If you pay attention to planning and development in Oakville, you know the Province has offered existing residents a deal. Well, maybe imposed is a better word.
The deal is: accept intensification in enough places to accommodate growth and higher density in greenfield development, and we will let you preserve the character and stability of your existing neighbourhoods.
Livable Oakville (the Official Plan), and the zoning that gives effect to it, reflect the Town’s agreement to this deal. The Province approved Livable Oakville at the then Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), now relabelled Local Planning Appeal Tribunal (LPAT). The Town acknowledges the Province has full authority over how much population we must accept and can set rules for the form of development. The Town accepts responsibility for making that work within the context of the existing community, with input from residents and councillors who live here.
How High is Too High?
How high a building should we be willing to accept in the mid-town core (Oakville GO Station) in exchange for being able to preserve stable neighbourhoods? Oakville News would say pretty high. Indeed, if that is what is necessary to let Oakville’s existing neighbourhoods retain their character, we’d even be OK with the mid-forty storeys one developer has proposed for the area…as massive a change as that might be in terms of population quantity and demographics. We’d, of course, expect the Town to ensure facilities, traffic and safety precautions kept pace. But while it might make it harder to get a restaurant reservation on Lakeshore Road East, it would certainly bring a much-needed shot in the arm to Downtown Oakville.
The problem with all this is we don’t have confidence the Province will keep its end of the deal. If we accept 40+ storeys in the mid-town core, will the Province respect the rest of our Official Plan? The Official Plan designates Glen Abbey as Private Open Space, for example, but so far, we haven’t seen any indication our Provincial representatives will fight for our right to preserve it as such. LPAT has lived up to its old nickname (OMB = “Owner May Build”), siding more with the developer than the Town, up to now. The Province can preserve it with a Ministerial Zoning Order (MZO), something they haven’t been shy about using to overrule municipalities in favour of developers. Still, there isn’t any sign they intend to do that.
Equality Under the Law?
Residents are flummoxed: they know they have to obey zoning rules on their properties, and they can’t understand there are different rules for big landowners and developers. One judge queried the Town, asking how it could expect to oblige someone to continue operating a golf course if they didn’t want to. Well, the zoning says private open space, not a golf course. If the Town can stop you from turning your large corner lot zoned residential into a McDonald’s Drive-Thru, in other words, oblige you to keep using it as a house, then surely the same can apply to private open space. After all, it’s not as though the designation changed after you bought it. You aren’t even obliged to operate a golf course. You can find another purpose within private open space or sell it. The hypothetical resident with a corner lot, on the other hand, has to keep operating his property as a residence or to sell it.
All of this is symptomatic of the major flaw in Ontario’s planning regime, one which the previous government finally moved to correct but which the current government has reinstated.
Responsibility Without Authority
The Town of Oakville has the responsibility to plan the Town in accordance with the rules laid down by the Province. What it doesn’t have is the authority. The LPAT can overturn the town's decisions without regard for its adherence to their published plans, even those which align with those of the Province.
Anyone who knows anything about management knows that responsibility without authority is a sure-fire recipe for angst. The conflicts between residents and Council, Council and developers, and the Town and the Province are the constant manifestations of this flaw. These adversarial eruptions characterize every significant development issue facing our community.
The Town has drawn up an Official Plan that aligns with the Province's goals and has been ratified by it. Yet, it cannot enforce it. Landowners and developers can appeal to LPAT. If LPAT simply reviewed the process to ensure that the Town was properly applying its and the Province’s rules in its decisions, this appeal process would make sense. The preceding Liberal government made that change. The Conservative and NDP members unanimously agreed to it, but when the Conservatives came into power in 2018, their members immediately reversed that change. Once again, the LPAT can consider applications, de novo, on a clean slate and make a decision without considering the Town’s reasoning or its intimate knowledge of its community's character or the destabilizing impact of the development may have on the surrounding communities.
Bad refereeing leads to fights
Because we know this, because we sense from decisions like this one and many others that have been made over many decades that our self-determination, even within the very narrow limits laid down by the Province, is constantly undermined, we do not trust the system.
Why should we accept forty storeys in the mid-town core if it doesn’t give us control of preserving the things we view as essential to our sense of place, the character and the stability of our community? Better just to fight everything, in the hope that you will get some wins here and there and hold back the tidal wave of growth a bit longer, so perhaps you can retire somewhere else before your hometown becomes completely unrecognizable.
These NIMBY struggles, in which Council absorbs the blame and the Province hides behind the supposed neutrality of LPAT, don’t need to be happening. They work for the Province, though. Council after Council has implemented Provincial guidelines and accepted growth targets imposed from on high, and fought losing battles on appeal, only to hear residents complain that the Town lets development happen because it is "greedy for tax revenue" or "in the pockets of developers."
The fights are acrimonious and expensive. Instead of partnering with developers to shape a community together, residents fight with Council, Council and residents fight with the developers, Council and residents fight with the Province.
The Province should demonstrate its good faith by aligning the Town’s authority to its responsibility. Immediately, it should move to respect the Town’s official plan and the democratically expressed will of its residents by allowing the Town to protect Glen Abbey in accordance with the Livable Oakville Plan through an MZO if necessary. Next, it should revise the rules for LPAT so that it becomes a true appeal tribunal, not a new decision-maker overriding the Town’s authority and dismissing local control over the form of the community.
Who knows what kind of community we could build if developers and the Town worked together instead of simply working on setting the stage for a fight? The current rules for LPAT undermine the Town’s negotiating position and lead to adversarial relationships between all stakeholders. There is little incentive for developers to cooperate in building a community that works not only for their prospective buyers but also for their much more numerous neighbours. Our town council is between a rock and a hard place: capitulation and resident anger, or expensive and often futile battles at LPAT.
If our current Provincial government does not commit to these changes, we will soon have an opportunity to install a new one. If you care about Oakville and want Oakvilleans to have a real say in how it grows, make this clear to your Members of Provincial Parliament: Stephen Crawford ([email protected]) and Effie Triantafilopolous ([email protected]). Tell them to save Glen Abbey and eliminate de novo hearings at LPAT.
