MidlandToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is regarding the issue of development on Ontario's greenbelt.
The government's goal is to build one million homes in the next 12 months and another million the following 12 months for a total of two million homes to house the millions of homeless and newcomers. None will be affordable.
It takes between 20 and 30 trees to frame and clad one 2,000 sq. ft. home.
That means they will need between 40 to 60 million trees to build 2 million homes.
There are about 1,600 trees for every hectare; so far this year at least 4 million hectares have burned. That is about 6.4 billion trees, gone, with the equivalent of 64 homes per hectare. That is worth about 256 million homes worth of trees.
The season is not over for 2023.
From 2000 to 2022 there have been 2.2 million hectares of forests burned in each of those years for a total of 6.6 million hectares or 6 billion trees, the equivalent of 140 million homes.
So Canada has lost the amount of lumber required to build 400 million homes since 2000. Then there is the lumber required to rebuild the homes and businesses lost to the fires.
There is no data on how many buildings lost to fires so far, but thousands have had to flee for their lives as others have died.
Lumber will become very expensive in the coming years adding to housing costs; newspapers and books will be more expensive leading to company failures.
A forest can absorb as much as 90 tons of CO2 per hectare each year. That means Canada/the world have lost the capability of capturing 14 billion tons of CO2 each year so far. That is why our green belts and wetlands are far more important than ever.
Our forest fires have sent 300 million tons of CO2 into the air, choking lungs, burning eyes, killing people and wildlife. We contributed to 25% of all global emissions.
This will change Canada's weather pattern. We might end up with a huge desert. Green belts / wetlands are far more important now than ever.
And our federal / provincial governments have failed again with no preventative forest fire plans. The only provincial plan is to destroy green belts and wetlands.
A police investigation is definitely needed on the Ford government's actions.
Brian Mellor
Midland
