The Ontario government introduced new measures to reduce the regulatory burden on new homes, something the province desperately needs as pitiful housing starts in Canada’s largest province drag down national homebuilding stats. The Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, introduced by Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Rob Flack on Thursday, contains measures intended to reduce the cost and time it takes to build homes in Ontario, as well as other measures, such as prohibiting the removal of car lanes to build bike lanes.
Bill 60 will, when passed, grant the government substantial new powers to issue planning decisions even if they don’t conform with other provincial policies. The minister will now have the ability to issue approvals for projects that wouldn’t otherwise be allowed under the provincial policy statement. Basically, provincial policies will apply to municipalities, but not the province.
(In a technical briefing, public servants were careful to insist that rules protecting the Greenbelt are not affected by these changes.)
The government will also have more flexibility in how it writes ministerial zoning orders, the notorious tool this government has used much more than its predecessors. It will also implement a review of Ontario’s building code to eliminate inefficiencies, though the government says not to expect any major policy changes — advocates hoping that Ontario will revisit its current policies on staircases, among the most conservative in the developed world, are out of luck.
The government’s proposals, incremental as they are, contain some interesting nuggets all the same. Some proposals could amount to a substantial uploading of municipal planning powers to the province, along with other measures to give the province a larger role. The government wants to explore the idea of standardized official plans for municipalities, saying that these key planning documents have gotten too large, too unwieldly, and too bespoke between the province’s 444 communities. (Ontario’s municipalities are currently not required to agree on how to measure the height of a building.)
The province also wants to create a system to directly track planning and building applications at a provincial level, which implies some level of centralization. Even if the permits are issued municipally, making sure the province is in the loop would allow the government to start collecting data on what’s being built, where.
Municipalities might bristle at the idea of more provincial intrusion in a core aspect of their competence. If so, they’re going to positively hate my suggestion: the province should go further and assume control of nearly all land-use decisions in Ontario.
There are two major problems with the status quo. The first is that, ultimately, it’s wildly difficult for the province to meaningfully change land-use policy because it has farmed out the actual grunt work of approvals and permitting to municipalities that have their own staff, political priorities, and economic interests. The province built the legal edifice of the planning system, but it has grown so large and complicated that it now has a life of its own and is resistant to changes. The McGuinty government first amended the Planning Act to nominally legalize secondary suites nearly 20 years ago; the Ford government is still, a generation later, tweaking the rules to make basement apartments and garden suites easier to build. And that’s for the paragon of so-called “gentle density,” the kind of timid incrementalism that should be easy.
If land-use planning were itself unimportant, then it wouldn’t matter that Queen’s Park can’t always get what it wants. But from modest beginnings after World War II (when provinces were compelled to legislate comprehensive planning so they could access federal housing funds) planning rules have become something they were never intended to be: a comprehensive filter through which nearly all economic and demographic growth must pass. That includes housing, warehouses, housing, office towers, housing, factories, oh and by the way did I mention housing? There’s a reason the “housing theory of everything” is taken seriously: because across the English-speaking world we have broadly the same planning laws, and with very few exceptions the same planning attitudes rule the day locally — and so English-speaking countries all share a housing crisis more severe than the ones that plague other countries.
To reiterate an argument I’ve made before: it’s simply obvious, from a federal or provincial perspective, that economic and demographic growth is broadly a good thing. The same cannot be said at the municipal level, where new people mean new services and new expenses. The answer to this dilemma is for the province to take over as much of the land use planning process as makes sense.
Standardized official plans are one step. The next step is standardizing zoning rules, so that a home that’s allowed to be built in Toronto is also legal in Mississauga, or Sudbury, or Cornwall. This would guarantee alignment with other policies the federal and provincial governments hope will ease the housing crisis, like mass-produced modular homes. It’s simply not possible right now to build modular housing at scale; even if a developer wanted to, there’s no guarantee local rules would allow them.
Municipalities can still have a role in the planning process, albeit a much reduced one. They can be allowed to draw the maps of where and how those rules apply, subject to provincial approval and within clear, growth-oriented provincial rules (much the same way official plans are approved today). This process would be simpler for municipalities (who, incidentally, would get to blame the province for the changes their communities would see). And of course, municipalities would still have to plan the things they own: the parks, community centres, libraries, and so on that they operate.
Progressives could rightly object to the idea of giving Doug Ford (who has not once, not twice, but three times threatened to open up the Greenbelt to development) this kind of power over the entire province. The good news for them is that Ford has expressly allied himself with the NIMBYs of the province in opposing the idea of housing abundance, so there’s no real danger of this occurring. But the fundamental tension between what Ontario says it wants and what the planning system actually allows will remain when the Ford government is eventually gone, and his successor will face the same problem.
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