When Premier Doug Ford said no to allowing the construction of fourplexes by default across the province, he said it was best to leave those decisions up to the locals. “We are not going to go into communities and build four-storey or six-storey buildings beside residents,” Ford said. It wasn’t up to Queen’s Park to dictate from Toronto what affects someone in Peterborough or Kitchener or Timmins. The government would be hands-off.
Ford’s rationale for leaving up red tape in a housing crisis may ring hollow for anyone with a memory of how the Progressive Conservatives have run the province for the past six years or so. The government had no problem butting in when it cut the size of Toronto’s city council during anelection and against the will of that very council. Ford and company didn’t seem so hands-off when they issued 110 minister’s zoning orders in four years to dictate local planning from the top down — including when Ford overruled Mississauga over a decades-long waterfront-development plan. No, it seems that the Tories are perfectly happy to interfere in other people’s business when it suits them.
The idea that Ford is concerned with a proper division of powers, federal-provincial or provincial-federal, is divorced from reality. The government cares about one thing and one thing only: using its power to pursue its vision for the province. The constraints of good democratic governance, pluralism, and procedural checks are seemingly anathema to the Ford government when they get in its way.
We’ve seen Ford’s play in action time and time again, and not just when it comes to municipal elections and planning. As The Trillium reports, the government has moved to permit itself to overrule conservation authorities when it chooses — perhaps, say, when protecting sensitive land gets in the way of a building project the province supports (a move reminiscent of a 2020 play against conservationists).
In February, the government sought to bigfoot the province’s independent energy authority on the cost for new housing hookups. Then there’s Ford’s desire to stack the bench with partisan judicial appointments that reflect his party’s “tough on crime” philosophy, and his order that the LCBO bring back paper bags. The list goes on, but you get the idea.
Whether some find Ford’s interventionist moves welcome is beside the point. I happen to think the government ought to override municipalities to allow fourplexes to be built by right. The decision about the LCBO bags is probably a good one, too. They were another small consumer annoyance in a world that is getting more irritating by the day.
The substance of a decision is incidental to the broader issue here, which is that the government is trying to have it both ways by pretending to be concerned about maximizing self-government and determination in some instances while plainly overriding it in others, without providing a rule or rationale for the inconsistency. Moreover, the government tends to proceed as a bull would in a china shop, which doesn’t inspire confidence that it’s thoroughly and thoughtfully considering all the angles before proceeding with a decision. In sum, this doesn’t seem to be a measure-twice-and-cut-once government. When combined with its power and willingness to do what it pleases in the face of popular and institutional resistance, that’s bad news.
As things stand, the rule for intervention from the Ford government seems to be that, whenever it imagines something is “good for the people,” it will move heaven and earth to override anything that gets in its way. But the government’s version of “the people” seems overly reliant on developers and single-family homes and hostile to teachers, urban dwellers who prefer dense cities, and those concerned about climate and the environment.
Without explicit, transparent, and consistent rules for governing, we can’t know what’s what, and we’re more than justified in assuming the worst. For all we know, decisions are being made on the hoof — and in the service of the few over the interests of the many. This concern is more than supported by, for instance, the auditor general’s report on changes to the Greenbelt.
Governments have a right to exercise their power within the boundaries of the law and the Constitution. But they also have a duty to govern with forbearance and within the limits of democratic best practices. The Ford government seems concerned with neither of these constraints. Between its wretched policymaking history and poor foresight, we face one of the worst of all worlds for Ontario.
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