coverage from the Hamilton Spectator, CBC Hamilton, and CHCH News.

Videos from our YouTube channel

We regret that we don’t have a video of the powerful and uplifting speech given by Mike Schreiner, leader of the Green Party of Ontario.

Photos from the rally

The climate crisis is on track to destroy capitalism

Shortly after our recent Action Update on the effects of the climate crisis on the costs of insurance, this article appeared in The Guardian.

In it, Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, said that “without insurance, which is already being pulled in some places, many other financial services become unviable, from mortgages to investments”.

The core business of the insurance industry is risk management and it has long taken the dangers of global heating very seriously. In recent reports, Aviva said extreme weather damages for the decade to 2023 hit $2tn, while GallagherRE said the figure was $400bn in 2024. Zurich said it was “essential” to hit net zero by 2050.

He goes on to say that the idea that billions of people can just adapt to worsening climate impacts is a “false comfort”, he said: “There is no way to ‘adapt’ to temperatures beyond human tolerance … Whole cities built on flood plains cannot simply pick up and move uphill.”

At 3C of global heating, climate damage cannot be insured against, covered by governments, or adapted to, Thallinger said: “That means no more mortgages, no new real estate development, no long-term investment, no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.”

Lessons from the California Wildfires

The catastrophic fires in Los Angeles are a stark warning to Hamiltonians that climate change is real and getting rapidly worse. Climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time last year, supercharging extreme weather and causing “misery to millions of people”. It can devastate even wealthy cities, not just the global south. 

It’s a lesson we should have learned with the destruction of Fort McMurray in Alberta forcing the evacuation of its more than 80,000 residents. It should have also been obvious last summer when Jasper went up in flames in a few hours. 

And while we’ve so far avoided catastrophic fires here in Hamilton, we’ve tasted the smoke more than once and suffered some of the toxic air that cuts our lifespan. The 2023 wildfires across the country burned far more than any previous year, six times the average. But last year actually torched the second largest amount of forest without much media attention.

Los Angeles is a stark example that most of our homes, especially the newer ones, are a bonfire waiting to happen. Canadian journalist John Valliant, the acclaimed author of Fire Weather, a detailed account of the Fort McMurray fire, warned this week that “if you start looking around at your home, you’ll realize that petroleum and its products are everywhere. And these are really, really flammable.” He points to “vinyl siding and Formica counters and polyurethane stuffing and the rubber tires and the gas tanks in the garage”. These and other materials resulted in nothing left but the foundations in five minutes.

The extreme weather that has driven the Los Angeles fires has been felt repeatedly in southern Ontario, especially with regards to flooding. Last year, the Toronto area and parts of Burlington were inundated several times. The costs were added up at the end of December by insurance officials: “Extreme weather hit Canada hard in 2024, setting a record of $8.1 billion in insurable claims, coupled with an additional $24 billion in uninsurable damage incurred by governments, businesses and individuals.” 

They went on to explain that “just over 10 years ago, insurable losses in Canada hovered around $700 million a year, less than 1/10th of this year’s claims. These more recent effects are the tail end of a longer-term trend – 40 years ago, Canada experienced 20 natural disasters a decade, which have now grown to 138.”

Climate leader Bill McKibben warns that the California fires, like the hurricanes in Florida last fall, put enormous strains on the property insurance system we all depend on. “The great casualty in the month’s ahead may be the insurance system of the world’s fifth biggest economy, which is going to buckle under the strain of these losses,” he predicted. We all will pay.

And there’s more to come. “These fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decades: compound climate disasters that, when they occur simultaneously, produce much more damage than they would individually,” says prominent American meteorologist Eric Holthaus.

Vaillant points to “a real moral cowardice” from governments, media and the corporate elite who have failed to deal with “the buildup of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane” from the burning of oil, coal and natural gas. “This kind of blind — frankly, suicidal — loyalty to the status quo of keeping fossil fuels preeminent in our energy system is creating an increasingly difficult situation and unlivable situation.” 

Protests work!

In it’s article “Here are some fantastically uplifting stories from 2024“, The Hamilton Spectator highlighted the activities of “the Dundas Four”, Hamilton 350’s elders who were arrested at the RBC branch in Dundas in March this year.

Here’s an extract from the article:

Aged agitators take on banks and big oil

A group of seniors, canes in hand, left court in November after pleading guilty to trespassing; each fined $250 for an act of civil disobedience. The climate activists — calling themselves the Dundas Four — were arrested protesting RBC’s investment in oil companies inside the King and Sydenham branch in March. The manager asked them to leave. They politely refused.

The Dundas Four — three of them pictured here — pleaded guilty to trespassing during a climate change protest. 

The Hamilton Spectator file photo

Developers fretting over potential hit to projected profits

Developers are clearly worried that Hamilton’s firm urban boundary is going to affect their projected profit windfalls. See the story Developers want Hamilton mayor to help fast-track urban-expansion project in The Hamilton Spectator, 20 December 2024.

As “Nancy”, one of the commenters in the article, puts it:

“Land speculators who are attempting to force the expansion of Hamilton’s Urban boundary onto Prime farmland would profit enormously from expansion if their land holdings get converted from rural to urban zoning thru an MZO. Hamilton taxpayers and would be home buyers would be the losers.

“Hamilton currently has a 3.8 billion dollar gap in infrastructure spending. Our roads, bridges, water mains, sewers, rec centers are all crumbling because we do not have the money or tax base to pay for our already sprawling infrastructure.

“The way out of this mess is to build middle density housing in existing neighbourhoods all across the city, which is what will be achieved through recent city-wide zoning changes. Adding more tax paying residents to existing neighbourhoods not only boosts the tax base but promotes renewal of existing, aging infrastructure without the need to build more roads, sewers Etc and add to that 3.8 billion dollar deficit.”

Remember also that this kind of development is precisely what the Ford Conservatives had in mind when they rammed Bill 165 (the absurdly named “Keeping Energy Costs Down” Act) through against the recommendation of the OEB. Rather than seizing the opportunity to look to the future and supply new subdivisions with cleaner, cheaper energy through heat pumps, Enbridge would be subsidized to install soon-to-be obsolete fossil gas pipelines at the expense of all Enbridge customers, with developers providing gas furnaces in new builds.