Premier Doug Ford’s government announced Monday that it’s tabling legislation to overhaul how transit, road and housing projects get approved in an attempt to speed up their construction in Ontario.
The bill tabled Monday afternoon aims to significantly change the permitting and approvals processes for roadway and transit projects, modify the province’s development charges and land-use planning systems, according to information the provincial government released before tabling it.
“We are pulling out all the stops to protect and build up Ontario during this time of economic uncertainty,” said a quote attributed to Infrastructure Minister Kinga Surma in a news release published by the government.
However, the Housing Minister Rob Flack stopped short of promising that the bill would ensure that the province will reach its goal, announced in 2022, of building 1.5 million new homes by 2031. Asked if that goal was still realistic, Flack said the province was “facing some pretty strong headwinds.”
“It’s a goal, but frankly, I’m focused more on, and our team is focused on, the next 12 to 24 months, because if it stays the way it is now, we’ll never get there,” Flack said.
“Is it forgotten? No way, we’re not giving up.”
Many of the changes outlined in Tuesday’s bill won’t come into effect once it receives Royal Assent. Instead, the province will have to issue a slew of regulations to make them real.
Flack’s bill, if passed, would eliminate municipal building codes like the Toronto Green Standard — a 20-year-old program that offers reduced development charges to builders who meet higher energy efficiency targets and other environmental building goals.
While officially voluntary, developers have long argued that the program has effectively become mandatory, adding cost and complexity beyond what's required under the Ontario Building Code.
In December, RESCON filed a legal challenge against the city’s standards in Ontario Superior Court.
RESCON president Richard Lyall told TorontoToday that developers are often pressured by city staff to comply with the higher-tier standards. “They can make life very difficult for you,” Lyall said in a phone interview last year. “They can tie you up in knots.”
The province’s new bill would also limit the number of studies municipalities can request from developers during the approvals process — part of the province’s broader push to streamline housing construction.
Together, the measures would create a more uniform construction environment across Ontario’s 444 municipalities.
The province is also planning to further limit municipalities’ use of inclusionary zoning, a policy that requires some new residential developments to include affordable units in order to create mixed-income housing.
The Ford government, which placed restrictions on the areas where inclusionary zoning can be used shortly after taking office, is now planning to limit the percentage of units that must be affordable to five per cent of the total development, and require that the period for which they must remain affordable to 25 years.
Provincial civil servants said this would have a particular impact in Toronto, which has announced a policy requiring five to 22 per cent of condominium developments to be affordable for 99 years.
The bill makes a raft of changes to Ontario’s development charge regime.
Currently, cities have limited ability to amend their development charge rates in response to changing economic climates. Several cities, like Vaughan, Mississauga and Toronto, have taken some steps to cut rates, but they can only go so far under the current regime.
While the Ford government has frequently lauded the mayors of those municipalities for lowering their development charges, it is not insisting that other municipalities do the same.
“I’m hoping that they take the lead and follow by example,” said Flack, when asked why the province hadn’t gone further on development charges, adding that it is eliminating them for long-term care homes.
The bill would also give builders more flexibility to defer payment of development charges to when a unit is occupied, as opposed to when a building permit is issued.
It would also let the province create rules allowing developers to use credits from one type of infrastructure work — like building roads — to offset fees for another, such as transit, and let the province set clear rules on what kinds of infrastructure can be funded through development charges.
It’s also proposing to allow the province’s housing minister to place conditions on municipalities and developers that they would have to meet before development fast-tracking minister’s zoning orders (MZOs) come into effect.
Looking to accelerate subway and rail projects, the government is also proposing to enable itself to apply the processes of the Building Transit Faster Act to all provincial transit projects.
The PCs created the act in 2020, aiming to more easily enable priority transit projects, including the Ontario Line, Scarborough Subway Extension, Yonge Subway Extension, Eglinton Crosstown West Extension. They’ve since also applied it to the Hamilton LRT and Hazel McCallion LRT, in Peel region, projects.
Enabling any provincial transit project to fit under the Building Transit Faster Act’s processes would “significantly speed up getting shovels in the ground,” the government said in its news release.
The government is also looking to better align its Building Transit Faster Act and its Transit-Oriented Communities Act through amendments to both. Briefing documents the government provided journalists said changes would “enable the designation of (transit-oriented community) lands to apply more broadly.”
The Ford government has for years been planning TOC projects at many current and under-construction Toronto subway and rail lines. Plans for these TOCs include hundreds to thousands of new homes each. The PCs have been exploring potentially applying the concept at key transit stops in the Greater Toronto Area and elsewhere in the province.
“Through our transit-oriented communities program … has the potential to create up to 285,000 homes along GO and LRT stations across the Greater Golden Horseshoe,” Surma said at a news conference on Monday.
The Progressive Conservative government’s legislation, if passed, related to a few promises they made while campaigning ahead of this February’s provincial election. In their platform, the PCs promised to “speed up key capital projects … including building and upgrading roads, highways and transit,” and to “bring a rational, common-sense and sustainable approach to development charges to lower their burden on the cost of new housing.”
The bill announced by the Ford government on Monday is meant to align with a couple of the other pieces of legislation it has tabled since winning re-election, including Bills 2 and 5.
Bill 2 aims to reduce the trade barriers Ontario has with the rest of Canada.
Bill 5 would introduce new laws, and change several existing ones, to speed up natural resource extraction and other projects.
The Ford government also said it will allocate another $400 million through its Housing-Enabling Water Systems Fund (HEWSF) and Municipal Housing Infrastructure Fund. Through the two programs, the Ontario government transfers provincial taxpayer funds to municipalities to help pay for upgrading their infrastructure systems.
The new funding would bring the total the Ford government has allocated to spend through the programs to almost $2.3 billion, over the span of four years. So far, it’s committed to giving $1.3 billion to municipalities to fund 77 municipal water and wastewater system projects through the HEWSF, which are meant to enable the construction of 600,000 new homes.
—With files from Allison Smith
Editor's note: This story was updated with additional information and quotes from the housing minister after it was initially published.
