Shortly before the 2025 budget release swallows all the attention in provincial politics, the Ontario government has announced a sprawling new bill aimed at addressing the province’s housing crisis. Municipal Affairs and Housing minister Rob Flack will, on Monday afternoon, introduce the Protecting Ontario by Building Faster and Smarter Act. The law itself will make more than two dozen changes to existing provincial laws, and further regulatory changes will address even more areas of provincial policy after further consultations with municipalities, developers, and other groups.
The two largest changes — and ones likeliest to attract the most opposition in Toronto — are: a substantial reduction in the ability of municipalities to impose inclusionary zoning rules in their cities near protected major transit station areas and a clear prohibition on municipalities adding any building requirements outside of the provincial building code.
Both of those measures target major policies in the provincial capital. Toronto had adopted rules requiring up to 22 per cent of gross floor area to be dedicated to affordable housing for a period of 99 years; provincial rules will limit that to 5 per cent of floor area for 25 years. Toronto has also had a Green Building Standard for more than a decade, but a developer coalition has challenged it in court on the grounds that provincial law doesn’t allow municipalities to exceed the provincial building code. That court case will likely be moot if and when Flack’s new bill is granted Royal Assent, nullifying both Toronto’s policies and similar building standards in other municipalities around the province.
These are two substantial policy changes that will earn the government a lot of criticism, and there will undoubtedly be more to say about them in the days and weeks to come. We can, however, at least predict what the likely result of these changes will be, which is more than we can say for much of today’s announcement. There are still so many unanswered questions about what the government is actually doing, or whether the changes will be more than marginal, that it’s difficult to say what the results will be.
Development charges have been a target of this government, homebuilders, and housing activists for years now, but the announced changes today are relatively modest. Instead of outright curbing these charges, the government is fiddling with the knobs and dials of bureaucratic machinery in ways that might see development charges fall, but we won’t know for sure until we see the actual regulatory changes.
The government already seems to be trying to lower expectations. On Monday morning, Minister Flack acknowledged that development charges are driving up housing costs (“We’ve heard time and time again how development charges are increasing the costs of new homes”) and that Queen’s Park likes it when municipalities reduce them. But he also reassured municipal leaders that they won’t be forced to reduce these charges: “We’re not asking anyone to do that.”
Except, of course, where they are: the government will change the law to exempt long-term care homes from development charges, as the province continues to need new LTC beds for its aging population. That aside, many of the other measures (changing how DCs are calculated, when they have to be paid, how the benefits of new infrastructure are allocated to different parties) are quite explicitly not intended to be a radical change — and the government could provide no estimate for how much, or even if, these measures would actually reduce DCs paid by developers.
Municipalities will still get an extra $400 million from Queen’s Park even as they are not compelled to reduce, or even freeze, development charges. That means $2.3 billion will flow from the province to cities over four years through a pair of funds.
The government also reiterated that it likes the idea of removing water and sewer service from municipal development charges and moving those services to a publicly-owned utility model. The Tories have been saying this for a while now and it’s been advocated by developers since at least 2022, so it’s unclear whether we should take this at all seriously.
Outside of the development charge file, there are some interesting measures announced today. The government will legalize public schools and in-school child-care centres in residentially-zoned areas, a sentence that’s mildly astonishing to need to write in 2025, but will help school boards deliver on their legal responsibilities. The government will also streamline some truly “minor variances,” cases where a proposal almost-but-not-quite qualifies under a city’s existing zoning rules. In cases where a project is only slightly (10 per cent or less) outside of existing setback rules, it would be allowed as of right instead of having to go through a lengthy and costly committee of adjustment process.
(Toronto’s committee of adjustment made headlines last year for fights over whether the City was actually allowing the housing that its own policies are intended to encourage; this new law might help in some of those cases.)
Both provincial and federal governments acknowledge we’re in a housing crisis, but the package of measures announced Monday doesn’t really meet the moment. Under the cover of the crisis, the government is giving the development industry in Toronto specifically two clear favours, but those measures will be of limited importance elsewhere in the province. Many of the other measures announced today might someday end up being more than marginal, but we’ll have to wait and see. As someone who hoped that the newly re-elected Ford government would at least use some of its political capital to take some big swings on the housing file, today’s announcement is a letdown on its own terms — and a worrying primer for the next four years.