Even in a normal, non-dramatic, good-news press conference, Premier Doug Ford has the capacity for amusing absurdity. Standing next to Toronto mayor Olivia Chow — whom Ford had predicted, not 12 months ago, would be an “unmitigated disaster” for the province’s largest city — the premier on Thursday was all smiles and praise for the mayor as he and Municipal Affairs Minister Paul Calandra handed over an oversized novelty cheque for $114 million as a reward for Toronto’s having exceeding its 2023 housing targets. The premier, asked about his thoughts on Chow’s recently passed budget — including its 9.5 per cent property-tax increase — declined to take the bait.
“I don’t believe in telling any municipality, all 444 of them, what to do,” Ford said. “They know their needs, they know their requirements, and I have all the confidence in the world.”
About 15 minutes later, Ford was asked about a new report, now before Chow’s executive committee, that recommends a city-wide tax on off-street commercial parking spaces as the latest measure to right the city’s shaky finances. Once again, Ford demurred and insisted he won’t tell cities how to govern.
A respectful, restrained, even modest response that suggested he appreciates the limits of what it’s possible to know and do from the premier’s office. Good stuff. Top marks.
Six minutes later, Ford proceeded to tell local leaders how to govern their respective municipalities.
“All the folks out there, the mayors and wardens out there, take a page out of Toronto’s book,” Ford said, before pivoting to an attack on Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie’s record as mayor of Mississauga and her (admittedly unimpressive) record on housing starts.
Look, there was already a kind of cognitive dissonance built into the whole thing: the point of the day’s event (and a similar one Friday morning in Brampton) was that the province of Ontario is, in fact, telling municipalities that they need to step up their game and approve more housing construction. Ford and Calandra are, in fact, telling municipalities what to do — or at least what they would very much like to see them do. It might not, strictly speaking, be coercive, but with substantial sums of money at stake — and the fiscal demands on Ontario municipalities are as urgent as ever — it’s not not coercive, either.
Which, to be clear, is fine: the housing crisis demands a massive response, and the corollary to the cliché that municipalities are “creatures of the province” is that it is actually the province’s responsibility to ensure that municipalities are well-governed.
The larger and more urgent question is whether the current suite of measures is working and sufficient. The Ford government can boast that, according to its tracking data, the province reached 99 per cent of its housing target in 2023. (As with so much about this government, this is an arguable assertion, but for today’s purposes, let’s stipulate it.) The provincial housing target of 1.5 million new homes by 2031, however, was set before last year’s explosion of uncontrolled admissions of international students, and while the federal government is now furiously trying to lock the barn door after the horses have all escaped, Ford himself has previously acknowledged that the 1.5 million target is almost certainly out of date.
What the province will do next is uncertain. On Thursday, though, Calandra said that the next iteration of the government’s housing-supply measures will include some kind of “use it or lose it” provision in planning law that’s intended to spur developers to bring approved housing projects to market instead of sitting on permits. Calandra’s confirmation comes as two of the province’s largest developer lobbies, BILD GTA and the Ontario Home Builders’ Association, released a report arguing that municipal planners (and the elected leaders they answer to) have been wildly overstating the case for this kind of policy and warning that it carries the risk of serious unintended consequences.
Regardless of the merits of a use-it-or-lose-it policy, if that’s the only major change in Calandra’s next housing law, that will signal another wasted year in housing policy, and Ontario can’t afford many more of those.
Calandra says the next bill, coming next month, will be “very, very aggressive” and specifically target delays in getting lands serviced with water and sewerage. (Only in this province is the most banal part of getting homes built approached as if it were a policy and engineering puzzle on par with splitting the atom.) But Ontario would have to practically move mountains simply to catch up to the policies being implemented elsewhere: the NDP government in British Columbia is setting the pace for provincial governments across the country, and it ought to embarrass Ontario that B.C. housing minister Ravi Kahlon said on a podcast this week that part of its success was simply due its having read Ontario’s housing-affordability task force report and then adopted many of the recommendations. This was the document Ford and his cabinet commissioned and then promptly put in a desk drawer. The province has mostly ignored it for two years and counting.
Ford and his cabinet may be congratulating themselves (and the mayors they’re on good terms with) this week — but there’s a long way to go yet before we even see a light at the end of the current tunnel.