The Ontario government is taking another stab at speeding up the province’s land-use adjudication system.
It is one of “a lot of things” the government needs to reform to get more homes built as quickly as possible, Premier Doug Ford said on Tuesday.
A pair of Progressive Conservatives said in the legislature late last year that the Ontario Land Tribunal was under review in order to speed up its decision-making.
“We’re trying to speed up development in every which way possible,” Ford said Tuesday, when asked about his government’s latest attempt to improve the system that’s been in a constant state of reform over the last half-dozen years.
The premier took reporters’ questions after he announced forthcoming legislation to require a provincial referendum ahead of the implementation of any new carbon emission-pricing programs.
The Ford government is also expected to soon introduce new housing-focused legislation.
There were 85,770 housing starts in Ontario in 2023, according to data the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation released in January. Its housing starts total last year was seven per cent less than was recorded in 2022, and significantly below Ford’s PCs’ 2023 goal of 110,000.
Recent projections suggest the number of new builds in Ontario will fall far short of the 1.5 million new homes that the province’s Housing Affordability Task Force said need to be built from 2022 to 2031 to address Ontario’s supply shortage.
Last year was a tumultuous year for provincial housing policy. The Ford government’s major policy changes — opening sections of the Greenbelt to development and increasing the developable land within municipalities’ limits — were reversed in scandal over developers’ influence with the government.
The Ford government is now “going to do everything we can to make sure that we continue building as quickly as possible,” the premier said on Tuesday.
The OLT’s role is to adjudicate land-use disputes in Ontario. The tribunal has undergone frequent changes since just before Ford’s PCs were elected. In 2017, the Liberal government finalized its reforms to an older quasi-judicial body that had been plagued by sloppy operations, concerns about politically charged appointments and slow decision-making.
Despite a couple of significant overhauls to the system’s operations since then, some issues have persisted — and novel ones have also emerged, four well-informed sources told The Trillium. The first chairperson who Ford’s cabinet appointed atop the system was central to many of the newer issues identified by these sources, which The Trillium detailed in a Feb. 1 story.
The four sources said morale plummeted under the leadership of Marie Hubbard, a “friend” of Ford’s who’d previously worked in the adjudication system under the Liberals. Hubbard was brought back to run it in 2019, receiving a special fast-tracked appointment.
Hubbard’s tactics — including sidelining adjudicators who she deemed not to be meeting decision-making targets, or whom she clashed with — created a “toxic” workplace, as one source put it, that led some of the system’s best adjudicators to leave.
The situation became so dire that the Ministry of the Attorney General later stepped in to conduct a workplace review of the OLT, interviewing staff about their experiences, two sources said.
The government hasn’t released any details about this workplace review, including in response to a freedom-of-information request that The Trillium filed. The Ministry of the Attorney General cited an exemption under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act allowing for documents on “labour relations and employment related information” to keep all records captured in the request from being disclosed.
A pair of the well-informed sources The Trillium spoke to about the OLT also recalled separate times that the Ford visited Hubbard at the tribunal’s office not far from Queen’s Park, which they found an odd practice for the premier and head of a tribunal.
Asked about these meetings on Tuesday, Ford said, “I have such a fond memory of Marie.”
“I think she was 85 years old — she knew that file inside and out; she did an incredible job catching up on the backlog,” the premier continued.
“(We met) just to see how she's doing. She's just a wonderful, kind person and I remember she baked some cookies — she brought them in to me — and honestly we ate cookies and discussed life. But my goodness, she was such a wonderful person and I miss her dearly.”
Hubbard died in August 2022.
Shortly after, Michael Kraljevic — whose shared history with the premier dates back to Ford’s days on Toronto city council, and, reportedly, their days playing football in high school — was appointed chair of the OLT. Kraljevic’s current appointment is set to keep him atop the OLT until February 2028.
With files from Jack Hauen
