Sometimes politics and policy are complicated. There are innumerable different political alliances between government, other political parties, industries, and activists, and everyone has their own interests and can be either harmed or helped by the details of policy changes. The work for journalists is to explain the impacts of policy changes as clearly as possible and to explain the political stakes as simply as possible.
So, to put it simply, with the introduction of Bill 185, the Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act, there are winners and losers. Winners include municipalities that have spent much of the past two years complaining that the government’s changes to development-charge policies were going to bankrupt them — they’ve won a substantial reversal from a government that wasn’t willing to replace their lost monies with cash of its own. Municipalities are also getting the “use it or lose it” powers they’ve been clamouring for, having alleged that developers across the province have approved projects they’ve been sitting on instead of getting shovels in the ground.
Losers include the aforementioned developers (cue the world’s tiniest violin), neighbourhood busybodies who will lose the right to appeal developments to the Ontario Land Tribunal (cue the second-tiniest), the government itself (which would appreciate it if voters didn’t notice that much of its current housing plan is simply a reversal of previous plans), and perhaps even universities, which are receiving the dubious privilege of being exempted from planning controls so they can build more student housing. More dorms are undeniably needed, but based on this government’s record, it’s fair to wonder how long that exemption will last after some university proposes an actual ambitious housing plan that’s in or near a riding currently held by a Progressive Conservative MPP.
The biggest losers of all, however, are the people waiting for ambitious housing policy from Queen’s Park — people who are paying too much for too few square feet to call their own or people who have no home at all. There’s nothing in the bill introduced Wednesday that’s going to fundamentally alter the trajectory of the housing shortage in Ontario. As legislation goes, it’s broad but shallow, covering many different areas but not pushing too hard in any one place. It does not enough of too much.
There’s good stuff in the bill, to be clear. The government is proposing to prohibit parking minimums around major transit stations; that’s the kind of no-brainer policy that ought to have been implemented a decade ago under a different premier. The hitch here is that Toronto already did this on its own initiative, and a very large fraction of the province’s priority transit areas are inside the city’s boundaries — either GO, subway, or LRT station areas. It will be effective outside Toronto, nevertheless.
The government is also proposing to give the minister of municipal affairs and housing the power to approve standardized home designs and exempt them from local zoning. This is a crucial part of the advocacy for pre-approved plans we’ve seen across the country, and it’s necessary for standardized plans to make any sense at all as housing policy. Developers know how to build homes, and a catalogue of standardized plans doesn’t help unless the province commits to allowing them to be built.
The government is also proposing to give itself the power to clamp down on municipalities that use planning rules to obstruct so-called additional residential units: basement suites, laneway homes, and garden suites, among other typologies. This follows on previous efforts by the government to allow up to three units on a lot: a duplex plus an accessory dwelling unit over a garage, for example. The Ford government may have learned what other jurisdictions did long ago — municipalities have ample powers to say no when they want to and are endlessly creative about using the rules of planning law to do so. If the minister wants to use these new powers to play regulatory whack-a-mole with cities and towns across Ontario, that could be good for the province. If nothing else, it’d be entertaining to watch.
None of those items from the government’s plan is bad. They’re just not sufficient. In the face of a housing crisis that is, every year, driving thousands of Ontario residents to more affordable communities in other provinces, the Ford government is fiddling with the dials of housing policy, seemingly unsure of what it’s doing or even what it’s trying to do. Every new announcement is at least half composed of reversals of announcements from six, 12, or 18 months ago, and the genuinely novel and important bits — like this plan’s focus on water and sewer infrastructure — will require a commitment to long-term consistency that this government will have a hard time providing. The rest is simply timid half-measures.
Experimentation in government isn’t itself a bad thing. Indeed, experimentation during a crisis can be exactly what we need. In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not yet president of the United States, said his country was calling out for “bold, persistent experimentation” in the grips of the Great Depression.
“It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something,” Roosevelt said. The Ford government is clearly well practiced by now at trying things, failing, and trying something else. What’s been missing since before the last provincial election, and still missing today, is boldness.
The next words from Roosevelt’s speech provide a warning for governments that can’t meet the moment with the ambition it requires: “The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.”
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