Thousands of Toronto's buildings are at risk of losing their heritage status. Here's why

A new bill threatens to eliminate a designation that covers almost a third of the properties on the city's Heritage Register.

Thestar.com
Jan. 3, 2024
Raju Mudhar

What happens in the year ahead will say a lot about the future of the city’s past, as the clock is ticking on almost 4,000 buildings in Toronto that are set to lose their heritage status at the end of 2024.

The Ontario government has prioritized building more homes, and in 2023, it passed Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act, which has changed the Heritage Act’s rules in ways that have municipalities scrambling to deal with the fallout. In Toronto, this could potentially affect some of the city’s best-known buildings, although it's more likely that lesser-known and smaller historical buildings could end up in developers’ sights. To make it easier to build more housing, the province is effectively eliminating a designation that covers almost a third of the buildings on Toronto's Heritage Register -- one that has served to warn about potential changes to these properties.

“We don’t have a culture in this city, province or country, where we believe our history is worth saving,” said Christopher Hume, the Star’s former longtime architecture critic. “If a buck can be made by knocking something down, people will do it.”

The City of Toronto’s Heritage Register, which is more than 50 years old, has 11,271 properties on it that are either "designated" (evaluated and granted heritage protection for historical or cultural significance) or “listed but non-designated” (commonly referred to as “listed,” which covers properties that may be of importance but haven’t been evaluated). If someone wants to develop, demolish, or change a listed site, 60 days’ notice must be given to the city, which can then examine whether the building needs to be designated.

There are currently 3,977 properties with listed status.

“We’ve had a number of properties that have been on the Heritage Register since 1973, that are listed and have never been designated, because there has just been no particular reason to do that,” said Mary MacDonald, City of Toronto's senior manager of heritage planning.

Bill 23 changed that. Along with making it tougher to add buildings to the register, and requiring that new additions be listed before they become designated, the bill adds a two-year time limit on currently listed properties. Since the clock started when it became law on Jan. 1, 2023, if a building is not designated by the time the new limit expires, the property can’t be re-listed for another five years.

Previously, properties could be listed indefinitely, such as the 130-year-old Queen’s Park building, which has been listed since 1973. Other listed but non-designated buildings include the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall and Robarts Library; the Ontario Science Centre; Little Trinity Church, the city’s oldest church; and the Wheatsheaf Tavern, its oldest bar.

In 2017, the city started to batch-list areas, using planning studies to identify significant neighbourhoods, and over the years, it added groups of buildings along stretches of the Danforth, Dundas West and Roncesvalles. Those buildings could now be at risk.

“There are spectacular buildings on the list, and in a year, some of them will be sitting ducks for five years, with no protections,” said Michael McClelland, principal at ERA Architects, which has worked on several heritage projects. “It’s kind of desperate now for these 4,000 buildings. It’s a nightmare. What it’s really going to do is make things very black and white. You are designated, or you are not.”

Unless something drastic happens, it’s unlikely municipalities can work through the backlog in a year. The city tends to designate a handful of properties each month, and usually only if there is an urgent reason to offer the full protections of designated status. In a November report to the city, MacDonald gave an update on her team’s progress, saying that it is reviewing the Heritage Register and prioritizing buildings, and will issue a final report with recommendations sometime in 2024.

“The thing to remember is, just because things go off the register doesn’t mean they fall down, right?” said MacDonald. "It doesn’t mean they're going to be developed.”

She said that while the Heritage Register is an important record of the city's history, her department is exploring other options, including a possible alternate, city-created register.

"It may not be a provincial register, but check back in a year and I’ll tell you what it is," said MacDonald.

McClelland says that the city might have to rely on the goodwill of those developers who understand how important it is to protect old buildings.

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“Good developers have no problem working with heritage buildings. If you go to London or Rome or anywhere in this world, there are heritage processes that are part of the obligations and requirements of working in a city," he said. "It’s not just a dreadful nuisance. It’s actually part of good city building to do this.”

Architecture Conservancy Ontario (ACO), an organization that aims to save and reuse important historical buildings, is creating a database of important buildings, called TOBuilt. The goal is to add to the database many properties that may lose their listed status.

“That historical information is going to come off the Heritage Registers and all the municipal websites, so at least we’ll have a record of the listed buildings, so that they are not lost in our memories, even if they are potentially lost in existence,” said ACO president Diane Chin.

Chin said the organization is calling on the provincial government to extend the limit another five years on buildings that currently have listed status, to buy time and find another way to protect them.

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