Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s proposed housing bill will make new buildings in many cities across the province less efficient and more expensive to heat and cool, say critics.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s proposed housing bill will make new buildings in many cities across the province less efficient and more expensive to heat and cool, say critics.
Ontario’s proposed housing bill will make new buildings in many cities across the province less efficient and more expensive to heat and cool, say critics, sabotaging our efforts to cut carbon emissions and fight climate change.
The Building More Homes Faster Act, which was introduced last week, eliminates the ability of municipalities to enforce more stringent energy efficiency standards in new buildings, according to current and former city councillors who developed the rules.
“For the last 15-20 years, the city of Toronto has been on a deliberate trajectory to make buildings more and more climate friendly with an ultimate goal of making them net zero. The new provincial legislation effectively kills that work,” said Coun. Gord Perks.
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While early criticism of the bill focused on how it would curtail the power of conservation authorities to limit development on floodplains, climate and environment groups are now turning their attention to its effects on urban development. Environmental Defence echoed Perks’s analysis, calling the bill a Trojan Horse for environmental catastrophe.
The changes could make it “impossible for the city of Toronto to meet its building emissions targets,” the group said in a statement.
Strangely, this may have been an inadvertent consequence of sprawling legislation that alters several other laws, critics say. Eliminating energy efficiency does not speed up the construction of new buildings, which is the law’s stated intent, and the provincial law nullifies Toronto’s Green Standard, which passed city council unanimously in 2013 — with the vote of then-councillor Doug Ford.
“This legislation includes clauses that will inadvertently make future homes more unaffordable and less efficient for Ontarians,” states a letter sent to Premier Ford Tuesday by Brian Purcell, vice-president of The Atmospheric Fund.
The letter states that the gutting of local energy efficiency standards will extend far beyond Toronto to Ottawa, Brampton, Ajax, Whitby, Pickering, Markham, Vaughan and Halton Hills.
“Excluding energy, sustainability and climate from consideration in the planning process will leave new housing exposed to spiralling energy costs and carbon prices,” Purcell wrote.
Including these stricter energy efficiency standards in the development approval process has never delayed development, and no building permit has ever been denied because of them, he writes.
“Energy efficiency rather improves affordability by ensuring quality homes with lower operating costs,” the letter adds, upgrades that qualify for government funding and rebates.
Melissa Diakoumeas, a spokesperson for housing minister Steve Clark, said the Ontario Building Code already contains “high standards for energy efficiency“ that apply across the province.
“If municipalities create their own standards, this patchwork of energy efficiency and other requirements reduces consistency and erodes affordability,” she wrote in an email.
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Outgoing city councillor Mike Layton was one of the first to recognize the risk the new law poses to Toronto’s — and other municipalities’ — ability to achieve climate commitments of net zero emissions.
“This is a big part of TransformTO,” Toronto’s plan to reach net zero by 2040, said Layton.
“TransformTO is dependent upon 100 per cent of our buildings achieving near net zero by 2040,” he said. “In order to achieve that, obviously, all our new buildings have to be as efficient as possible. Only then can we tackle the older building stock.”
The Green Building Standard started out with not very aggressive efficiency rules, Layton said, but it ratcheted up over time, “which is why it’s such a useful tool.
“It’s useful for the developers because they know what’s coming. And it’s useful for cities because we can say, ‘Well, we’re going to set a target of net zero by 2030 for buildings, and we’re going to slowly achieve it over the course of time by increasing building efficiency.”
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It’s not just a question of emissions targets, it’s also about costs to future homeowners.
“We need to be able to build newer buildings to a higher standard, if not for the environment, then for the people that will own the buildings and who will eventually need to upgrade them,” he said.
Former city councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon, one of the architects of the Green Building Standard who was elected to the provincial legislature as a Liberal in the spring, spoke out against the bill.
“The world is in a climate emergency, horrible disasters are devastating communities around the world, and the need to properly prepare and protect ourselves well in advance has never been more clear. So why on earth would we wish to remove our green standards, especially when they allow residents to live more comfortably in their homes and to save money in the long run while living sustainably?”
“We cannot let a decade’s worth of work be squashed. Cutting these standards will not lead to more affordable housing. Quite the opposite,” she said. “The cost of inaction is high. Building environmentally efficient homes ends up being a win-win for all involved.”
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