Curbing money politics saves us money - and land

Decoupling money, politics and planning explains overdue reforms to urban and suburban planning at Queen's Park.

Thestar.com
May 26, 2017
By Martin Regg Cohn

Affordable housing and lower taxes. Less congestion and pollution.

All of the above are crowd-pleasers and vote-getters. But getting there is more complicated than easy sloganeering.

Achieving results requires a hard look at urban planning and suburban sprawling. Which usually results only in eyes glazing over.

The problem is that while most people pay little heed to the fine print of planning, big land developers pay big money to high priced lawyers to exploit every opening in the laws of the land. And have long tried to persuade politicians to give them their way, perfectly legally, through campaign donations.

Now, that linkage - money, politics and planning - may be decoupling.

Queen’s Park has just announced major changes to urban planning and suburban growth. The good news is that the latest reforms are a major step forward after decades of money politics as usual.

The indecipherable and insufferable Ontario Municipal Board is being dismantled, to be reborn as a more balanced and predictable Local Planning Appeal Tribunal.

And the decade-old Growth Plan that protects much of southern Ontario’s land from being swallowed up by development has been updated and largely reinforced.

Taken together, these two pillars of improved planning are the best way to harness future growth. Without them, we would face more costly sprawl - consuming land unsustainably, building communities unaffordably, rendering transit unusable, and making cars unavoidable.

The details are difficult to digest, but the outcome is more palatable than many had predicted. Most of the environmental and community watchdogs that tracked the government’s consultations and reformations have been remarkably positive in their assessments so far.

“Despite intense developer pressure to break apart the Greenbelt and stop the Growth Plan in its tracks, the province appears committed to the Smart Growth principles we require in Ontario,” noted Kevin Thomason of Smart Growth Waterloo Region.

Marcy Burchfield, head of the Neptis Foundation, describes the new strategy as a “balancing act” between developers and protectors, with the potential to achieve greater fidelity with community planning across the region.

It reaches a reasonable equilibrium in a dynamic growth process that is prone to economic, political and population pressures. The Greater Golden Horseshoe (extending from Niagara to Peterborough) is destined to grow by 4 million people over the next quarter-century, reaching 13.5 million residents.

Widespread fears that the greenbelt would be gutted, that developers would pry loose choice chunks of land, have been dispelled. How did the government get it more or less right?

Most NGOs on the outside, and even government officials on the inside, point to the news behind the news: Ontario’s belated reform of campaign finance laws, enacted last year, has acted as a circuit-breaker - as much mental as fiscal - in helping all sides step back from money politics. A ban on corporate (and union) donations, and cash for access events, severed the direct links between supplicants and pliable politicians.

It’s not that all governments always did developers’ bidding in the past. But there’s little doubt that everyone involved in the policy-making process - non-partisan civil servants, political staff, and ministers - was mindful of how they could do the right thing given the imperative for political parties to get re-elected and refinanced.

As the Star’s Jennifer Pagliaro noted in her recent series on the OMB - documenting how it distorted development in favour of developers - campaign contributions from big donors were impossible to ignore. Pagliaro’s analysis showed that the GTA development industry alone contributed more than $1.7 million between 2014 and 2016, and her search of numbered companies showed even more undisclosed connections and donations.

Previous research by York University’s Robert MacDermid showed the development industry was by far the biggest donor to the Liberals and PCs, reaching $17.5 million province-wide between 2004 and 2011. That continuing cash infusion explains the inertia at Queen’s Park over the decades, and why previous efforts to reform the OMB made little progress.

Policy-makers didn’t just reach the right decisions this time, they finally got the decision-making process right. Substance plus process, minus cash for access.