This article was first published by TorontoToday, a Village Media publication.
The province said the newly-passed Bill 17 will take away the city’s authority to enforce key parts of the Toronto Green Standard (TGS) for buildings — though the city continues to deny the law will have any impact.
A spokesperson for Rob Flack, Ontario’s Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, said in a statement to TorontoToday that the act — which aims to speed up housing and infrastructure development by doing away with many local planning rules — would render mandatory parts of the TGS unenforceable.
“Our government’s legislation, the Protect Ontario by Building Faster and Smarter Act, standardizes construction requirements and provides consistency, clarifying that no municipality has the authority to enforce a by-law that supersedes the Ontario Building Code,” spokesperson Alexandra Sanita wrote.
“Through these changes, the City of Toronto’s Tier 1 of the Green Building Standards would not be allowed as they mandate requirements for new development planning applications that go beyond the Ontario building code.”
The TGS are a set of city rules that require housing developers to implement eco-friendly design features in new buildings.
The standard consists of four tiers, with Tier 1 being a mandatory list of assets developers must incorporate within new developments. This includes adding bicycle parking and electric vehicle charging stations to new buildings over four storeys, and taking steps to mitigate flooding and extreme heat, for instance, by building rooftop gardens and planting trees.
Tiers 2 through 4, while not mandatory, provide developers with financial incentives to take on more ambitious climate targets. Developers can get a portion of the development charge fees they pay to the city refunded for achieving these higher targets.
According to the provincial spokesperson, Tiers 2 to 4 “will not be affected” by Bill 17.
City pushes back on province’s interpretation of law
Despite the province’s statement, a spokesperson for the City of Toronto denied that Bill 17 will have any impact on the municipality’s ability to enforce the TGS, reiterating findings from a staff report earlier this week.
“City staff have reviewed Bill 17 and determined that there is no impact to the City’s ability to continue to apply the TGS to new development,” the spokesperson told TorontoToday.
Last week, the city released an assessment of the impact of Bill 17, which pushed back on the idea that local authority over the TGS could be restricted..
“Recent media reports have suggested that Bill 17 has impacted or restricted a municipalities [sic] ability to apply the TGS,” the report read, going on to deny there would be any impact.
The city’s executive committee received the report on Tuesday.
Experts previously raised concerns over Bill 17
Before the bill was passed on June 3, experts speculated a provision that updates the Building Code Act of 1992 could bring an end to the TGS.
The provision says municipalities do not have the authority to “pass by-laws respecting the construction or demolition of buildings.”
Some legal professionals interpreted this phrase to mean that Ontario cities would no longer have the authority to enforce sustainable design standards.
“This would appear to make green building standards obsolete, and ensure that the same standards (the [Ontario Building Code]) apply province wide,” lawyers from Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP wrote in May.
Environmental experts had also raised alarm that TGS would be “deeply undercut.”
Additionally, the president of an organization representing Ontario’s residential construction industry argued the law was intended to override the TGS.
“No municipality has the right to choose not to implement legislation irrespective of how unappealing it may appear to them,” Richard Lyall, president of the Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON), wrote in a letter to the city’s executive committee last week.
Lyall referenced comments made by Minister Flack in the Ontario Legislature, when he spoke about the need to make building standards across the province consistent.
“It’s bureaucratic; it’s red tape; it isn’t working,” Flack said during legislative debates in early June, adding that green standards are “part of the slowness of getting houses built.”
“That is why we brought Bill 17 forward; that is why we are going to have one code in this province, not hundreds of iterations,” Flack said.
RESCON is also currently engaged in a legal battle with the city over the TGS. In December, the industry group asked the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to block the city from enforcing construction standards that go beyond the Ontario Building Code.
