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Nearly half of 2 million acres of land in Ontario is protected under the Greenbelt legislation is farmland. Currently the province is holding town hall meetings around the Golden Horseshoe asking for feedback. Tomorrow evening, a town hall will be held in St. Catharines and Niagara’s farmers and mayors have a lot to say about it.

For the past decade 850 000 acres of Ontario farmland has been protected under the Greenbelt laws. Austin and John Kirkby and their family have been growing grapes and tender fruit in Niagara-on-the-Lake for generations, they want to see the agricultural land protected. “Problem is you can’t protect the land without protecting the farmer.”

But Austin says some of the rules are too rigid, like the one has designated road ditches in front of their house- a river, which means they can’t put up a farm building within 30 metres of a ditch a drain or farm swale. The only place they can put a building is right in their vineyard. Growers say the rules are so onerous that they can’t put up a farm building within 120 metres of a woodlot without doing an environmental assessment that would cost about $20 000.

The Niagara Peninsula has some of the best growers, climate and land in the the country but parcels, about 2000, are under 10 acres. These rules don’t give growers a lot of room to move.

It hasn’t given small towns like Grimsby a lot of room either. Because of Greenbelt the town only has about 600 hectares of land left for development. Mayor Bob Bently has taken that issue right to Queen’s Park. “I said come over to the window because what you’re legislation has just done is turn small town Ontario into this, high rise buildings all over the place in Toronto.”

They held a ground breaking this afternoon for the first high rise building near the lake and Mayor Bentley says because of the Greenbelt legislation you can expect more high rise because small towns like Grimsby have no where to grow but up.