In April of this year, I wrote that the Tories had a bit of a novel problem: they were doing so much in the housing and planning sphere that municipalities were begging them to pump the brakes a little just to give staff and elected officials time to figure out what the policy changes would mean for them on the ground.
Well, it’s eight months later, and, in a way, I got my wish: the Tories have spent the fall backpedalling so furiously on land use and other municipal-policy matters that, in one sense, this has been a pretty restful year. Policy in December looks more or less like it did back in January.
It just wasn’t actually quiet if you had to, you know, live through it.
The number one spot on our list of reversals has to go to the government’s decision to finally, belatedly, grudgingly, see political reality (and policy good sense) on the Greenbelt file. After spending most of the first nine months of the year asserting over and over that opening up protected lands for development was going to get more housing built quickly — having never mentioned the notion during the 2022 election and having expressly promised to protect the Greenbelt in 2018 — Ford apologized for spending so long defending the indefensible.
Close on the heels of the Greenbelt decision came Minister of Municipal Affairs Paul Calandra’s introduction of legislation to reverse the previously ordered expansions of municipal-growth boundaries. These lines on the provincial map dictate what lands will be allowed for housing development. And, while they didn’t directly tread on protected lands as the Greenbelt decision did, this was another case of the government choosing sprawl over more intense, transit-oriented development. It was also a case of the PCs overruling some local mayors and councils, including Hamilton’s.
Not everything has been a reversal: some decisions have simply been frozen by the political chaos the government has inflicted on itself. Under then-minister Steve Clark, the Tories had proposed in the spring to consolidate the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe with the Provincial Policy Statement. Without going too deeply into the weeds, both the growth plan and the PPS are broad planning documents; the growth plan, predictably enough, applies to the municipalities of the Greater Golden Horseshoe, while the PPS applies provincewide. The government had apparently decided earlier this year that having two documents of this kind was redundant and posted notice of its intent to consolidate them on the Environmental Registry, where the public can comment. The public-comment period expired in August, but the government hasn’t announced any further progress.
Then, to close out the year with a bang, in the waning days of December, the government made it official: it was indeed cancelling the divorce in Peel Region and leaving Mississauga, Brampton, and Caledon in their fractious marriage. Clark’s successor as municipal affairs minister, Paul Calandra, announced the reversal last week at Queen’s Park, telling reporters that the structure of Peel Region would be preserved but that responsibilities would be shuffled around various levels of municipal government to encourage more housing construction. Additionally, the government is reversing some of the changes it made to the use of development charges, which will now preserve the powers of cities to put the cost of new infrastructure on new home construction.
The reversals aren’t exclusive to the area of municipal policy, either: after coming to office with an opposition to renewable energy that bordered on the pathological, the government is allowing the Independent Electricity System Operator to begin tentatively planning for more wind and solar-power projects on the province’s grid. This month, the IESO announced that, as part of its long-term procurement process to meet electricity demands in the province, it’s seeking 2,000 megawatts of “non-emitting” electricity generation, with the possibility of another 3,000 megawatts by 2034. According to the IESO, there are currently about 5,300 megawatts of wind and solar connected to the grid, so this could potentially mean a doubling of renewables in the province over the next decade.
Given how controversial some of these positions were, reversing them was undoubtedly the less politically harmful move for the government. Flip-flops aren’t intrinsically bad, so long as the flop is less harmful than the flip that preceded it. The problem the Tories face is that, particularly in municipal-policy areas, the problems they were trying to solve remain, and the government has spent a year not really addressing them in a concerted way; the net result of its efforts forward and backwards has added up to not much more than zero.
Ontario still faces a dire housing shortage. As a result of last year’s 180s, the province is being outpaced on housing policy by both the City of Toronto and the Government of Canada. The new year will require Calandra and Ford to bring new focus to the housing file — in a way that doesn’t simply involve trying to put out fires they’ve started themselves.
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