Making Sense of Guelph's Finances

I decided to roll up my sleeves and write an article about the Guelph city budget so I could help make the financial situation facing residents more understandable. I was more than a little afraid to do so, and the more I got into the job the more I found that that fear was justified. To give the city it's due, staff have made huge progress towards making financial information about the city more available than it has been in the past. If you look at the city website, for example, you can find a very detailed document that explains the 2016 budget. I downloaded it onto my computer and now have a 341 page pdf to work through.  But unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that Guelph has a budget that is approaching a half billion dollars a year, and it really does require a professional's eye to make sense of it---so there is ultimately no way that I can easily understand and explain all the details. This doesn't mean that a thoughtful generalist (or engaged voter) can't learn from the document, however. So I decided the best thing I could do to help readers is to identify some issues that people sometimes get wrong and which can create confusion. They are as follows:

• using brute numbers instead of percentages
• scaling problems that arise because of Guelph's rapid growth
• confusion between capital and operating budgets
• Guelph's extra "design features" that render comparisons with other cities problematic
• emerging long-term problems that most people don't know about
• "locked in" costs that the city is responsible for paying but has little control over

In addition, I think it is important for people to understand that the corporation of the city of Guelph has "hands off" control over and responsibility for various corporations that are either essential to the operation of the city or are the result of specific decisions in the past that fit into the long term "design features" that the city has decided to follow. These include:

• Envida
• Guelph Hydro
• Guelph Municipal Holdings Inc.
• Guelph Junction Railway

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The Simplified Explanation of the Guelph 2016 Budget---in all it's glory.
From the city website

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Why it is Important to Use Percentages:

The first thing necessary to understand about the city budget is its absolute size. This is important because people routinely throw around numbers without attempting to put them into a context. For example, it really doesn't help anyone understand local government if they are told "The total budget used by city Council and the Mayor---including both salaries and expenses---comes to $947,400! Why does it cost so much?" The issue here is that "947,400" is just a number on a page until someone puts it into a context. In many instances people automatically think about what that number would mean in their personal life. In those terms, $947,400 is about several times the cost of a person's home. But that isn't a proper comparison for things as completely different as a city and a household budget. A city is much bigger than any one individual, and does a whole lot more. A more useful way of understanding a number in the budget is to consider it as a percentage of the whole. It turns out that Guelph only spent 0.2% of the entire budget on Council.

The difference between comparing what Council costs to your personal finances to the over-all cost of running a city is emotional. When someone just uses a number instead of a percentage, they are often doing so in order to create an emotional response in the reader. Emotions bypass our reason and can often get us to do things that we wouldn't if we calmly thought about what is really the best thing to do. A professional reporter is often trying to "stir the pot" and get people angry so they will share their story in social media, which will generate "clicks" and therefore revenue for their website. Someone working on a political agenda will also do this because they want to get people angry so they will either avoid voting in the next election (because "they" are "all the same") or because they want citizens to vote for their candidate---or best of all---cut a cheque for the cause.

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People might wonder why I routinely point out how other news sites manipulate people into sharing stories so they can generate ad revenue through clicks on advertising---then ask readers of the "Guelph Back-Grounder" to share it on social media. The difference all comes down to how it's done. Revenue has to come from somewhere to support independent journalism, and you can either support it through making a conscious decision or by being manipulated by people appealing to your unconscious reflexes. What sort of business model do you want to see succeed? 

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How About Another Graph from the City Website?

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Scaling Issues Due to Growth:

It isn't hard to accept when you think about it, but most people don't know that Guelph is the fastest growing city in Ontario, and the 7th fastest growing one in all of Canada. In fact, between 2011 and 2016 Guelph's population grew by 7.7%. (Please note, the population numbers are calculated every five years through the national census. This is not an annual growth rate.) This isn't the fastest than the city has grown in it's lifetime (46% between 1951 and 1961, 51% between 1961 and 1971---and 270% between 1851 and 1871), but it is still quite high in comparison to other Canadian cities. 

Professional staff at City Hall have to take these issues into account when they do capital estimates---for both new builds and routine maintenance. For example, consider the expansion of the city police department building, a $34.1 million dollar project. It was originally built in 1960 when the city's population was 38,000. An addition was put on in 1989. The population in 1991 was 88,000---so we can assume that a doubling had occurred by then. (That would put the average annual increase in population between 1960 and 1989 at 2.42%.) The news release that came with the announcement for the Police Hall expansion suggested that this new build was to provide for the next 25 years. At 7.7% growth rates per every five years, this would suggest that in 25 years Guelph will have a total population of 191,000---a 45% increase. If Guelph didn't have to consider a 45% increase in population over the lifespan of this building project, it wouldn't be hard to believe that the police headquarters project would cost a lot less than $34 million.

Of course no one can tell what tomorrow will bring. Guelph gets its water from wells, which means that if we don't want to build an expensive pipeline to bring in water from Lake Erie, there is a limit to population growth. But it is fair to say that planners can consider a significant increase in population in the near future. This means that when it repairs, expands, or, builds new, the city has to create something with capacity that far exceeds its existing needs. This is a problem because the tax payers that are needed to pay for this expanded infrastructure are currently nothing more than a gleam in the eye of a planner. Hopefully they will arrive shortly and help pay for the expanded infrastructure, but in the interim the existing citizens are going to have to pay for a lot of the stuff that those future people will use. (And, of course, the faster that tax base grows, the greater the chance that the city estimates were too low and the facility will have to be expanded again to deal with a dramatic increase in population.)

And this isn't just a question of "big builds" like a new police station. Consider sewers. There has been a lot of work recently on expanding the sewers downtown so they can handle the increased flow from the new condo towers. Because sewers work with gravity, when you expand them you can't just open a trench and put a bigger pipe in. Instead, you have to dig down farther than the existing pipe and put the new, bigger capacity sewer in deeper. And, Guelph has it's bedrock very close to the surface---which means that putting in bigger sewers requires a lot of "jack hammer parties". (A friend who lives on Margaret Street has told me about the joys of having a year's worth of sewer reconstruction outside one's front door.)

All of this just goes to reinforce the point that it is very, very expensive to have a city grow quickly. 

So why doesn't the city just refuse to grow? First of all, it can't. The Ontario Places to Grow legislation basically forces the city to grow whether we like it or not. Secondly, there are groups in the city that really, really, really want this growth to continue. One person in 13 works in construction and 7% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) comes from the industry. This means that there are extremely well-motivated organizations that work to ensure that government makes no effort at all to limit growth in the city. It also means that anyone who works in construction, sells stuff needed in construction, or, has any family or business connection with either of these two types of people, is going to be extremely upset with any politician who suggests that the city should limit its growth in order to control taxes.

In fact, during the 1991 election campaign a slate of candidates (full disclosure, including me), ran on a "slow down growth" platform that pointed out that the rapid growth of Guelph's suburbs were responsible for increasing tax rates for people who lived in older areas. (This is a separate, but related issue that stems from the cost of servicing new low density (ie:  suburban sprawl) versus older, high density (ie: walkable) neighbourhoods.) This campaign so scared the Guelph Home Builder's Association that they placed a full page advert in the Guelph Mercury that warned

There are candidates in this municipal election that are against growth and economic prosperity. Send a message with your vote that you want Guelph's businesses to grow, for the employment of your children and the prosperity of your neighbours.

From Daily Mercury, Saturday, November 9th, 1991. Page 11-B 

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Since deconstructing the city budget is a huge undertaking, I've decided to split this story into "bite sized bits" instead of creating an on-line "War and Peace".  Stay tuned for the next part, which will come out as soon as I can find the time to write it.

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Here's another graphic from the budget. The city really
has done a good job on the 2016 report!

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If you like reading "the Guelph  Back-Grounder" consider sharing it, making a donation, or, maybe even subscribing to the account.  Even one dollar a month can make a difference!  If people won't support independent, local journalism, the citizenry will not have access to the information that they need to make informed choices. 

Water, Quarries, Construction, Growth, and Guelph

Most people don't think of Southern Ontario as being the center of a mining industry. Probably most folks don't think that there is an open pit mine within walking distance of downtown Guelph. But there is. You can just glimpse part of it off the Hanlon Expressway in between Wellington Street and College Avenue, through gaps in the trees on the side of the road away from the center of the city.

Aerial view of the Guelph DoLime Quarry,
photo by Mike Nagy

One of the odd things about this open pit mine is that it isn't in Guelph legally, even though it is certainly part of the city geographically. Take a look at this map of the boundaries of the city. As you can see, the official boundary of the city ends just at the edge of the DoLime open pit mine. This means that the city has no effective direct control over the property---which is under the jurisdiction of the County and the Province.

Boundary Map, City of Guelph
Original map from Elections Canada,
minor modification by author

This quarry has been in operation for over 150 years, and began its life in the countryside and the city grew up around it. It is currently owned by "River Valley Developments" and managed by "James Dick Construction Ltd".

River Valley Developments is owned by Carson Reid, who is the son of Albert Reid, who was the brother of the developer Melville Reid. Melville's brother Albert had a son Orin, who started a company called "Reid's Heritage Homes", which is now managed by Orin's sons Brian and Scott Reid, plus his son-in-law, Tim Blevins. So there are two housing construction and development companies in Guelph owned by members of the Reid family:  "Carson Reid Homes" and "Reid's Heritage Homes". "River Valley Developments" is a separate business that owns the Guelph dolime quarry, and lists Carson Reid as the president.

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The Guelph DoLime quarry is of importance to the city because concerns have been raised about the impact of it's operations on water quality in the city. Guelph is an "odd duck" in that it is a city that gets its water from a complex of 21 wells. This is a rare thing to do because the population plus it's associated industries uses an awful lot of water. In order to keep it flowing, the city has to be vigilant in preserving the aquifers. To understand why Guelph is able to run a modern city on wells, we need to understand a few things about hydrology.

The Guelph situation,
Image from Guelph City website

Wells are just holes in the ground that allow people to draw water from an aquifer, but the complexity comes from different layers of soil, sand, gravel, rock, and, clay that the water sits in and flows through. As you can see in the above graphic, there are two different aquifers to consider---the shallow one above the clay barrier, and, the deeper one between it and the bedrock.

Guelph has a very strong deep aquifer at least in part because it is surrounded by geological deposits called "moraines" that are left over from the last ice age. Take a look at the following map:

The dark blue blotches that surround K-W, Guelph, and, Cambridge are moraines.
Image c/o Wellington Water Watchers (right-click on it for a bigger map.)

Moraines are important sources of "recharge" for groundwater and act like sponges that will soak up water during heavy rains and spring melt and slowly release it into both aquifers and streams during relatively dry times. No doubt part of the reason why Guelph has such good ground water is because it is surrounded by them.

The water in an aquifer doesn't just sit still, either. It often flows from place to place---just like water above ground. The difference is, however, that it can be often difficult to know the direction, rate of flow, and, source of water in an aquifer. This means that we can only map this information through very expensive research---and even then, we often end up in a situation where people making decisions can have to play the old "dueling experts" game. The problem is that the city has to decide and water is really, really, really important to the future of the city. Right now River Valley Developments wants to dig deeper into the bedrock that they are mining and this means that they are well into the same depth that the city harvests its water from.

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Before we get much further, I'd like to remind people that I put a lot of work into these articles and making a few bucks off them allows me to put even more time into research and writing (money buys convenience.) If you can afford it, please consider subscribing through Patreon or tossing something in the tip jar. If that doesn't appeal to you---or you can't afford---no problem. 

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For the past five years the city of Guelph has been opposing a bid by River Valley to double the amount of limestone being taken every year from the quarry.

The City has been clear in its concerns regarding the amended permit. Concerns are based on the fact that increased pumping above historical levels at the quarry will impact water quantity available at some of the City’s municipal wells. The City is calling for a limit at the current pumping rate; a long-term management plan for the quarry; an effective monitoring program; and financial assurances to ensure the quarry owner—rather than Guelph ratepayers—pay for long-term mitigation costs related to its operation. (From a press release dated Feb 4, 2013.)

The key potential problem that can arise would happen if surface water were allowed to seep directly into the deep aquifer without having first been filtered through the layers of gravel, sand, and, clay that exist in both the covering soil or the moraines surrounding Guelph. Consider, for example, a situation where there was some sort of ruptured pipeline, agricultural run-off, or, industrial accident that led to contaminated water flowing across the surface and ending up in the quarry pit. It would end up flowing directly into the lower aquifer---and from there possibly into the city's wells. Once it is in that aquifer it is essentially beyond the ability of the city to ever remove it.

In addition, by pumping down the deep water aquifer enough to expose the bedrock, the risk could be that this would also lower the aquifer over a much wider area---which would reduce the flow rate in nearby municipal wells.

Finally, there is the problem of what is going to happen to the quarry once the business no longer wants to mine the limestone. This is a far from trivial issue as it means that a lot of money needs to be spent after the cash flow from the sale of limestone has ended. It is true that under the 1980 Pits and Quarries Control Act all quarry operators are expected to put up a financial deposit that they forfeit if they don't pursue a remediation strategy that meets the approval of provincial inspectors. This act was modified in 2017 by the Aggregate Resources and Mining Modernization Act, which gave the Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry increased power to intervene and modify site plans for extraction resources in order to protect both the economic and environmental interests of the community.

The Schedule includes some amendments relating to enforcement of the Act and regulations.  In order to encourage voluntary compliance, the amendments give inspectors the power to provide a person believed to be contravening the Act or regulations with a report indicating the contraventions identified during an inspection.  A new offence is established in respect of false or misleading information provided under the Act.  The Schedule repeals the current penalties for offences under the Act and provides a new maximum fine of $1,000,000 and a new maximum daily fine of $100,000.  A provision is added to protect the Minister, inspectors and public servants from liability for any acts that they have done in good faith under the Act. 

The Schedule includes amendments to give the Ministry powers to obtain more information from licensees and permittees.  A licensee or permittee is required to submit reports on the progressive rehabilitation and final rehabilitation of the site of a pit or quarry.  Regulation-making powers are added to require licensees and permittees to prepare reports on records they are required to keep under section 62 and submit the reports to the Minister.  Regulations may provide for a person with prescribed qualifications to review technical or specialized studies or reports that a licensee or permittee is required to prepare and to submit a report to the Minister.  The Minister is given the power to direct licensees and permittees to submit information relating to the operation of a pit or quarry to the Minister and to conduct inventories, tests or studies with respect to the pit or quarry and submit a report thereon to the Minister.

From the "Explanatory Notes", Legislative Assembly of Ontario Site

The city raised its concerns about the long-term impact of the River Valley Developments quarry on the deep water aquifer in 2013. The province agreed to consider these issues, and a provincially-appointed mediator has been working between the city and the company to find some sort of compromise that both parties can live with. Since mediation happens in secret, the public record just about ends at that point. 

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There is another open pit mine that people should be thinking about:  the Hidden Quarry project just East of Rockwood, off highway 7. James Dick Construction limited (the same guys that run the Guelph DoLime quarry owned by River Valley Developments) want to open a 39.4 hectare limestone quarry. Just to understand the size, one hectare is roughly the area of a football field, so think of the quarry as being forty football fields in size. This has raised the concerns of local folks who (understandably) are concerned about it. People are afraid that they will have giant trucks roaring down their roads, blasting, dust, and/or, wells drying up. And, of course, just concern about these issues is bound to affect people's property values---let alone if some of it actually comes true! Some folks have even suggested that the deep water aquifers that serve places like Guelph are all connected and if some contamination were to occur in the Hidden Quarry that it would eventually affect the city.

Here's a YouTube video from a Rockwood Group, "The Concerned Residents Coalition" that goes in pretty significant detail about the Hidden quarry proposal.

I'm not going to try to sift-out these issues to try to separate the plausible from the far-fetched. I lack the expertise to do so, and that is a very deep swamp for a journalist to negotiate. But I will

Green Party of Ontario Leader,
and Guelph candidate, Mike Schreiner
photo c/o Wiki Commons

pause to point out that there are very well organized groups in this area that have made the issue of gravel pits and limestone quarries---and groundwater in general---a very big issue. These include: Wellington Water Watchers (Guelph DoLime, the Nestle bottling plant in Aberfoyle, and, growing the Ontario Green Belt), the Concerned Residents Coalition (the Hidden Quarry proposal), and, an umbrella group called Gravel Watch Ontario. In addition, we have the Green Party of Ontario leader, Mike Schreiner, who has made concerns about local water quality a key part of his bid to gain election to Queen's Park in the Guelph area. This isn't to say that any of this is anything more than public-spirited individuals seeking to ensure that Guelph's water supply is preserved for future generations. After all, every single advance that society makes has come about through the work of advocacy groups plus politicians who have decided to make a specific issue "their project". All I want to do is point out that is that aggregate extraction is a significant issue in the political consciousness of both local voters and politicians, and as such, it is something that the citizenry really should think about.     

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With that in mind, I think it would be useful to discuss the greater role that aggregates play in our lives. River Valley Developments and James Dick Construction want to dig up limestone because someone wants to buy them. And the people who do are you and me!

In 2009 the Ontario government commissioned a study of the Ontario aggregates industry. In the first decade of the 2000s, it estimated that Ontario used 179 million metric tonnes of sand, gravel, and, limestone per year. (A metric tonne is 1,000 kilograms, which is roughly the same weight as an Imperial ton.) That comes out to 14.5 tonnes per person, per year. The per capita use is actually less than what it was in the 1980s, when it was 16.4 tonnes/person/year. But because the population has gone from 8,625,107 in 1981 to 13,448,494 in 2016, the actual total amount used per year has increased by 45 million tonnes over the same time. Since Guelph DoLime and the Hidden quarry are specifically limestone mines instead of gravel pits, it's important to separate out the demand for limestone as opposed to sand and gravel. According to the study I'm working from, 43% of the aggregates in Ontario are crushed stone (ie, what comes from the Guelph DoLime and Hidden quarries)---as opposed to sand and gravel. This translates to a little over 6 tonnes of quarried stone per person per year.

Aggregates are used in a lot of different things---including such esoteric things as computer screens, abrasive cleansers, glass, road sand, etc. But by far the greatest use (81%) is in construction. And in construction, 62% is used directly, 21% goes into ready mix concrete, 7% goes into making cement, and, the other 10% goes into other construction materials. And the purpose of that construction breaks down as follows:  34% for new roads, 14% for "repair construction" (the majority is road repair), 26% for new residential buildings, 15% for new non-residential building, and, 10% for new "other" engineering (don't know what that means---bridges?) The greatest use of aggregates in Ontario is for roads (34% plus the majority of 14%.)

 This is a significant increase since the late 1980s, when it was only 34% of the total. And let's separate out the use of crushed stone in road construction:  "road metal" 24%, concrete aggregate 22%, cement 12%, asphalt aggregate 12%, a variety of other uses at 2% or less, plus a whopping 26% of "unspecified uses".

(A few explanations are in order here.  "Road metal" is the traditional name given to the stone chips that are mixed with asphalt to make a bitumen road. "Cement" is the name given to the chemically-active substance (usually "burnt" limestone) you mix with water, sand, gravel, chipped stones, etc, with to make "concrete" which is cast in forms to make things like sidewalks, steps, foundations, etc. The "unspecified uses" in the above are just that: "unspecified"---they could be road metal, cement, etc, or something else entirely. The consultants had a hard time finding numbers for many parts of the aggregate survey, which they explained in another part of the text.)

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Aggregates all have two properties in common:  they weigh a lot and we use a lot of them. Put these two things together and transportation becomes a major fraction of the end cost of use. This means that it just isn't feasible to import aggregates from some far away "sacrifice zone" and ignore the impact that extraction has on that neighbourhood---like we do for oil:

Alberta tar sands,
Photo by Howl Art Collective, c/o Wiki Commons

This means that if we are going to continue to use a lot of limestone in Ontario, we are going to have to have open pit mines like Guelph DoLime and Hidden quarry pretty much in our own backyards. This raises the question, "Can we do with less limestone?"

The answer is "yes", and we are already moving in that direction. The first option is recycling. If you checked out the first phase of the Metal Works condominium project or other building site you probably saw something like this.

Aggregate recycling. Photo by Peter Craven, c/o Wiki Commons

And while driving along the road, you may have seen something like this. 

A pavement recycling machine,
Photo from U.S. dept or transportation, Highway Division

These are two examples of "in situ direct aggregate recycling". There are other things that can be "recycled" as aggregates. These include demolition waste, slag from steel mills, ground glass, etc. The study I am working from says that Ontario uses 7% recycled content in the aggregate mix, whereas Europe uses as much as 20%. Gravel Watch Ontario suggests that if Ontario recycled at the European level, we would save 22 million tonnes of virgin aggregate a year.

Of course, it's important to remember that this reduction is for total aggregates, not crushed rock (ie what comes out of Guelph DoLime and Hidden quarries.) From what I've read, it appears that recycling tends cut down on the use of sand and gravel more than crushed rock. Moreover, there are issues involved in the use of recycled materials that need to be addressed. For example, there was a problem with highway 427 where road failure resulted from the use of recycled materials with a relatively high concentration of contaminating gypsum materials (eg: drywall) because of swelling due to absorption of moisture. This isn't to say that there is an intrinsic problem with recycled materials, just that there is a learning curve in developing the knowledge and systems to ensure that it is used properly.

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Another interesting option is the use of more wood to build mid-range buildings. It turns out that it is possible to build mid-range sized buildings---both commercial and residential---using a lot more wood instead of concrete, if the local building code allows it. On January 1rst, 2014 the Ontario provincial building code was amended to allow wooden structures up to six stories tall.  This opens the door for more buildings like these:

1201 Mercer St., Seattle Washington

  

Aspen Art Museum, Aspen Colorado

Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater, Washington District of Columbia

Arcadia Student Living, Charlotte North Carolina
All photos c/o the "Image Gallery" of the Wood Product Council
(lots more great stuff there)

These sorts of building not only use less aggregates, they tend to be cheaper and quicker to build too. And, as you can see, they can be designed both as the Brutalist blocks which are so beloved by institutions (and that enrage so many neighbourhood associations), or, as something that fits better into the existing pattern of communities. There has been some opposition from fire departments and aggregate companies (of course) who say that these buildings aren't as fire resistant as concrete ones, but there are ways of getting around that problem and these are covered in the new code.

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One other way we could cut our use of aggregates would be to live in smaller homes. According to Stats Canada, 1861 6.2 people lived in the average household---by 2011 it had declined to 2.5 At the same time, home size has been increasing. In 1975 the average Canadian home size was 98 square metres, but in 2010 it had increased to 181 square meters. At the same time, the number of people living in that home declined from 3.1 to 2.5. Canadians currently have the third largest average home size in the world---with an average of 72 square meters per person. (Hong Kong has the lowest at 15.)

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There are a lot of ways in which we can probably change the amount of aggregate we use in Canada. We could drive less and take public transit more---which would cut down on the wear-and-tear on roads. We could get a handle on population growth. We could decide to live in more modest homes. All of these things would help us live more in harmony with nature. They would also help with climate change (gravel trucks use a lot of fuel.) But they would all involve Canadians rethinking our values and how we live our lives. What is more important---a big house or a clean environment? Do we want to live in the countryside at the expense of degrading it? The large house in the countryside---which we have to commute from in order to pay for---requires much more aggregates per person than the modest home in town serviced by public transit.

At this point I suppose I could put up an image from the famous poster by Walk Kelly, "We have met the enemy and he is us." (I would if I could find a public domain version.) But that would be disingenuous. A lot of "powers and principalities" exist to inflate people's expectations and wants in order to get people to want to buy the largest houses possible (I won't say "can afford", because many people buy homes that they can't), as far away from work, public transit, shopping, etc as possible. Home builders want to build big luxury houses instead of affordable apartments. The OMB wants to "preserve the character of neighbourhoods filled with single-family, fully detached units". The debate over gravel pits and limestone quarries will work itself out one way or another. In the process of doing so, I hope that some people will take the time to consider what effect their personal decisions affect the world around them.

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One last point. If you think that this magazine helps inform voters, share it with your friends. "Word of Mouth" is absolutely essential to its success. So post a linke on FaceBook, Twitter, or, however else you connect with friends. 

The Ontario Municipal Board

Synopsis

The Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) has grown over 100 years from an informal body designed to help towns and cities deal with technical issue into a pseudo-legal court that routinely over-rides planning departments to impose its own vision. This is not because it is "in the pocket of developers" so much as because it has adopted the "ideology of the law" and because it has had to deal with a lack of direction from the province. This has served the interests of provincial politicians in the past, but ill serves cities that need to have the flexibility to experiment in order to quickly retool for a society where environmental sustainability is quickly becoming of paramount importance. It is difficult to over-emphasize the importance of the OMB to our quality of life in cities, yet people rarely know much about it. Right now the provincial government is undertaking a review of the OMB mandate, and this means that this is a time when pressure on our MPPs will have maximum impact on the future of this body.

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In a previous article about Guelph and the Places to Grow Act, I finished off by saying that recent amendments to the Guelph Official Plan were currently under appeal to the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB.) (See case number PL140042 at this website.) The companies taking the city to court are:

• Abode Varsity Living Inc
• Loblaw Properties Ltd.
• Terra View Custom Homes Inc. & Lambden Farm Trust 
• Thomasfield Homes Limited
• D Four Guelph Developments Limited 
• Fieldgate Commercial Developments Limited
• Greenways Group Guelph
• Living Rivers

In the past, the OMB has had a profound influence on the shape of Guelph. To cite one example very relevant to my own personal experience, it overturned that part of Guelph's official plan where it stated that the corner of highways Six and Seven should only be used for light industrial activity, and allowed Walmart to build a "big box" mall there. In fact, the cost of that and other fights between the city and appellants to the OMB has made the city "gun shy" to the point where when Councillors make suggestions to change plans to make the city more "walkable", it is routine for staff to suggest that such a change would not survive an OMB appeal. That is usually enough to take a suggestion off the table. This dramatically limits the freedom of Council to find innovative solutions to problems that face the city. So the citizens of Guelph would be wise to learn a little bit more about this pseudo-judicial organisation, hence this article.

In the following I will be drawing heavily on the book A Law Unto Itself by John George Chipman. It was published in the year 2002, so it is somewhat out-dated, but I think his historical analysis is useful to understand how the board works, what issues it faces, and, whether or not it should continue in its present form.

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The OMB was originally created in 1906 as "The Ontario Railway and Municipal Board" (ORMB.) It's primary goal was to help towns and cities deal with the technical aspects of running streetcar lines. As such, it was not supposed to follow legal structures or be adversarial. Indeed, in the original three person configuration, one of the members was specifically supposed to be an engineer with experience in running a streetcar system. Later on, the mandate of the board expanded to include other technical aspects of city development----like electricity, telephones, and, gas lines. As time went by, the board assumed the duty of giving advice and oversight to municipalities for financial matters. This was important in the 1930s, as many municipalities in Ontario fell into severe fiscal problems during the great depression.

In 1917 the province decided that municipalities should be developing official plans to deal with new construction. The board was told that they had to look at these new plans and sign off on them before they went into effect. And in 1946 a planning act was passed that set out a formal process for creating a local official plan. At this point the board was designated as the body that the Minister of Municipal Affairs could send a dispute between two or more parties over an element of a municipal for settlement.

The idea was that judges and the courts are not properly set up to deal with the very technical elements of emerging technology or a financial crisis. Moreover, even back then it was recognized that lawsuits were very expensive and tax dollars would be better spent fixing potholes than lining the pockets of lawyers. The ORMB was considered a more cost effective system in that real experts would be available to help municipalities by offering advice instead of descending into formal legal battle.

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The thing to remember about the legal system is that it is a very blunt instrument to accomplish much of anything.

For one thing, it takes an ungodly long period of time to accomplish anything. To cite one ridiculous personal example, I have been asked to act as a character witness in a medical malpractice trial---and it has already gone on for seven years, with no end in sight.  It is tremendously unfair to individuals to spin on proceedings this long, but the majority of businesses simply cannot afford to allow things to go on for the lengths of time that lawyers and judges seem to believe are reasonable. Can you imagine the cost of a development project being on hold for seven years? And, of course, even if you don't mind putting your business or life on hold for years and years, legal fees have escalated to the point where only wealthy people can afford to access the law. So it makes perfect sense to create informal tribunals where people are dealing with the substantive issues instead of worrying about precedents, strict rules governing evidence, and so on.

Also, to get back to the original technical nature of the ORMB, the legal system doesn't do a very good job understanding newly emerging technologies or ideas like railroads, electrical grids, natural gas pipelines, intermodal transit systems, "walkable" and "resilient communities", and so on. Lawyers and judges are experts in one thing only, the law. And they spend their time dealing with a full panoply of human conflict---from petty larceny, through physical assault, to, murder. The only way that they can deal with technical issues that are outside the domain of the law is to go through a painful process where each side of the conflict bring in their own pet experts to "educate" the judge and jury in the fine points of the discipline.  At least with the board, you have the potential to have people in charge with some experience in the subject at hand.

Finally, and most importantly, the legal system is pretty much adverse to preventing problems. It does deal with the issues that individuals and businesses can create for their neighbours---but only after the damage has already been done. So if a business wants to build a rendering plant in a residential neighbourhood---to cite an obvious, hypothetical example---a law court will not stop the plant from being built, it will only award "nuisance" damages to the neighbours after the business is already running. In contrast, the OMB will stop development based on a reasonable expectation that a rendering plant will stink up the community and destroy the property values of people who already own homes there.

For these reasons, it make sense in principle for the province to set up a separate, informal body to deal with planning issues. Unfortunately, Chipman believes that the board has been "captured" and it no longer does the job it was originally designed to do.

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People will sometimes say that the OMB has been "captured" by developers. This is the idea that it no longer believes that it has any responsibility to the general public and instead overwhelming rules in favour of people who's business is making money off sprawl. Chipman would say that this isn't true. He's done a statistical analysis of board rulings, and believes that it routinely rules against the development community in support of municipal plans and some particular types of property owners. For example, he believes that the board has been quite zealous in protecting rural farmland by preventing farmers from severing off lots to build housing. Moreover, he believes that the board has also tended to protect neighbourhoods of single-family, detached homes from being altered by the introduction of either apartment buildings or social housing (retirement homes, group homes, etc.)

What has happened, according to Chipman, is something else. First, he believes that the province has been historically negligent in the creation of policy that the board can use to evaluate individual planning decisions. In the absense of "de jure" (or written down, official) planning policy, it has created its own "de facto policy" (or what is actually being done) policy. Secondly, he believes that the board has hired so many lawyers, and dealt with lawyers hired by businesses so often, that it has been captured by what he calls "the ideology of the law". That is to say, that the board has increasingly ceased to see itself as an informal tribunal that is supposed to help municipalities quickly and cheaply find the best way to plan their cities, and instead acts like a totally impartial law court that where different factions come to fight it out according to strictly defined rules.

Among other things, this "ideology of the law" has resulted in the OMB becoming dominated by lawyers, costing a huge amount of money to access, and, taking exceedingly long periods of time to come to a decision. At least in terms of accessibility, it has become a copy of the court system, which totally negates that particular reason for setting it up in the first place.

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The OMB is supposed to make judgements that are "in the public interest", but the problem that it faces is how to decide just exactly what that is and how to find it. As Chipman writes,

"There is not a general public interest:  it is only the interests of different groups, which, if sufficiently influential in the context of the issues under regulatory consideration, come to be considered as the public interest."

(A Law Unto Itself, John George Chipman, p-28) 

Looking at the decisions of the board, Chipman believes he has found evidence of a general understanding of "the public interest" that the board has tended to follow. 

---the normative distinction between public and private has tended to disappear, particularly as the board has identified ever smaller groups as the public. Yet it has regularly followed this empirical, uncritical approach, most noticeably in developing its policy for the protection of neighbourhood character. (Chipman, p-36)

What Chipman is referring to is the historical legacy of a board that for decades tended to define "the public interest" in terms of protecting the "neighbourhood character" of an individual, geographic area filled with single-family, fully detached homes---rather than that of the more general "public interest" that is served by the creation of things like higher density rental properties or social-housing such as group homes. The "public interest" would certainly be served by increasing the stock of rental accommodation, but the board has defined the term in its own, peculiar way to mean  specifically those "existing property owners" who own singled detached homes in low-density areas.

Chipman believes that in his historical analysis of OMB rulings of the past, he has seen a clear tendency of the board to rule against developers who seek to increase the density of housing stock in areas that currently had low-density, suburban sprawl. This has created problems for cities because it meant that whenever someone wanted to build an apartment tower or group home, if there is a "neighbourhood" of people living in nearby, single detached homes, they got an automatic veto. Not only did this shut down intensification, it made developers, city councils, and planning departments "gun shy" because they don't want to get involved in a long OMB battle.

However, this did eventually change. Chipman believes that this bias towards sprawl has been diminished since 1994. Unfortunately, in the interim Ontario cities have suffered from a dearth of affordable and social housing because---at least in part---both were so difficult to build due to OMB refusals. (Chipman p-112)

What makes this unarticulated policy even worse was that the board seemed to really favour only neighbourhoods of single detached homes. Areas of the city where they don't predominate just didn't seem to matter. This meant that in all other areas the board tended to be more concerned about property owners getting the most out of their investment rather than the public interest (or "preserving neighbour character".)

"[t]he owner of the land should be able to obtain as much economic gain as possible so long as it does not override, to any significant degree, the public interest"

(Chipman, p-46, orig citation, West Hill Redevelopment Co vs City of Scarborough, 1995)

What this unspoken policy resulted in was a policy that forced all intensification into specific "sacrifice zones" of the city (like a downtown core or older areas that are zoned for multiple uses), and "protected" suburban sprawl from any attempts by a city to retrofit it into the sort of higher density that would support public transit, "walkable" neighbourhoods, and, lower cost housing.

As I look back on the example of the Walmart battle, this makes sense. The presentations to the Board from clergy people about the impact of increased traffic on three cemeteries and a Jesuit retreat center had effectively no interest to the OMB---because they were in an area that wasn't restricted to single-family, detached housing. According to the de facto board policy, this meant that there was no "neighbourhood character" to preserve.

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Another aspect of the de facto policy that the OMB has developed is what classes of problems it chooses to look at when deciding on a specific planning issue.

Where the health and safety of existing and future inhabitants are involved, where there are patent and immediate hazards to the well-being of the community, the municipality should have the unfettered discretion to sterilize the use of lands, without the additional burden of compensation.

(Chipman, p-47, orig cit, Dickinson v. City of Toronto, (1999) 37 OMBR 366. 

The problem with the above are those three words "patent", "immediate", and, "sterilize". The first is a 20 dollar, lawyerly word for "obvious". The second refers to the time frame---the board doesn't seem to think that an "eventual" problem is sufficient to require real action. And that word "sterilize" seems to imply that stopping the landowner from doing what he wants with the land is the moral equivalent of a nuclear strike.

The problem with this attitude is that there are lots of problems that cities and society face that should be dealt with through municipal plans that are neither "patent" nor "immediate". As mentioned above, in the past the OMB has rarely seemed to believe that a lack of affordable housing is sufficient reason to over-ride the concerns of the people who own single detached homes. This is explained by seeing that this sort of problem can never be seen as "patent" or "immediate" (unless you, yourself are looking for an affordable place to rent.) One can only assume that any attempt by a municipality to deal with something as "nebulous" as climate change would never be seriously considered sufficient grounds for removing a landowner's right to to "obtain as much economic gain as possible".

I would suspect that this is part of what Chipman sees as "the ideology of the law". The law doesn't really exist to create justice in terms of what ordinary people consider "fair". It certainly doesn't seem interested in promoting "the common welfare". Instead, what it seeks above all else is "consistency". That is exactly what Anglo-Saxon "case law" is all about---making sure that each similar situation is dealt with in the same way that similar situations have been dealt with in the past.

This is why the law is so conservative. If you look at the historical record, time and time again the legal system has often held onto some aspect of social policy long after it has become obvious to any educated, intelligent person that it is patently ridiculous. Perhaps the most odious examples were the "Chancery Courts" that Dickens lampoons in Bleak House. Today, we hear endless complaints from all sorts of people---from anti-poverty activists to high ranking judges---about how time-consuming and expensive the court process usually is, yet nothing ever changes. That's what happens in a truly hide-bound and conservative institution, it recognizes a deep, systemic problem, wrings its hands, yet never seems to be able to actually do anything.

Roy McMurtry, Wikimedia Commons

"It's only the relatively affluent in society, for the most part, who can afford to go through a trial," says Ontario Chief Justice Roy McMurtry. Access to justice, McMurtry says, is the most important issue facing the legal system. (From, Toronto Star article "The dark side of justice", by  Tracey Tyler Sat., March 3, 2007.)

In the case of the OMB, the issues aren't so much access to the law (although that is an issue too), but rather the way planning issues just keep piling up and yet cities don't do much of anything to stop them. Low density sprawl threatens to bankrupt municipalities? Nope, not going to stop that. Public transit systems going bankrupt? Nope, not going to deal with that. Housing becoming out of reach of all but the wealthy? No way are we going to fix that mess. Climate change threatening to destroy human civilization? Don't even think about that one. 

