Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Paul Calandra revoked a Peterborough-area minister’s zoning order after the property was listed for sale.
The minister’s zoning order (MZO) was issued in early 2023 by former housing minister Steve Clark after Cavan Monaghan’s town council asked for the province’s help speeding up development following a presentation from Melanie Horton of Esher Planning that John Mutton of Municipal Solutions had helped prepare.
Mutton was the “unregistered lobbyist” notoriously referred to as “Mr. X” by Integrity Commissioner J. David Wake in his Greenbelt investigation.
MZOs are a tool the provincial government can issue to overrule local planning decisions and bylaws, often to fast-track developments, including by rezoning properties to make them easier to develop. In many cases, lands’ values are increased by MZOs.
MZOs were seldom issued by the province before Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives were elected. The Ford government has used the tool at an unprecedented rate. Before the heat of the Greenbelt and Las Vegas trip scandal, the Ford government issued more than 110 from 2019 until 2023.
The MZO the province granted landowner Sam Ganni for his 1840 Brown Line Road property in Cavan Monaghan of Peterborough County changed part of the land’s zoning to facilitate a large industrial facility. No such development has since gone ahead.
In late summer 2023, the property was listed for sale for almost $19 million — nearly 15 times what Ganni bought it for in 2017, as the Toronto Star first reported in September 2023.
Calandra filed a regulatory change to revoke the MZO on Monday. He said it's been rescinded “in part because the property’s for sale but, in totality, because of lack of progress.”
1840 Brown Line Road is just north of Highway 7 and about two kilometres north of the Peterborough airport. In a May 2020 report, a firm hired by Cavan Monaghan to complete a “growth management strategy” for the town suggested the area, including 1840 Brown Line Road, be made employment lands because of its proximity to existing industrial businesses.
Mutton wrote a letter dated Feb. 22, 2022 to Cavan Monaghan’s council, asking it to formally request that the province issue an MZO for Ganni’s property. “Our request for a MZO to M1 Zoning is based on an implementation which encapsulates industrial development, infrastructure, services infrastructures and other public benefits,” Mutton’s letter said.
Horton presented to the town’s council about the MZO request two weeks later, on March 7, 2022. Slides she showed the council said rezoning the land from “rural” to “employment” use would allow three buildings containing “approximately 150,000 square feet of industrial space” to be built on the property bordering the City of Peterborough.
After Horton’s 15-minute-long presentation and an equal-length debate, council members voted 3-2 in favour of requesting the MZO from the province.
Then-councillors Matthew Graham and Ryan Huntley each voted against it at the March 7, 2022 meeting. Both criticized the lack of information accompanying the request during the short debate.
“MZOs are to be taken seriously, and I don’t feel this has. I feel like it’s come half-baked to us,” said Huntley, now the town’s deputy mayor.
“To me, this is a few drawings on pieces of paper… There’s nothing to quantify, or solidify, or justify what’s being discussed here,” said Graham, now mayor of Cavan Monaghan.
“We have a few MZOs,” Graham told The Trillium in early September after Calandra publicly proposed the revocation of the MZO issued to the 1840 Brown Line Road property. “It was probably the most divided one we had as council,” Graham recalled.
“There was very little provided in the way of justification or planning documents or plans for this specific project,” Graham said, explaining why he voted against it.
“I felt that, and I expressed this in the meeting for the application, I think there were less than five pieces of paper provided. So, far from the due diligence warranting what would be a significant benefit,” Graham said in the interview.
Shortly after Cavan Monaghan endorsed the request, Mutton boasted online about it. “MZO’s (sic) are us,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post. “We have been successful with multiple MZO’s in the Province of Ontario. Look no further for your project approval.”
Getting more employment lands has been — and continues to be — a focus of Cavan Monaghan’s council, Graham said.
After the town’s council voted to ask the province for the MZO, City of Peterborough staff caught wind and sent an angry letter to the province.
The property is “directly adjacent” to Peterborough’s municipal boundary and the city hadn’t been consulted, staff said in the April 2022 letter.
“The proposal contemplates rural employment uses directly adjacent to an urban municipality where significant growth should occur into the future. By permitting rural development proposals to occur right at the boundary of an urban municipality, the future expansion of the urban municipality is jeopardized,” it said.
Staff were also concerned that “no information” had been shared on how the building would be used, its servicing capacity, or how the developer planned to deal with the wetland the building sat on.
Despite the City of Peterborough’s objection, Cavan Monaghan’s council went ahead with the requested MZO. The Ford government granted it in January 2023.
Since then, the city hasn’t received any applications to service the site, which needs to happen before anything can get built, Graham said in the September interview.
“To my knowledge, I don't believe we have received studies or any formal applications for any development, or any expedited development of the site itself in question to date,” he said.
Ontario’s integrity commissioner released his report on the Ford government’s Greenbelt removals on Aug. 30, 2023. A few days later, news outlets including The Trillium confirmed that the “unregistered lobbyist” who’d helped get land in Clarington removed from the Greenbelt that Wake had dubbed “Mr. X” was Mutton.
Mutton, a former mayor of Clarington, had been set to receive $1 million from the developer he’d worked for if he’d been able to develop his lands that were temporarily removed from the Greenbelt. Lobbying success fees are illegal.
The integrity commissioner’s office can’t disclose the identity of anyone it's investigating for potentially violating Ontario’s lobbying law, which Wake implied in his Greenbelt report was why he’d created the pseudonym “Mr. X.”
A few days after Wake’s office published his Greenbelt investigation, Clark resigned as housing minister. Premier Doug Ford appointed Calandra to replace him.
One of Calandra’s first actions as housing minister was to launch a review of the MZOs issued under the Ford government. He tasked Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing officials with looking into the progress made on projects MZOs had been issued to before December 2022 — meaning the one granted for 1840 Brown Line Road wasn’t intensely scrutinized at the time. Three months ago, Calandra officially proposed its revocation.
"Any MZO that I supply, or that I approve, going forward, will immediately be reviewed over 12 months, and if I don't see progress, that MZO will be taken back," Calandra said last Friday.
On Tuesday, the housing minister explained that he won’t automatically revoke an MZO if the land its issued to is listed for sale.
“When’s there’s no progress, when it appears that an MZO has been used only to increase the value of the land, then I’ll absolutely, positively, move quickly and revoke,” Calandra said.
Ontario’s auditor general is expected to soon release a report on the Ford government’s use of MZOs.
