BUDGET 2017: THE MONSTER THAT ATE ONTARIO

Fresh interventions and programs serve to feed the beast, writes Terence Corcoran.

The question all Ontarians must begin asking is how much economic pain — high transportation costs, soaring electricity rates, rampaging housing-market shortages and costs, stalled transit development, soaring debt — are they willing to endure to satisfy the Central Planning Monster.

The beast is everywhere, lurking in the background of every twitch in government policy and every legislative lurch. It’s thick claw-marks are all over Finance Minister Charles Sousa’s new Ontario budget, tabled Thursday, taking control of more and more economic activity and extending policy-making ’s reach far beyond the iron grip it already holds on health care.

In the name of climate change and carbon control, Ontario’s Liberal government sent electricity prices soaring, the predictable product of the 2009 Green Energy Act that allows the government to seize control over an expanding range of energy operations.

Carbon taxes on gasoline and fossil fuels are set to climb inexorably in years to come, claimed as essential to fulfil a green agenda and fund assorted uneconomic anti-automobile transit initiatives.

The causes of the energy-price crisis are generally understood by the majority of Ontarians: Botched government planning by politicians and bureaucrats who adopted green central planning at the core of an increasingly authoritarian land-control regime.

Personal choice be damned. Market forces be damned. We, the all-powerful, all-seeing and all-knowing ministers and bureaucrats will dictate how much energy Ontarians will consume, what kind of energy and at what cost. The result is soaring prices and increasing dysfunction.

Same with health care, where the government’s new budget deepens the state’s grip with a new partial pharmacare scheme, and tries to grapple with wait lists and systemic structural problems.

Less appreciated is the degree to which the same planned chaos is likely responsible for Ontario’s escalating housing crisis. The role of green central planning in creating runaway house prices in the Toronto area was highlighted earlier this week in a new report from Ryerson University’s Centre for Urban Research and Land Development.

In a nutshell, Toronto’s housing crisis is a function of a shortage of land upon which ground-based housing — single, detached, row house or townhouse — can be built. And the cause of the shortage: A monster of a green plan called the 2006 Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, a 32,000-square-kilometre sprawl of territory surrounding Toronto.

Enacted by the Liberals under premier Dalton McGuinty, the growth plan’s objective was to force millions of Ontarians to live in low-rise and highrise buildings rather than singlefamily units at ground level.

The new Ryerson report, by Frank Clayton and Ryerson development professor David Amborski, argues that the growth plan deliberately limited the supply of serviced land. Instead, the plan — whose current version is a dense 80-page manual of landuse regulations — fostered condo and apartment construction at the expense of single-family housing.

The Ryerson report is a gem of condensed analysis that nails the 2006 plan as a primary cause of Toronto’s house-price mania. While demand for ground-based housing increased as predicted over the last two decades, helped by ultra-low interest rates, the supply of serviced land has not kept pace.

“Rising prices are a reflection of a shortage of supply, not an unexpected surge in demand,” it explains.

The claim that homeowners are willing to give up on singlefamily homes in exchange for condos and apartments located near transit is a myth, says the report — a myth fostered in part by the notorious green-planning theorists at the Pembina Institute, the same activist group that helped drag Ontario energy into the green claws of the Central Planning Monster.

Clayton and Amborski say the claim perpetuated by Pembina is “flawed” and flies in the face of other research and market trends. Anywhere from 60 to 80 per cent of Toronto-area homebuyers indicate a preference for ground-based single-family homes.

That may be what people want, but it’s not what Ontario’s bossy Liberal planners want them to have. The 2006 growth plan is obsessed with forcing people into what are described as “compact, vibrant and complete communities.”

Complete communities required “density targets” set by the province’s planners. “The designated greenfield area of each upper- or single-tier municipality will be planned to achieve a minimum density target that is not less than 50 residents and jobs combined per hectare.”

Rather than look at undoing the growth plan, the Liberals intend to make it more aggressive. The province’s housing and natural resources ministers, Ted McMeekin and Bill Mauro, support expanding its reach. They say Ontarians want communities “where they can work and play, go to school and shop all in the same area.”

This little bureaucrat-designed hell, which could be a model for any Soviet town, is to be encouraged by imposing even tougher intensity regimes and fewer single-family homes. The new objective is to “mainstream climate change” throughout the plan by “applying more aggressive intensification and density targets to achieve compact, lowcarbon communities.”

Local municipalities will be directed to target 80 residents and jobs per hectare. One expert estimates that means new greenfield projects would be limited to a mix consisting of 70 per cent apartments, 20 per cent town houses, and only 10 per cent single-family dwellings.

Consulting firm Malone Given Parsons says increasing the density target would require opening previous land decisions and would create “absurd densities” of 130 people per hectare and create even more delays in land availability.

As usual with these budgets, the latest Ontario version plows forward with fresh interventions, new initiatives and yet more numerous planning processes. It is more feed for the monster.

The new budget takes control of more and more economic activity as it extends the government’s iron grip.