The Provincial Housing Agenda: A Year In Review

OVERVIEW: provincial housing legislation introduced over the past year has largely been viewed as trenching on an area of jurisdiction – residential land use management – that properly belongs to local governments. While the provincial government has certainly reasserted its authority in that regard, many elements in the provincial housing agenda actually enhance local government authority in ways that reinforce and extend local land use management jurisdiction. This paper focuses on those elements.

A principal focus of the provincial housing legislation is the removal of municipal council and regional board discretion over certain categories of residential zoning changes, for the sake of expediting development approvals. It now seems clear that the provincial government understood that the aversion of local governments and their planning staff to zoning significant areas of land for higher-density residential development in advance of site-specific applications to rezone (what has come to be called “pre-zoning”) was not entirely due to their enthusiasm for public hearings. The rezoning process had come to be used as a bargaining chip to obtain all sorts of public benefits from developers – not only cash community amenity contributions but also highway widenings, EV charging stations and other transportation improvements beyond those required by servicing bylaws, tenant relocation commitments not required by the Residential Tenancy Act, affordable housing units and so forth. There is some validity to the argument that the use of the zoning power has been diverted away from traditional land use management objectives and towards revenue generation and programs such as affordable housing that have historically and traditionally been within the jurisdiction of senior governments. With the new provincial requirements for pre-zoning land to accommodate 20 years’ demand for new housing, allowing small-scale multi-unit housing in low-density residential zones, and accommodating higher-density housing in areas well-served by transit, an obvious question was whether and how local governments would be able to secure these types of public benefits – the need for which would only be magnified by provincial and federal government housing supply initiatives. The answer to the question lies in an array of new local government powers reviewed in this paper.

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