More Greenbelt land could be opened to development, new housing minister says

Sep 08, 2023

Ontario's new housing minister Paul Calandra says development will continue on 14 sites removed from the Greenbelt last year as he carries out a wider review of the protected lands, while suggesting more properties could be opened to housing construction.

At a news conference Wednesday, Calandra said he has asked his ministry staff to lay out parameters for a review of the Greenbelt and hundreds of existing development applications that is "public, open and accountable."

The pending review, first announced by Premier Doug Ford on Tuesday, comes after two provincial watchdogs found last year's process for earmarking roughly 3,000 hectares of Greenbelt land for development favoured a small group of developers with direct access to a political staffer within the housing ministry.

Calandra said a nonpartisan provincial adjudicator will continue working with the owners of that land — which include some of the largest developers in Ontario — on their plans for building new homes on the sites. Calandra said he has asked the adjudicator to complete her work by the end of the year, at which point the agreements will be made public and subjected to the wider review process. He said he expects "shovels in the ground" on those sites by 2025.

"We want to ensure the highest level of accountability on those sites and future sites," Calandra said. He acknowledged that public trust in the government was damaged by the findings of Ontario's auditor general and integrity commissioner, who both issued scathing reports on the Greenbelt land swap.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids