Speakers:

Dan Leeming is co-founder of Planning Partnerships and has worked throughout Ontario and the U.S. to promote liveable communities

John Ambrose is an engineer and investment advisor with a deep interest in geothermal

Victor Doyle was lead planner of Ontario’s Greenbelt Plan and has documented the ruinous cost of sprawl

Ontario needs 1.5 million new homes and it is easy to see how the rush to action can take precedence over questions like where to build, what designs to use, and how to make our new homes and communities sustainable and liveable.

Dan Leeming concluded his presentation by stating that climate change is real and accelerating – and new building can either help create a way out or lock us into a worsening future. What is currently being promoted in Ontario is a huge missed opportunity.

Subdivision sprawl creates over 50% of our greenhouse gas emissions – for heating, transportation, and building materials. New communities can be designed for increased density and walking – straight roads that take you where you want to get to instead of endless loops designed for cars. According to the Lancet medical journal, climate change threatens all health improvements over the last 60 years and walking is the best promoter of public health.

While EVs are a big step forward – the Tesla model Y is now the world’s best selling car – it doesn’t help if every house requires three vehicles because communities have been designed to rely on private vehicles.

Urban designs can feature central parks for easy accessibility, nearby shops, and shuttle transportation. And also incorporate the idea of embedded carbon vs operational carbon – concrete and brick used in construction generate very high levels of greenhouse gases.

Homes can use less energy – heat pumps, induction stoves, air sealing with heat recovery ventilation, on demand hot water, high performance windows and doors. 

And energy can be provided from multiple sources – solar and wind, batteries, and back-up generators – even from coupled EVs that provide power during peak periods.

In answer to a question, Dan stated that up-to-date Official and Secondary Plans can include contemporary urban design principals and neighbouring communities have them in place. Unfortunately, the County does not.


John Ambrose concluded with a picture of happy faces – people living in a safe, affordable home, isolated from climate events – buildings that are a sanctuary for neighbours. He compared it with the situation in Texas, in February 2021, when a winter ice storm caused $195 billion in damage, natural gas electricity plants failed, the electricity grid failed, and 21 people died.

The difference is geothermal. Heating and cooling our buildings makes up a third of our energy consumption and it could be done for free while emitting no greenhouse gases. Twelve feet down, the earth is at a constant temperature of 12°C – relatively warm in the winter and cool in the summer – heat can be ‘pumped’ into and out of the ground with an ‘efficiency’ of 400% (because energy is being moved not converted) to provide year-round comfort.

Geothermal can be designed for a single building, connected buildings, districts, even towns. John gave examples of:

• Picton’s new library (12,000 sq ft) – six geothermal wells would have saved 38 tonnes of CO2 per year, $20,000 a year in utility costs, and provided a life cycle value of $9 million.
• Newfoundland’s Corner Brook Hospital (600,000 sq ft) – 375 geothermal wells provide heating and cooling for the whole hospital and save about 30,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.
• Picton’s Queen Elizabeth School, if repurposed with geothermal, would require 18 geothermal wells, save 120 tonnes of CO2 per year, $60,000 a year in utility costs, and provide a life cycle value of $25 million.

Again, it is another missed opportunity. Geothermal is not part of Ontario’s Energy Plan. It was not incorporated into Picton’s new library and it is unclear it will be incorporated into either Picton’s new hospital or its new Long-Term-Care facility. 


Victor Doyle’s bottom line was that low-density, car-dependent urban sprawl – whether residential, industrial or retail – does not pay. Ontario has an over $100 billion (in 2012) infrastructure deficit caused by too many kilometers of pipes, wires, sidewalks, roads, and curbs all requiring upkeep and maintenance. Asking for help from other levels of government simply ignores the fact that there is only one level of taxpayer.

Victor’s key message to municipal politicians is that the most important decision you’ll ever make is about planning your community and its infrastructure. Once land is paved over it’s forever and taxpayers are committed to its maintenance and repair for ever. He recommended a book, ‘Perverse Cities’ by Pamela Blais.

While Ontario is a huge province, most of us live in just 10% of it – in southern Ontario – and we have to do a better job of managing what land is left. Its use is intimately tied to environmental sustainability with numerous externalities: worsening human health, increased greenhouse gases, traffic congestion (costs $10 billion a year in the golden horseshoe in lost productivity), lack of the needed range of housing options including affordable, loss and degradation of the environment including ecological services (estimated to be $85 billion a year), and loss of agricultural land (Ontario is losing 325 acres of farmland a year while the agricultural/food sector is the third biggest employer accounting for 750,000 jobs).

Numerous studies have been done to demonstrate the ruinous consequences of low-density sprawl: Calgary (32% lower cost by building 25% higher density), Ottawa (all low density options lose money), Peel (ditto). And there are now sophisticated modeling tools being deployed by private sector consultants, eg, Minicozzi, who has studied Guelph and Hamilton and showed only medium and high density development are fiscally sustainable. IBM and Siemens have looked at Portland Oregon and London, UK, to help local politicians and planners to see better visions for how our communities might be planned and built.