Green Energy Act won't protect prime farmland from solar farms

Friday, May 1, 2009

© AgMedia Inc.

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

The Ontario Green Energy Act, in the final stages of becoming provincial law, won’t have a provision to protect prime farmland from solar farm development, says Simcoe North’s Member of Provincial Parliament.

Progressive Conservative Garfield Dunlop, a Progressive Conservative member, says the topic was raised but the provision was not among the amendments approved by the Legislature yesterday when the Liberal government moved the Bill to its third and final reading. The bill has now passed beyond the stage where such amendments are made, he says.

Amy Tan, a spokesperson with Deputy Premier and Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman’s office, says no formal amendment was put forward. The issue of building on prime farmland “is not something that necessarily needs to be in the legislation, it can be addressed later on through a regulation,” she says.

The law gives the provincial government the right to approve solar and wind projects over the objections of neighbours and the municipalities in which the projects will be located.

“Here the government’s talking about protecting green land and agricultural space and all this sort of thing with their Greenbelt legislation and then they turn around and right in the Greenbelt I suspect they’ll be able to put in solar farms,” Dunlop says.

Farm groups are resisting proposals to locate solar farms on agricultural land near Hawkesbury east of Ottawa, and near Belmont, south of London. The Ontario Federation of Agriculture objects to solar projects on good farmland but supports solar farm establishment in other locations.

Dunlop says he has constituents in his riding concerned about the issue too. “We have a case up in Simcoe County where we have a very large, very productive farm that apparently has been leased to some people; they’re going to put in a solar farm and it’s going to use up 260 acres of prime agricultural land,” he says. “I suspect that the solar farm will be built on this prime agricultural land now.”

Tan says third reading on the bill begins next week but there’s no timeline on how long the legislative debate will take.

Dunlop predicts the bill will be passed before June 4, the end of the government’s spring session. BF