Of course, it would be wrong to blame all of this on the OMB. But it's commitment to the ideal of consistency---that "ideology of the law" thing---means that it is really loathe to change the basic idea that land belongs to whomever owns it and they should be able to do whatever they want with it---and the Hell with the public interest. Why? Well, because that's the way things have always been done since the ORMB was first created in 1906.

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Another way the board has been "captured" by the legal system involves the way it treats evidence and the process of coming to a decision. As I pointed out in the beginning, the original ORMB was meant to be an informal, tribunal, with specialized knowledge. Municipalities and individuals were supposed to approach it in order to deal with complex issues that they didn't understand well enough to successfully resolve. But times have changed. Cities have planning departments and there are regulations that govern the development of official plans. The OMB has ceased "filling the gaps" in municipal expertise and instead become an over-protective parent that refuses to allow cities to "push the envelope" and experiment in order to find solutions to the problems that we are facing in the 21st century.

OMB hearings are supposed to follow city plans and provincial policy. Yet the board has ruled that each of these are only to be considered as one piece of evidence among many, and, unless a specific party introduces some part of the plan as evidence, it is not to be considered by the board at all. To be fair to the board, what Ontario considers "official policy" is a tremendously nebulous thing. It isn't restricted to something passed by the legislature, and doesn't even have to be openly published by a Ministry. The board needs to create some sort of consistency in its rulings for businesses to be able to make plans with some sense of what will and will not pass an appeal to the board, or else they will be constantly spending money on properties and proposals that fail for one reason or another.

The declaration of provincial interest is a very strong strong tool to which the Board is obliged to give considerable weight during a hearing. However, as I emphasized at our meeting, it is not an end in itself. Unless the evidence is supportive of the provincial statement and its application in a particular hearing is clear for all to see, the matter could well fail...As an administrative tribunal, the Board conducts hearings in an adversarial environment and the evidence we hear is always the final determinant of the adjudication.  

(Chipman, p-156, orig. cit. "a letter to a high official in 

the Ministry of Natural Resources, Sept 6, 1990")

What Chipman and I have characterized as being "captured" by the "ideology of the law", is ultimately a piecemeal attempt by a group of professionals to help developers and communities navigate a very complex, ambiguous process where huge amounts of money are at stake.

Adding to the innate difficulty of this is the fact that secrecy is often important because developers are in competition with each other, and, have a vested interest in not letting landowners know what is going on so they can "bank" land for the smallest cost possible. This means that developers are often loathe to honestly engage with a city in order to see what is or is not acceptable in a given project, because if they did so, "the cat would be out of the bag". Because we have the OMB appeal process, it is a lot easier for a developer to "ask for forgiveness instead of permission." This is especially true because the OMB "dad" has a very well-established pattern of over-riding the municipal "mom" when developers ask if they can stay out late and build a big box mall.

Also consistency in planning is tremendously important to this process because if someone banking land cannot accurately predict what can and cannot be done with it in the future, they risk ending up with something that they cannot use. Land banking is, ultimately, a form of speculation. And speculation is a very risky business if you cannot predict what will happen in the future. In effect, it appears that part of the job of the OMB is to protect speculators from taking a loss. 

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It is, of course, unfair to put all the blame of this on the board. If the province was truly unhappy with the current state of affairs, it could change the board's mandate, or, institute firm policy that it would have to follow. If it did this, however, it would have to make a strong commitment to a specific plan of action---which would alienate part of the voting public. The recent success of "populist" politicians who ride to success based on slogans instead of sound policy is more than enough to scare provincial governments from doing such a thing.

Probably the worst example of this was the infamous Rob Ford, who destroyed a long-anticipated, complex, fully-funded, transit expansion to fulfill a campaign pledge to end "the war on the car". As a result, Canada's largest city has fallen several more years behind on absolutely essential improvements in public transit.

Rob Ford, c/o Wiki Commons

Former Mayor David Miller's administration came up with the $6-billion Transit City plan, which would build a 120-kilometre network of light rail transit across Toronto.

Subways cost about six times more per kilometre to build than light rail, but Ford said voters want subways.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the war on the car stops today," Ford announced. "We will not build any more rail tracks down the middle of our streets."

(CTV Toronto News, December 1rst, 2010) 

Not to give too much of a hard time to our current mayor, even Cam Guthrie indulges in this a bit when he suggests that there might possibly be a way for Guelph to provide affordable, fully detached homes to young people---just like in the "good old days".

Cam Guthrie,
from the City Website

Some of the change can be attributed to policy changes, such as the Places to Grow legislation that mandates the City direct growth to its core built-up areas. The province has launched a 10-year review of Places to Grow, and the City of Guelph will be providing comment as part of that process. As Mayor, I will also provide feedback as a member of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario and the Large Urban Mayor's Caucus group. I will ensure Guelph's voice and Guelph's experience is heard. In my personal opinion, I believe a goal of many young families is to eventually own a detached home, with a backyard to throw the ball around with their kids. If there is a way to accommodate more of this type of housing within our growth plans, I think we should.

(Cam Guthrie,  "State of the City Address", c/o Guelph Mercury/Tribune April 24 2015) 

Politicians know that a significant fraction of the voting public act like spoiled brats and refuse to listen to complex discussions about why suburban sprawl and private transportation are being priced out of the reach of most individuals. Instead, they shove their fingers in their ears, hum loudly, and, vote for idiots who pander to their ignorance. If the province were to be more honest about where the province needs to go, the politicians developing that policy could very easily find themselves being replaced by people who are either too stupid to understand where the public interest really lies, or, don't even care. (Think for a moment about what is happening South of the border.) Having an informal tribunal---like the OMB---that can take all the heat is a very useful thing. This is why provincial governments have been loathe to get rid of it.

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Societies face existential problems once in a while. Right now, the entire civilized world is facing several at the same time. The biggest is climate change, but there are others. Wealth stratification is stripping the gears of our democracy. Experts predict that within a few decades most jobs will be replaced with automation which will probably mean that we will have to find some way to decouple income from employment. These are enormous problems that nations, provinces, and, cities are going to have to deal with. And cities are where "the rubber meets the road" with these sorts of things.

To deal with these issues, we are going to have to innovate and significantly change "business as usual". And this is not going to happen through tinkering and incremental change. Society is going to have to do something that it absolutely hates doing---change fundamental ways of thinking about key concepts. Cities are going to have to be able to pursue bold, radical experiments if we are going to change to a sustainable society that preserves some degree of egalitarianism. Otherwise, we face a dystopian future where a small elite live in gated communities and the vast majority cannot afford to live anywhere else than hovels---while in the background the environment collapses around our ears. This sort of change simply cannot happen while a very conservative pseudo-judicial board continues to look over the shoulder of cities and force them to adhere to a 1950's vision of "happy motoring" and suburban sprawl.

I suppose it all comes down to what you think is happening in our society. If you are a climate change denier and believe that it's all a "socialist plot to take our money", we can continue with business as usual. If you are a climate change denier "lite" and agree that the problem is real but have a strange tic in your brain that allows you to hold that idea while at the same time thinking that this doesn't mean that we have to do anything about it---business as usual too. But if you accept what the overwhelming majority of experts are saying---and they are certainly very concerned---then society is like a car speeding towards a cliff. Rolling up the windows, changing the station on the radio, etc, aren't going to avoid catastrophe. We need to jam on the brakes and quickly turn the wheel to avoid a catastrophe. The OMB is one of the elements of our society that is fighting tooth and nail against any attempt by municipalities to experiment and find new ways to develop a sustainable society. It's time for the board to either "get with the program" or "let go of the steering wheel".

Shutterstock Image

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I started this article by listing the several businesses and one community group which have appealed amendments to the Guelph municipal plan. It would have been perfectly logical to write something about why exactly these groups are appealing the changes to the plan. But if you look at the board website, all you see are dates, places, and, times. I contacted a couple members of Council, one fellow who recently settled with the Board, and, a community group that was one of the appellants. Only one person, a Councillor, got back to me. He tried to get someone from staff to respond to my question about what the substance of the complaints were. I haven't gotten a response as of publishing.

Eventually I cornered a Councillor and he grudgingly admitted (so grudgingly that I am letting this be an "anonymous source") that no one wants to talk to me because everyone has the absolute fear of God put on them about talking to the press about any issue "before the courts". This shows how much the OMB has strayed from it's original reason for existence. The OMB isn't a court. It's supposed to be an informal venue to settle complaints about technical issues facing cities. If you are "in the system" this secrecy makes sense---after all a lot of money is at stake. But if you aren't, it makes no sense at all. I don't give a damn about developers and their lawyers making money and neither should you---what we need to care about is the public interest. If citizens don't know what is going on, then there is no way we can exert pressure on politicians to try to change things. Business people have to adapt to what the public wants, the public shouldn't have to adapt to what business people want. The costs of doing business will get passed on to the consumer anyway---but the city is where we live and we should have a collective say in how we want to live.

It is true that Guelph is a representative democracy and we elect our Councillors to make decisions for us. But it is tremendously important for ordinary voters to have some understanding of how the system works and why things happen the way they do.  That is why I am writing this article about the OMB. But people are fickle and they generally only pay attention to the "here and now" instead of the "big picture". That means that there are only a few "teachable moments" with any given issue where the media can write a story with some hope of ordinary folks paying attention. This might be one of them, but I'll never know, because the "ideology of the law" dictates that none of our elected officials can make a fuss about a handful of corporation's attempt to roll-back much needed changes to our Official Plan.

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This is doubly annoying, because the Provincial Government is currently reviewing the mandate of the OMB. Most provinces don't have anything like the OMB. Indeed, the immense powers of the OMB are pretty much unique in all of North America. Most jurisdictions have some sort of appeals process, but none of them have morphed into a full-blown, pseudo-court that gives developers so much power to overturn the decisions of planning departments. Look at a great many problems that our cities face and you can see the baleful influence of the OMB. And yet, the majority of citizens don't even know that the thing exists. Instead of aiming their anger at the board, they direct all their anger at their elected municipal officials. If you have concerns about the inability of cities like Guelph to construct forward-looking, walkable, and, environmentally sustainable development plans, I would suggest that this is an ideal time to contact your local MPP and let her know that you think the OMB has lived long past it's usefulness.

Liz Sandals, (Photo from Legislature Website)

You can contact her by:

Canada Post:  

173 Woolwich Street,
Guelph, N1H 3V4

Email: lsandals.mpp.co@liberal.ola.org 

Phone: (519) 836-4190

Fax: (519) 836-4191

The Places to Grow Act and Guelph

Executive Summary:

Guelph faces extreme pressure because of forces outside of its control. Chief amongst these are the Toronto Green Belt and the Places to Grow Act. These two forces have pushed the city to develop in a way that citizens need to understand if we are going to adapt to the future.

The Places to Grow Act and Guelph

Guelph citizens sometimes complain bitterly about about how the city keeps getting bigger and bigger, and, how there seems to be so much emphasis on getting more people to live downtown. Why can't the city just stay the way it was in the past? Unfortunately, Guelph doesn't exist in a bubble. It is under the ultimate authority of the Province of Ontario, which means that provincial planning guidelines supersede local ones. And two of the most important ones are the Greenbelt Plan and the Places to Grow Act.

The primary driver of both of these plans is population growth. As you can see by the graph below, Ontario is estimated to grow by somewhere between six and two million more people over the next twenty-five years. (You can click on the graph to see it more clearly.)

Because Canada has a very low birth rate---it's currently 1.61 per woman---all of that population increase will be coming from immigration. And for a variety of reasons immigrants tend to move to the larger Canadian cities, like Toronto. This means that there will be a natural tendency for those six to two million new people to move to the Greater Toronto Area. Just as Guelph is under the control of Ontario planning decisions, so Ontario is under the control of Federal immigration policy. So whether it likes it or not, Queen's Park has to figure out how to accommodate those people.

In the past the province would just unleash the developers and let them create housing for them. Unfortunately, this just is no longer a solution because the province is hitting the physical limits of how many people we can cram into it using the old ways of doing things. Suburban sprawl has already gotten to the point where it is threatening our water and food supplies.

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One of the areas where development and water supply clash is the Oak Ridges Moraine.

Norman Einstein, May 27, 2005

As should be obvious from the map, this area of land is situated perfectly for developers to create new housing. All they would have to do is strong-arm the province into building some new roads, maybe a few GO lines, build a few million little houses made of ticky-tacky, and Toronto's immigration woes are over! Unfortunately, the moraine is not only a great place to build suburbs, it's also the place where the ground water is recharged for most of the municipalities around it. Which means that if the moraine were developed, there is a good chance that many places around it would find that their wells would dry up. Equally important, many rivers and streams also originate in the Moraine, so development there would dramatically lower the water quality for a huge swathe of Ontario.

People get upset when they contemplate their wells and streams drying up, so a significant amount of citizen opposition mobilized against development. This culminated in the Mike Harris government declaring a moratorium on development on the moraine, followed by the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Act. A lot of hemming and hawing took place as politicians began to realize that they had to preserve the moraine or else voters would punish them severely. Effectively, the moraine is now "off the table" as a dumping ground for population growth in the Greater Toronto Area.

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People are not only attached to the idea of drinking water, they also like to eat food. Unfortunately, seeing as most of Canada was covered by enormous ice sheets until very recently, there are precious few places in the country that have good agricultural land. Southern Ontario has a large proportion of it. Two of the best areas are close to the Greater Toronto Area and would be great places for developers to build houses. These are the fruit growing areas that are close around lake Ontario (the "Niagara Tender Fruit and Grape Area"),

Map c/o Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation

and, the Holland Marsh (aka "the Salad Bowl of Ontario".)

Map c/o Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation

Farmers often complain about how hard it is to export their crops to Europe and Japan. What they fail to understand is that within living memory both of these areas suffered starvation. They were dependent on imported food to sustain their populations and during World War II they had that lifeline severed. As a result, they have collectively decided that "never again" would they become so dependent on outsiders for their food supply. This is a lesson that Canadians should also follow. We won't starve without the Holland Marsh and the Niagara Peninsula, but we would find our diet a lot more monotonous without fresh vegetables, peaches, and, grapes.

Even if our society never suffers from absolute deprivation, any item that we need that comes from a foreign source is a drain on our balance of payments. Last winter there were headlines about cauliflower costing as much as eight dollars a head in supermarkets. The reason why was a combination of a low Canadian dollar relative to American, plus a drought in California that reduced supplies. If people absolutely had to have this particular vegetable, that means that their money left the province and went to the USA instead of staying and helping the local economy. Preserving a local fruit and vegetable industry offers a valuable economic "buffer" that ensures that Ontario will be able to keep a balanced, sustainable economy. This will help avoid the economic roller-coaster of "boom and bust" that happens in areas that pin all their hopes on one industry alone. (Ever heard of Alberta?)

Add the Oak Ridges Moraine to the Holland Marsh, the Niagara Tender Fruit Area, and a few other things, and you get the Toronto Green Belt. 

