Ford’s new bill amounts to a full reset and redo
After all the boasting and blustering about building up Ontario, Doug Ford finally and formally admitted defeat this week.
His hopes for a housing boom have gone bust.
Two years after running for reelection with a promise to “get it done,” the mighty premier is undoing the damage — with a do-over. His Progressive Conservative government has just unveiled comprehensive “omnibus” legislation that amounts to making amends — a reset and a redo.
Officially, it’s called the Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act.
Unofficially, it’s the Doug Ford Damage Control Act.
This collection of anticlimactic legislative proposals made news only because it codifies a series of climbdowns over screw-ups of the past. The bill attempts to bring closure by cleaning up the mess created by Ford’s multibillion-dollar boondoggle over bulldozing the Greenbelt.
After promising to stop breaking his promises, the premier is now putting it in writing:
The bill attempts to restore order to the controversial minister’s zoning orders that brought disorder to the planning process during peak Greenbelt madness, transforming a legacy of opacity, belatedly, into transparency.
For better or for worse (Ford himself can’t seem to make up his mind), it cancels the “Hazel McCallion Act (Peel Dissolution)” — in effect dissolving the dissolution. It is as if the original legislation were written with invisible ink when introduced nearly a year ago, after the premier promised the former mayor on her deathbed that he’d liberate Mississauga from the yoke of regional government with Brampton and Caledon.
Now, in a quiet acknowledgment that he over-promised and will now under-deliver on his public target of 1.5 million homes within a decade, Ford is making it up to us. And making things up.
Over the last two years, the actual number of new homes fell well below the average annual goal of 150,000 — with merely 109,111 units last year and 80,300 the year before.
To make up for lost ground, Ford isn’t merely moving the goalposts, he’s redefining them — and rewriting the rules of the game.
Henceforth, Ford will count student dorms and long-term-care beds as full-fledged dwellings.
Unless it’s a fourplex. Ford still refuses to embrace the recommendations of his own housing task force — and the exhortations of the federal government — to make fourplex approvals automatic across the province “as of right,” which is the right thing to do.
For Ford has a fourplex complex, emanating from his Bonnie Crombie complex, by which the premier reflexively rejects whatever the new Liberal leader proposes — most recently that the government encourage fourplex construction to bring “gentle density” to communities.
I have written before that Crombie lives rent-free in Ford’s head — so why not count that rental housing as one additional dwelling to bolster the government’s statistical claims?
Meanwhile, Ford continues to conflate the four units of a fourplex with fanciful stories of an eightstorey monstrosity towering over the backyards of NIMBY suburbanites:
“You go in the middle of communities and start putting up four-storey, six-storey, eight-storey buildings right deep in the communities, there’s going to be a lot of shouting and screaming,” the premier proclaimed.
Ford thinks it better to belittle the fourplex while doubling up on dorms and over-counting nursing homes. The melodrama is a missed opportunity to mop up his own mess.
Instead, the premier has been touring the province handing out oversized cheques while commending various communities for supposedly exceeding their targets for new homes. But tallies show Peterborough collecting extra cash only by counting long-term-care beds for half of its new units; Sudbury won its bonus by relying on long-term-care beds for more than one-third of the new homes it claimed.
To which NDP Leader Marit Stiles wondered aloud the other day if jail cells might be added to Ford’s housing statistics. Green Leader Mike Schreiner wondered if tents might also count.
That incredulity and mockery hasn’t stopped Ford’s Tories from massaging and manipulating the data to achieve an inflated and invented housing tally.
“We will continue to explore data sources for tracking the numbers of other institutional types of housing such as student residences and retirement homes for future program years and commit to engaging municipalities on the same,” Housing Minister Paul Calandra wrote last month in a letter to Mississauga.
You get the hint. If you want Queen’s Park to cut you a bonus cheque, you’d best get in the game.
There is an old saying that there are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies and statistics.
Fourplexes that he keeps counting out, while doubling up on dorms.