Premier Doug Ford’s government is looking to clean the planning slate of a long-troubled site near a GO station to help attract a builder that might finally follow through with its development.
The government proposed revoking a minister’s zoning order (MZO) issued for a transit-oriented community (TOC) at the Mimico GO Station, where the bulk of a 2,000-plus unit housing development was planned. The project fell apart about a year ago when Metrolinx cancelled its agreement with Vandyk Properties after its planned development landed in receivership as a result of the company's financial struggles.
Ontario law allows the province’s housing minister to issue MZOs overruling municipalities’ local planning rules or decisions. The tool was seldom used before Ford's Progressive Conservatives, which have granted over 100 — with many aimed at speeding up developments.
The MZO affecting lands near the Mimico GO Station was issued in April 2022. The order was specifically tailored to Vandyk's version of the project: it was to facilitate the construction of three multi-use buildings with six towers of mostly housing units. Revoking the MZO would effectively unlock the lands from those plans, providing the landowner more flexibility over their use.
“The reason why this is important is because we want a new building partner to acquire the land so that we can continue on with the TOC program with a new building partner, whoever they may be in the future,” Infrastructure Minister Kinga Surma told The Trillium last week.
Surma is the minister in Ford’s cabinet responsible for TOCs. Her request to Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Paul Calandra led him to formally propose revoking the MZO issued to the Mimico TOC lands on Nov. 1. It’s open for input from the public until next month.
The province could issue a new MZO to facilitate a future developer’s TOC proposal, and would be open to it, Surma said last week.
Mimico woes
The Mimico GO Station is about a kilometre from the waterfront in Etobicoke, the westernmost area of Toronto where Surma and the premier are each from. It serves as a stop along GO Transit’s Lakeshore West Line, which connects riders from Union Station in downtown Toronto to as far away as Niagara Falls.
A few developers have proposed skyscraper condos at or near the Mimico GO Station over the last decade-plus, as successive provincial governments have sought to encourage development around key transit hubs.
Before Vandyk Properties’ project, there was another proposal for a 27-storey condo with direct access to the transit line to be built — but that fell apart after an earlier developer ran into financial problems of their own.
A few months after Ford’s PCs were elected, Metrolinx announced a deal with Vandyk, which owned properties directly north of the line. The developer “would pay all construction costs for a new station building, parking facility and cycling and pedestrian path at Mimico” and “be given development rights above the station to create a mixed-use development,” the provincial transit agency wrote at the time.
The Ford government wrote in its 2019 budget that the Mimico GO project would “be the first of many projects” delivered under its TOCs' strategy.
Vandyk’s “Grand Central Mimico” proposal eventually grew into a project envisioned to include nine towers containing more than 2,000 new housing units in total.
In April 2022, Ontario’s then-housing minister issued MZOs to lands where most of the TOCs the government had announced by then were set to be built, including the properties where the bulk of Vandyk’s construction was planned.
A year later, Metrolinx announced that Vandyk had agreed to significantly improve the Mimico GO Station by adding a new fully accessible main station, two new station entry points, and hundreds of new underground parking spots. At the time, the developer’s plans also included building “an estimated 2,078 housing units, including affordable ownership and rental options, as well as new retail and office spaces,” Metrolinx wrote in May 2023.
Metrolinx quietly terminated the agreement with Vandyk last November after learning a court-appointed receiver had taken control of the company’s lands, the Ministry of Infrastructure told CBC News, which first reported the project’s collapse this spring.
Last week, Surma expressed that she’s hopeful a potential buyer of the lands where Vandyk’s project was planned would also be open to upgrading the Mimico GO Station as part of a development of its own.
“We were really excited about the station,” she said. “We want those community benefits to be negotiated in the future, and we’ll do that, but we need a new landowner in order for that to happen.”
