Last week, Ontario’s energy and mines minister Stephen Lecce introduced Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, at Queen’s Park. It’s a safe bet that “Protect Ontario” will be the theme of this year’s spring budget, and the words “Protect Ontario” will feature prominently in every major piece of legislation the government brings forward, at least in the first half of the year. The Tories are nothing if not single-minded about their branding.
Bill 5 has 10 separate schedules, some of which make minor changes to previous legislation, while others are more major. The government is proposing to repeal the current provincial endangered species law (the Endangered Species Act of 2007) entirely and replace it with a law (the Species Conservation Act, 2025) that it says will allow critical projects to be approved more promptly and with greater certainty. The Ford government is also giving itself the power to limit the exposure of Ontario’s critical infrastructure to international bad actors — it named the People’s Republic of China in the briefing documents posted online, but the potential list certainly doesn’t end there.
One of the most novel and potentially farthest-reaching proposals, however, is the power to create so-called “special economic zones” in the province of Ontario where the government would have the broad power to exempt both designated projects and their proponents from requirements under either existing laws or regulations — including municipal bylaws. In plain English, the law would give the minister of economic development (currently Vic Fedeli) the power to designate a part of Ontario where specific projects and companies would not be bound by the same laws that apply outside of those special economic zones.
The government’s briefing document names mines as one possible use for these powers. It also cites critical infrastructure. Here the proposal to override municipal bylaws is a bit of a tell: many of the largest mines the government is talking about, particularly the Ring of Fire, aren’t subject to municipal bylaws or regulation anyway, because they’re in the vast unorganized territories of northern Ontario — places where no municipal council or local board has any authority to overrule in the first place. If the Tories were narrowly tailoring this power for the Ring of Fire specifically or even mines more generally, the municipal bylaw clause would be superfluous; since it’s in the text of the bill, it’s not a crazy inference that the power is intended to be used more broadly.
This isn’t coming out of nowhere. The Ford government acknowledged Ontario’s planning and permitting regimes as obstacles to meeting economic priorities in deed long before doing so in word. You can look back to the ill-fated “open for business” bylaws proposed late in 2018 and hastily removed from Bill 66 when it went to committee in 2019 in the face of substantial backlash. You can look at the government’s fondness for ministerial zoning orders, allowing it to sidestep local municipal planning rules entirely. (MZOs are used at a level the previous Liberal government never dreamed of, and it remains a small historical joke that the Liberals left this legislative loaded gun on the mantlepiece for the Tories to fire.) Or you can even look at the odd case of Elgin County two years ago where the government re-wrote municipal boundaries to eliminate some permitting steps for a Volkswagen battery plant. These policies all look different and do different things, but the common thread is an impatience with the interlocking system of planning, building, and permitting rules that govern economic development in Ontario, and the government’s willingness to use whatever shortcuts it has at hand to cut through thickets of red tape. Special economic zones would just be a newer, more comprehensive example.
That VW battery plant in St. Thomas may be the likeliest example of the kind of non-mine project the government is thinking about, though it’s worth saying that there’s a live debate among the broader conservative movement that imagines founding whole new cities de novo where both business and governments can start from a blank sheet of paper. Some within the American Republican party want the Trump administration to create “freedom cities” on federally-owned lands where government and business can test different regulatory ideas at a small scale before potentially bringing them nationwide.
The association with the Trump administration may rightly cause some revulsion at the idea but there’s a non-crazy argument that SEZs have been a crucial tool for major reforms in other jurisdictions, most obviously China. When the rat’s nest of rules and regulations is too dense to realistically attack at a national level, SEZs allow governments to create pockets of experimentation without destabilizing the entire system. For a less wonky analogy, think of the way Major League Baseball tests out changes in the minor leagues, from pitch clocks to “robo umps,” before they’re rolled out in the majors.
There’s no need to dwell on that argument in Ontario right now because a) it’s extremely speculative and b) the Ford government has struggled even to make relatively modest changes in the places where it had a free hand to experiment – such as in Peel Region where it’s been more than a year of waiting for Queen’s Park to decide what it wants to do. Even more modest uses of SEZs could come with risks. The government eventually had to back off modestly on its love of MZOs — it issued 18 in 2024 compared to the 35 in 2022 — because of the serial controversies they caused, arguably culminating in the revelations surrounding a Ford family wedding party. Special Economic Zones are precisely the kind of tool that could find itself overused in a scandalous fashion for precisely the same reason: the government is asking the legislature to put extremely lucrative powers in the hands of cabinet ministers dealing with companies whose officers can make generous political donations to the PC Party and its candidates.
Even if the government manages not to embroil itself in scandal in the next four years, it would still be something of a missed opportunity. When the government wants to make wholesale reforms to laws it thinks are outdated, it knows how to repeal them and replace them with something new — it’s doing exactly that in this same bill, regarding endangered species. The Tories clearly think that municipal planning and permitting rules are a very big problem holding back Ontario’s economy, because they’re giving themselves the power to disregard those rules. But rather than engage in a total rethink of the roles and powers of municipalities across the province, they’re writing themselves a cheat code into the program of government. That’s going to be enormously valuable for the relatively small handful of high-profile projects that it helps the government woo to Ontario, but only in the regions it designates as priorities. The vast majority of the province will, however, still be labouring under rules the government all but acknowledges aren’t fit for purpose anymore.