Map c/o Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation

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Beyond food and water, there are other parts of the Greater Toronto Area that are problematic. As I was told by a consultant at a stakeholder meeting on this subject "the infrastructure is maxed-out and simply cannot be upgraded anymore". One example of this is the 401 highway. 

Most people I talk to are surprised to hear that the busiest roadway in North America isn't in the USA, it's actually the 401. Anyone who drives it on a regular basis usually gets over the initial surprise and then says "yeah, now that I think of it, that makes sense". 

Kenny Louie at Flickr

The problem with highways is that once they get maxed out, it gets REALLY expensive to add more capacity to them. This is because businesses and home start getting built up around them, which means that to make the road wider you have to compensate the folks who will have to have their building's demolished. Not only that, if you build the road that feeds cars into Toronto bigger, then you have to start thinking about expanding the volume on the city streets they feed into. And then you have to start thinking about where all these folks are going to end up parking---.

The provincial government understands these issues, which is why they are investing heavily in the Government of Ontario (GO) transit system. As you can see below, the government expects big things from GO over the next few years. (You can click on the graph to see it more clearly.) 

Natural RX from Wikipedia

Once again, though, it is important to realize that the GO system also plugs into another transit system once it gets to Union Station. And anyone who has seen the rush hour at Union Station's subway terminal will understand that it too seems to be "maxed-out". Unfortunately, the politicians in Toronto City Hall have dithered for decades instead of improving public transit.

Beyond transportation, there are other infrastructure issues such as sewers, water, etc. Anyone who has seen the huge numbers of condo towers being built downtown has to wonder "how can the city deal with so many people in a small area?"  Planners have raised the same questions, which is why the government has actually mandated that municipalities like Guelph have to take the "over-flow" instead of trying cram more people into the GTA.

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If everything was left up to developers, the Greenbelt would simply result in suburban sprawl "leap-frogging" the Greenbelt and eating up the land just beyond it. As you can see from the following map, the Greenbelt ends just outside of Guelph, Cambridge, and, Brantford.

Map c/o Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation

Guelph and Kitchener/Waterloo already have GO service, with promises of all-day and fast electric trains in the near future. Cambridge is also lobbying hard for integration into the Metrolinx system. With housing a lot cheaper in these towns than Toronto (although it's hard to believe in Guelph), a lot of developers would love to put up single-detached homes in these communities if there is a way that people can easily commute to jobs in Toronto.

With this reality in mind, the Places to Grow Act mandates that city plans follow new guidelines aimed at minimizing sprawl. First of all, it sets minimum guidelines for density of the downtown "core" of the cities around the Greenbelt. In Guelph's case, it says that it must have at least 150 people living and working per hectare (a hectare is an area of 100 metres by 100 metres) in that area. In addition, Places to Grow also defined the geographical boundaries of the each cities downtown core---so municipalities couldn't "define away" the  Act's influence on their community. Here's what it says about Guelph.

Of course, the province doesn't have any sort of mechanism for forcing people to live in Guelph rather than Toronto. But through planning it can control what and where new housing is being built. And if there is no new housing being built, the competition for existing housing stock will rise to the point where more and more people are priced out of the market. This means that they will move to areas where it is cheaper---which means Guelph instead of Toronto. And, if no new single-family houses are being built on the edges of the city (ie, "Greenfield" development), then prices will push the lower edges of the income towards higher density rental and condominium housing. The same sort of market mechanisms come into play with regard to commercial, service, and, industrial development---businesses get pushed away from expensive land towards cheaper areas.

The above point is tremendously important. You won't hear any politician say this, but high housing costs are not a bug, they are a feature. They are a mechanism for forcing society to change the way it does things. The hope is that people and developers will eventually stop pining for the single-family, totally detached home in the suburbs and instead live in higher density housing.

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Wait a minute!!!! Isn't this that awful "social engineering" that proponents of the free market accuse Greens and Socialists of doing? Shouldn't people be "free" to live any way they want to? Why should the government be telling me that I can't buy and live in a single family, fully detached home if I want to?

This is a totally bogus argument simply because that sort of freedom has never existed.

People have always been constrained by physical reality. You might want to jump to the moon or swim to Europe, but you can't because your muscles just aren't strong enough. And in the same way cities might want to build suburbs forever, but the fact is that in doing so they'd bankrupt themselves. Low-density suburbs are a lot more expensive to service than higher density urban areas. This is simply a function of mathematics. A quick Google search found a site that suggests for a representative sample of Canadian cities the suburbs are have only 31% of the population density as the core. If this is true, then this means that there are roughly three times as many tax payers per unit of road, sewer, public transit, water, etc, in the urban areas than suburban.

The above reality has been masked by several facts.

Up to a certain point suburbs are relatively inexpensive luxuries that cities can afford to support. If you have a healthy, prosperous urban core, then a thin "rind" of suburbs around them can be easily afforded. Secondly, you can pay for a large fraction of infrastructure by charging developers fees for building new homes. Also, when a society is going through a period of extended prosperity it can seem that the added price of maintaining these suburbs can seem to be an acceptable cost.

Unfortunately, however, as suburbs get bigger and bigger the infrastructure ceases to be just a minor "add on" to existing higher density systems. And after a few decades sewers, roads, water pipes, etc, need to be replaced and at that point all the costs come from tax payers. And as time goes on the economy changes and cities find new things that they want to spend their money on. "Locking in" extra-expensive services for low-density suburbs ties the hands of future city Councils. Unfortunately, people become attached to a certain lifestyle and resent any attempt to suggest that it is a luxury that society can no longer afford. In the same way, businesses become attached to the way they have always operated and fight against any idea that they need to change.

Aren't the suburbs in Markham pretty? I'm so glad they didn't build those ugly towers---.
IDuke from Wiki Commons

Ordinary voters do not have the specialized expertise that is needed to see the long-term costs associated with living in their own house in the "burbs", so they tend to complain that it is just because of "perfidious socialists" that they cannot afford a house. And, unfortunately, a lot of politicians and business people don't understand these issues either. Or, if they do, they are quite happy to lie to voters in order to get enough support to be able to gain power. These folks are quite happy to "kick the can down the road" for future generations to deal with.

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Guelph is at a bit of a cross-roads. Our current city plan limits expansion of the city and suggests that all future growth needs to happen through intensification instead of new greenfield development. At the same time, there is tremendous grass-roots opposition to any attempt to build higher-intensity housing as infill---citizens complain bitterly any time some developer wants to build an apartment building in their "back yard". As a result, housing costs keep going up and up. A lot of people want to go back to the "good old days" when folks could all buy a bungalow in the suburbs, and they don't know or care about the reasons why this is a very bad idea for the city as-a-whole. (I suspect that this is why some businesses say that Guelph is a hard place to do business. The guys who want to just build suburban sprawl run up against the official plan. Others who want to build apartments and condominiums find opposition from the "Not In My Back Yard" folks.)

And there are going to be politicians who are willing to say that there is no reason why the city cannot change it's plan and expand the city boundaries. There is no Greenbelt protecting the areas around Guelph like there is in Toronto. Even worse, even though Guelph's latest city plan has been accepted by the government of Ontario, it is currently in front of the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) where it is being appealed by a long list of developers, including:  Abode Varsity Living Inc, Loblaw Properties Ltd., Terra View Custom Homes Inc. & Lambden Farm Trust, Thomasfield Homes Limited, D Four Guelph Developments Limited, Fieldgate Commercial Developments Limited, Greenways Group Guelph, Living Rivers; and others.  (See the OMB website, the Guelph case number is PL140042 .) While it seems to be the case that the OMB tends to favour developers over city plans, the province is currently reviewing the OMB itself with an eye to "fixing" this problem. So it is hard to predict what the future will bring.