Two London-area municipal politicians are proposing the creation of a belt of land throughout southern Ontario that maintains its primary role for agriculture.
The Ag Belt, as Kelly Elliott and Jared Zaifman, have called their idea so far, comes from the fact that the two municipal councillors – one urban, one rural – kept running into the issue of the loss of farmland in their work.
There’s a project in London looking at pushing the urban growth boundary. “There’s the issue of high speed rail and the issue of aggregate extraction,” said Elliott. “The common denominator is loss of farm land.”
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Zaifman is the Ward 14 councillor in the city of London. Some of that land includes farmland that was annexed by London, but has to be developed.
His ward borders Thames Centre where Elliott is a municipal councillor. She is running for the position of deputy mayor in the Oct. 22 municipal election.
She agreed that the announcement just before the election could help her election chances, but said that she and Zaifman have been working on this idea for nine or 10 months.
“We don’t want to stop development,” said Elliott. “Development and infrastructure have to happen. We want smart development and smart planning, so that the loss of farmland is not an afterthought in what we’re doing.”
Elliott and Zaifman say they have support for the idea from the four leading mayoral candidates in London.
Elliott said they hear regularly from people in agriculture that there needs to be better protection of farmland during development and land use planning processes.
Municipalities see farmland as an afterthought. “What’s another 50 acres?” she said is the usual response.
The idea is still in its infancy, so Elliott said there remains many details to sort out. She said it would have to involve the province and they have had some initial discussions with area Members of Provincial Parliament (MPPs). They are at this point thinking about the London area and its surrounding Middlesex County and nearby Oxford and Perth counties are areas with prime farmland that have encroachment from growing towns and cities.
“It needs to start in the grassroots, in the municipalities,” she said. “Then we could take it to the province.”
