After the Greenbelt scandal broke, Ontario Premier Doug Ford had a new appointment added to his schedule: a meeting every two weeks to talk homebuilding with his top political advisors and ministers.
Biweekly housing meetings, which began in September 2023, were called to make sure that the premier’s office, minister of municipal affairs and housing, and other ministries were all on the same page as the government began work on its next housing law.
That law, the first under Housing Minister Paul Calandra, would eventually be tabled in April 2024, missing ambitious density proposals, particularly around transit.
The meetings represent a rare and recurring venture into granular policy details for Ford.
While schedules seen by Global News show the premier is often given high-level briefings, it is uncommon for the most senior politician in Ontario to make repeat appearances at policy meetings on a specific topic.
A senior government source told Global News the biweekly housing meetings were designed to break down silos between ministries as Calandra began writing the government’s next housing law.
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The meeting was needed, the source said, because of the sheer number of staff and ministers involved in crafting housing policy.
Meeting records obtained by Global News show Premier Ford regularly attended the 45-minute biweekly meetings, along with his chief of staff and several policy directors. Other ministries, including infrastructure, were pulled into the discussions depending on the week.
For example, the eventual law gave universities the ability to sidestep the Planning Act and its stringent requirements for new projects in order to build more housing. That idea required the Ministry of Colleges and Universities to join the biweekly meetings with Ford, Calandra and others to thrash out the details.
The biweekly housing meetings attended by Ford were so hyper-focused on the upcoming legislation, the government source said, that when the bill was ready, the meetings stopped.
But despite Ford and his top team taking part in regular, detailed policy meetings to develop the new housing bill, key parts of the law born from those meetings were still cut out at the last minute.
As Global News previously reported, a plan to add minimum heights for buildings at transit stations was dropped, along with a policy to allow fourplexes to be built across the province.
The idea of removing parking minimums for projects near university campuses was toyed with as well and dropped.
It is not clear exactly how central parts of Housing Minister Calandra’s proposed law were chopped, but sources said it was presented to Premier Ford and to his cabinet.
Housing expert and advocate Mike Moffat said it was difficult to see careful policy discussions take place — and then disappear before they see the light of day.
“It’s been incredibly frustrating to see this go into legislation, or at least go into draft legislation, and not be introduced,” he told Global News.
Moffat said the changes Ontario considered and then scrapped have been effective in other parts of the country where they have been introduced. He said that, despite being responsible for 40 per cent of the country’s population and roughly 50 per cent of its population growth, Ontario is seeing just 32 per cent of housing starts.
“We really are falling behind, because we haven’t seen those types of reforms that we’re seeing in British Columbia and Nova Scotia and provinces all across Canada.”
After five consecutive years of housing legislation that has tinkered with the edges of construction laws — without seismic progress to show for it — Moffat said the government should commit to one round of planning reform, and then leave the issue alone.
“I’d like to see the rip off the band-aid: make big changes once and then just let it be for a few years, and let developers and investors and builders get used to the new rules,” he said.
“Rapidly and constantly changing is not a great environment to do business in.”
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