Ford’s change to development rules is a massive overreach

Thestar.com
March 9, 2021

The Ford government used the extensive powers it already has to greenlight a development on protected land. And when it looked like that might not be enough it introduced an extraordinary new law to make sure the deal holds.

What the government has done is about so much more than levelling the Duffins Creek Wetland in Pickering, or helping one developer build an entertainment destination and distribution warehouse on environmentally protected land.

The government is changing the law midstream to get out from under a lawsuit and it will result in an enormous concentration of power in the hands of the minister of municipal affairs and housing, Steve Clark.

When Clark issued a ministerial zoning order for the Pickering project last year, he exempted it from public consultation and appeal to the planning tribunal. He has the power to do that -- a power he has made use of dozens of times to push through problematic developments.

But Clark also seems to have breached overarching provincial land use policies, which he does not have the power to do.

When called on it by three environmental groups who filed a lawsuit against the province, the government rushed out legislation last week that retroactively changes the rules so it can’t lose that case.

Under Bill 257, a ministerial zoning order (MZO) no longer has to comply with provincial policy statements, in this case the protection of certain wetlands from development. Furthermore, the bill states that MZOs are “deemed to never have been required to be consistent with policy statements.”

Retroactively changing laws is a really big deal and yet that dramatic change, unveiled in a single paragraph, was quietly tucked into the government’s legislation about expanding broadband.

The Ford government has used the sweeping power of MZOs far more often than any previous one, and now it’s exponentially expanding the power itself.

If this legislation passes, the municipal affairs minister will essentially become the sole arbiter of planning impacts across Ontario.

He can already overrule municipal planning rules and strip citizens of their right to public consultation. This legislation would let him ignore all of Ontario’s planning principles around preserving farmland, protecting the environment and managing growth to be more compact and less car-dependent.

All that will matter are the wishes of Premier Doug Ford and the developers he’s so keen to serve.

This is not what voters signed up for. Let’s be very clear: This is not about cutting red tape or streamlining, as the government likes to claim whenever it reduces environmental protections and hands developers an easier path.

This is a massive overreach. The government is ignoring its responsibility to represent the public interest baked into all those planning principles, which ensured competing interests were fairly balanced.

This, of course, is just the latest in a troubling pattern that dates back to this government’s earliest days.

The government has weakened Ontario’s environmental laws, gutted endangered species habitat protections and stripped conservation authorities of regulatory powers over development applications. It has eased the way for traditional sprawl development, revived Hwy. 413, an unnecessary $6-billion project that will pave over Greenbelt lands and brought back the developer-friendly OMB rules.

And Clark has issued an extraordinary number of MZOs, many of which communities are opposing, from the historic Foundry buildings in Toronto to the Duffins Creek Wetlands and beyond.

It really should be impossible that a government facing a torrent of public outrage over its abuse of a zoning power would take steps to expand that power even further. In non-pandemic times it probably would be.

The question we’re left now is this: if the Ford government is willing in this case to change a law to suit its current development desires and evade responsibility for complying with existing laws, what’s next?