Bill 23 could make for more disfunction, not less

Jeff Green | Dec 14, 2022

Bill 23 – the More Homes Built Faster Faster Act, recently passed by the Ontario Legislature, is a set of sweeping measures that reflect the underlying political thinking of Premier Doug Ford.

It is all about removing barriers to commerce, in this case the building and development industry, throughout the province. It is designed to allow for more urban sprawl on the edges of larger Ontario cities, but it also contains measures that would have pleased the old Lanark Landowners Association and our former MPP Randy Hillier, who railed against the fact that Conservation Authorities took a watershed protection approach to land development, stifling the ability of landowners, large and and small, from the unfettered enjoyment of their property.

Provisions in Bill 23 will cost some municipalities money, with the freezing of development fees. In our region, only South Frontenac will be affected because they are the only township that charges development fees, and the impact is hard to quantify.

But by far the biggest impact will be on the planning process for rural development, as municipalities will no longer be able to ask Conservation Authorities to comment on a host of environmental issues.

This is unfortunate because the economic future of our region is fully dependent on the health of the forests and lakes, since our main drawing card for both tourists and potential residents alike, is the beauty of the landscape and the lakes that punctuate it.

One of the paradoxes that becomes apparent whenever a development proposal comes before one of the local councils, is that the projects are invariably designed to be marketed to people who want to live a quiet lifestyle in a secluded, clean environment. At the same time, the opposition to the developments always claim that the development will ruin the clean, secluded environment in the region.

Over the past 15 years, most of the proposals for housing developments in Frontenac County have been in South Frontenac. And many of those have been contentious, the Hartington subdivision and the Johnston's Point project on Loughborough Lake, are cases in point.

Both of them took years, and many revisions, before they were approved, and were before Council on numerous occasions. Experts working, for the proponents and opponents, prepared their own scientific reports, which came to opposite conclusions, leaving council in the middle of it.

One side claimed the proposals would have zero impact on the local environment, that could not be easily mitigated, and the other side claimed that the developments would have a destructive effect on water quality, local wildlife and the ecosystem itself.

The entire process screams for revision, which has been slowly happening.

One of the obvious flaws in the system, which planning departments have been working on, is that there is no obvious road map, no fixed set of rules for what can and cannot be approved.

Removing Conservation Authorities from the process, as Bill 23 does, will not make this any easier. In fact it could make it harder.

For example, there is a contentious proposal before South Frontenac Council for an expansion to a campground on Lake Opinicon, Skycroft Campground.

In order to approve the expansion, South Frontenac Council will have to agree to amend both their Zoning Bylaw and their Official Plan, and there is a process for doing that. When the matter came to a Public Meeting of Council in September, a set of expert reports were presented by the proponents, based on scientific and engineering analysis. At the same time, opponents presented alternative expert opinions on the potential impact of the development on the lake and the watershed as a whole, based on their own scientific studies..

Among all the reports and counter-reports regarding the proposal, the local Conservation Authorities provided the township with an opinion from a different perspective. They looked critically at the case made by the proponents, and pointed out the gaps in the analysis, and said what was needed to ensure that the expansion, either the one being proposed or a smaller one, would be acceptable from an environmental impact perspective.

The advantage of the Conservation Authority analysis is that they did not start their analysis in order to support or oppose the proposed expansion. Removing this kind of analysis from the process just because Conservation Authorities come at their work from a conservation perspective, is not going to make the process any better or simpler.

It will only make it harder for South Frontenac Council to make the right decisions, as Council is inevitably squeezed between the legitimate commercial interests of a campground, that has been paying taxes, providing employment and economic spin-offs to the township for decades, and a group of property owners who have also been paying taxes for decades.

Meanwhile, the potential impact on the future of a township whose key asset is its natural environment, weighs on the minds of council members as well.

For Council, land use planning will only become more difficult because of Bill 23.

Unless, thanks also to Bill 23 and to other provisions in the Municipal Act, the provincial government takes an interest in the case.

The Province can, and will override the authority of the municipality if it sees fit to do so. That's one of the clearest messages being delivered over and over again by the Ford government.