In a move meant to spur developers who receive special approvals from the provincial government, Ontario's housing minister says they'll now have to make progress within one year or risk losing their special permissions.
On Friday, Housing Minister Paul Calandra said builders who are issued new minister's zoning orders (MZOs) will have 12 months to show development progress before the MZO granted for their project is revoked.
"Any MZO that I supply, or that I approve, going forward, will immediately be reviewed over 12 months, and if I don't see progress, that MZO will be taken back," Calandra said.
Almost a year ago, Calandra announced that 14 previously issued MZOs for developments including mostly housing units would be monitored over the next 18 months.
MZOs are a legal tool the provincial government can issue to overrule municipalities’ planning rules and ease the burden of development proposals. In many cases, they're granted by the government to fast-track projects. MZOs had been seldom used by previous governments.
Premier Doug Ford's government has issued more than 120. One of Calandra's first actions as housing minister, which he was appointed in early September 2023, was to launch a review into the MZOs granted by the Ford government. By last December, just 12 per cent of the MZOs it had granted had resulted in finished developments.
"Obviously on some of the housing files, we've seen a slowdown ... and I said from the beginning when we put in a new process for ministerial zoning orders that we expect to see shovels in the ground with ministerial zoning orders. Everybody's on a watch list, and in 18 months, if we don't see results — which is now being reduced to 12 months — if I don't see a result of a ministerial zoning order, then I will move to retract that zoning order," Calandra said.
"We don't give zoning orders to sit on. We give zoning orders so we can see results and shovels in the ground in communities across the province."
Calandra shared the tighter timeline for MZO-issued projects a couple of weeks before the expected release of an auditor general's report on the government's use of MZOs.
