Corrupted Liberals wallow in cash from developers

Once again the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), not city council, will make the final decision on the shape of the city. The significant issue it will rule on is the proposal by David Mirvish to build three towers between 70 and 80 storeys, on the block on King Street where the Princess of Wales Theatre is now located.

City council has not decided on the application, but the city planning department has been meeting with Mirvish and his famous architect Frank Gehry for almost a year, and the planners have made it clear they are opposed. The buildings are too high, they will put too much of a load on infrastructure and the project will demolish too many older loft buildings which should be retained. Mirvish has appealed to the OMB under the provision that if he does not get a decision from city council within a few months of making an application, then he can go directly to the OMB.

Sadly, this process isn’t unusual. Developers constantly take their proposals to the OMB when they can’t get satisfaction from a municipality. The OMB has frequently overruled municipal decisions in Ontario and given developers something close to what they want. The most outrageous example was in January when the OMB allowed extensive sprawl in Waterloo Region after the regional planners had said more sprawl was unacceptable. The region has since found a way to take this into the court system in a hope to upset the OMB, and even the provincial government has joined the region in the appeal.

Virtually every municipality is angry at this provincially appointed OMB, not only because it gets to upend the decisions of those who are elected, but because it is so expensive to retain the lawyers necessary to present a case at the OMB. Almost every municipality spends more money on lawyers at the OMB than they do on planning.

One keeps expecting the provincial government of Premier Kathleen Wynne to do something about the OMB, but it seems caught in neutral. At the annual meeting of the Association of Municipalities in Ontario in August, the Minister of Municipal Affairs, Linda Jeffrey, said the government had heard the municipal concerns “and we will be reviewing the process for land-use planning appeals at the Ontario Municipal Board.”

That sounded like good news, but it was all a ruse, more smoke and mirrors.

Now, two months later, the minister has finally announced what that review is all about. It will be an on-line review,\where you can send an email message with your thoughts so ministry staff can know what you are thinking, and six tightly controlled workshops with 90 minutes set aside to respond to prepared questions. One workshop will be held in Toronto.

But be warned that the review is extremely limited.

The ministry’s media release notes that several specific issues aren’t within the scope of this review, including “eliminating or changing the OMB’s operations, practices and procedures.”

So this review doesn’t look at the main issue.  Pretty pathetic.

Being a friend of Kathleen Wynne (together we led the fight against the megacity through Citizens for Local Democracy in 1996 and 1997), I approached her after she was elected Liberal Party leader early this year with some ideas about how a review of the OMB might be undertaken. She seemed interested and told me to talk to the staff of the Minister of Municipal Affairs, which I did in March, but was never allowed to actually meet the minister. The best I managed was a short telephone conversation in mid-August.

Why is the government not interested in addressing this issue when so many others are? One friend says it is simply a matter of money.

The Liberal Party of Ontario gets a lot of campaign contributions from the development industry, he said, and isn’t willing to do anything which might interfere with the board which gives the developers what they want.

I don’t have a better explanation than that—and that’s a sorry state of affairs indeed. John Sewell is a former mayor of Toronto.