The past few weeks have been much ado about jurisdiction. The federal government, down in the polls and with a budget coming up, is proposing a series of programs that officially seek to address urgent public-policy issues — and unofficially, of course, are also intended to give the federal Liberals an electoral boost.
The so-called renters’ bill of rights is an obvious example; so is most of what’s being proposed on housing, really. (My last column here specifically went into both the policy and political fronts of a battle shaping up between the federal and Ontario governments.) The school food program is another one that is in the news — federal money to achieve results at the local level.
Jurisdiction is raised by some, including me, as a cause for concern here. It is dismissed by others as of secondary importance, considering the laudable goals the proposals seek to advance. For the purposes of this column, I’m going to set all of that to the side. I’m not going to argue about the best jurisdiction to tackle these issues or even assess the merits of the proposals.
I will simply seek to remind readers that getting the details right matters, and we aren’t always good at this. In fact, I regret to report that we seem to be pretty bad at it.
The news gods can be unkind, but today they smiled upon me (if readers will permit me this tiny aside). I was trying to think of some way of writing this column that would be both topical and entertaining. As fate would have it, this morning, a member of my immediate family emailed me a link to a recent article in Cottage Life magazine. This relative has been seeking permits for a substantial renovation to their cottage and been finding the process nightmarishly slow and dysfunctional. There seem to be significant personnel gaps in the various government departments that need to work together, making it almost impossible to get all the necessary approvals coordinated. My family member, obviously exasperated by this, noted an article in the magazine and forwarded it to me as a prime example of the kind of problems they’ve been running into.
The article is here and is well worth reading. But here’s the short, darkly funny version. A gentleman in the Muskokas, Gerald Parker, had a new, environmentally friendly full-time dwelling designed and built. The home was intended from the outset to be free of fossil fuels, so instead of a centralized heating system, it used a series of heat pumps. Heat pumps, as readers will recall, are electrical devices that provide home heating and cooling by transferring heat to where it is needed. In cold weather, the pumps pull heat out of the air outside the home and put it into the home; in warmer months, the process is reversed, and the home is cooled by pulling unwanted heat out of the interior and putting it outside. The systems require no fossil fuels and run entirely on electricity. Newer models are now able to overcome earlier difficulties operating in extreme Canadian cold, which is why the federal government is looking to incentivize heat pumps across Canada. (Somewhat controversially, as readers may also recall.)
The problem is that the municipality then ruled that the home lacked central heating and was therefore not up to code. The presence of a series of small heat pumps, the very devices that the feds are encouraging Canadians to use as part of our decarbonization plans, didn’t cut it. Parker had to spend tens of thousands of dollars retrofitting his new home to include electric baseboard heating. He won’t need to use it, except perhaps on the most extremely cold days of the year. But he has to have it just to stay compliant with code. As an added irony, he told the magazine that he’d been warned this could be an issue and had even been offered a solution: build the home with a gas furnace, clear the code requirements, and then rip out the furnace and put in the heat pumps. That would count as a retrofit, not a new build, and wouldn’t have encountered legal obstacles from the municipality. That’s out of their purview. It just would have meant spending thousands of dollars on a fossil-fuel system that would never be used and exist only to tick a box.
That last bit of information is hilarious, at least to my dark sense of humour. Installing an entire decoy home-heating system just so you can eventually put in the one you actually want — one everyone agrees is better for the environment — is the kind of absurdity that no one would believe if it were written in fiction. It’s crazy enough to have to be true. You could write a whole column about that kind of broken system.
But this column is going to stay more on target: jurisdiction. Because as Parker found out when he tried to appeal this, the jurisdictional issues are a mess. The feds are encouraging heat-pump adoption. The province has authorized them to be deemed a home’s primary heating system, but it has left it up to municipalities to decide what that means for any given design. The Muskokas rejected Parker’s home design and will say only that they are looking into the matter and are compliant with the law.
And that’s why jurisdiction matters. A lot. What we have here is a perfect layer cake of frustration. One order of government actively wants you to do a thing, another layer of government will allow you to do a thing, and a third level of government — the one that ultimately has authority — can rule that you can, in fact, not do that thing.
I can’t imagine many hearts are breaking over the plight of the Muskokan with the fancy new house. Cottage Life is not where people go to read about the downtrodden working class. But just remember, for every Parker, there are thousands of other people caught up in similar jurisdictional jumbles that see three orders of government unaligned on something they would all agree, in the abstract, is a good thing.
And also remember: for every well-intentioned, broadly supported government proposal, there are lots of steps in the bureaucratic process, many chefs in the kitchen, and all kinds of different competing interests that all want their say on the matter, none of which want to cede a single inch of their turf to some other level of government or department. It’s nice to say that jurisdiction doesn’t matter when an idea is just so good. But jurisdiction is a detail, right? That’s where the devil always is. Ignore it at your peril.
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