The Minister is gone, But What About The MMAH

Jeff Green | Sep 06, 2023

Much of the Premier of Ontario's talk about the housing crisis and the need to build 1.5 million homes has seemed to me to be a ruse to allow big time developers to make more and more profit.

And nothing about what has transpired since the 2022 election, not the new rules limiting the scope of municipalities to block or alter development proposals, the slackening of environmental protections, none of it seems designed to create housing that benefits those who need it most.

Instead, it is designed to create opportunities for investment.

The revelations about the way the properties in Toronto's Greenbelt were divvied up to developers connected to the government supports that initial bias.

But it is essentially a Toronto story. We don't have a Greenbelt in Eastern Ontario, we have rural lands. We certainly have development pressure, however, and our local land use planners and political leaders are working to determine how, as a community, we can manage those growth opportunities to benefit both the people who will end up moving to our communities as well as those of us who are already here.

But there is one body that makes the rules of engagement for all development, and that is the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MMAH). As has been said many times, the MMAH is all powerful when it comes to Ontario municipalities. Municipal rules, from Official Plans, to Zoning Bylaws, to approvals for any and all building activity, need to conform to the dictates and the ministry, and those dictates can change, at the whim of the Premier, in some cases.

So, when it is revealed that developers can influence decisions by the ministry over what land can be developed, and how, it creates a whole new set of questions about whether the MMAH is acting in the interest of local communities in Eastern Ontario.

It has long been a mantra in rural Ontario that the MMAH develops policies that fit only urban development. In Frontenac County, where well over 95% of properties do not have access to municipal water systems and 100% of properties do not have access to municipal sewage systems, the MMAH seems to be at a loss.

They want to force development into hamlets instead of promoting rural development, even though that means squeezing more wells and septic systems into smaller places.

The Frontenac County plan to support Communal Servicing is a way around that problem, but even though the plan is well received by provincial politicians at conferences every year, the MMAH has not engaged in a meaningful way to encourage it to happen.

The County is moving ahead, but the process has been delayed because of delays from the MMAH regulatory system.

At the same time, the Greenbelt controversy makes it hard to trust that the MMAH is truly committed to ensuring that rural development does not result in damage to the complex inter-related watershed ecosystem that we inhabit in rural Ontario.

Essentially, the MMAH hinders growth by not understanding how development works in different communities, and also cannot be trusted to prevent the wrong kind of growth from taking place.

And the Greenbelt scandal, and even the necessary resignation of the Minister, who happened to come from Brockville and was the senior political minister for Eastern Ontario, only makes matters worse.

All of this when many Frontenac County residents continue to struggle to find suitable housing at a price that they can afford.