Illustration: THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Jordan Moffatt is an Ottawa-based writer who completed a master’s degree in geography at Carleton University, where he wrote a thesis on the development of residential zoning in Ottawa.
In Canada’s capital city, planners are completing the first rewrite of the municipality’s comprehensive zoning bylaw in a generation. Expected to be passed early next year, the updated measures include major reforms such as ending “exclusionary” zoning by allowing multiunit buildings in formerly single-detached-only neighbourhoods, in the name of expanding housing options for more people in more places – an important shift given our housing affordability crisis.
Ottawa’s planners should be commended for their work. But if the capital really wanted to lead the country in reforming its land-use policy, it would scrap zoning altogether.
This wouldn’t unleash some sort of libertarian or anarchic free-for-all. Ending zoning doesn’t mean the end of planning; in fact, not only should cities plan, they must. Ontario municipalities are required to create official plans that set the broad strategy for growth and then pass a more specific system to implement it. Zoning is just one of many possible systems in use around the world.
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Zoning was intended as the bedrock of urban control: a system of rules that, once in place, would finally settle land-use conflicts for good. But it’s clear that zoning isn’t doing what people want it to do. It’s supposed to provide clarity, but zoning bylaws are long and difficult to understand. It’s supposed to provide certainty, but developers frequently receive amendments, eroding public trust. It’s supposed to enable orderly development, but the costly and contentious review process delays much-needed housing. And while it’s supposed to reflect public values, it’s created from the top down, with minimal involvement from the people.
Reforming the zoning system can’t fix its inherent issues, either. Even though Ottawa’s new bylaw introduces substantial improvements, it’s still rooted in the same top-down problems: City planners have been working in private on the document for years, only letting the public in for time-limited review after drafts have been completed. As a result, the new rules maintain the unnecessary details and clinical, opaque exactitude that plagued their predecessors, clocking in at more than 300 pages, with more than 500 untitled annexes and approximately 4,000 exemptions – not to mention the many overlays, heritage districts, and secondary plans with conflicting provisions. To understand this complicated tangle, you’d need serious time on your hands.
Efforts to control every lot and building through zoning have become more impractical as cities have grown in size, population and complexity. Yet strictness remains at the heart of the system, originating from a desire to pacify homeowners who feared that apartments and renters would lower their property values. This is residential zoning’s main legacy – and even with reform, these same hyper-local homeowner interests can keep relying on rigid restrictions to prevent or delay new homes that would otherwise be allowed. For instance, while the CMHC estimates that housing starts must double to meet demand, starts in Ottawa actually decreased by more than 30 per cent from 2022 to 2024. Despite a sense of urgency in fixing this, approval times have gotten longer.
To be sure, many factors are slowing down housing, but an inadequate planning system is playing a big part. Consider the recent example of an application to replace a detached home with two multiplexes, which required minor zoning variances for height (by 30 centimetres), unit count (by two), and side-yard widths. Although this fits the mould of “gentle density,” protests from neighbouring homeowners – who said they were concerned with such threats as shadows, parking, character, renters and the displacement of local raccoons – halted construction. The developer won the appeal – the Ontario Land Tribunal ruled that the specific zoning regulations mattered less than their “general intent” – but the process set the 16-home project back more than a year.
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What would we replace zoning with? Many other systems are used worldwide, but Ontario has only one legal alternative: a development permit system, also known as a community planning permit system (CPPS). A CPPS is similar to zoning in that it sets the rules for land use and building form. But it differs in two key respects: first, proactive public engagement comes at the start, rather than in reaction to specific development, meaning proposals don’t need to be relitigated if they meet established goals; and second, its regulations can come with baked-in flexibility so that planners can accept a proposal if it meets the spirit of the rules, if not the exact letter of the law. In practice, this should mean more meaningful participation, greater certainty, sped-up review times, and more of the housing cities need.
This form of land-use control is fairly new in Ontario. The town of Gananoque was an early adopter, passing a development permit system in 2011; the much larger city of Brampton followed with one for its Main Street North district. Peterborough is currently working to replace its city-wide zoning bylaw with a CPPS, and Guelph, Oakville, and Waterloo are establishing community-planning-permit bylaws for strategic areas such as main streets and transit hubs.
Of course, a CPPS can come with many of the same issues as zoning. Even though the upfront process is supposed to be shaped by the community, cities may run the same tired forms of limited public consultation, privileging only the select few who show up at contrived meetings. Following that, cities may be tempted to simply copy-and-paste their old zoning bylaw and call it a CPPS.
Without real public engagement to co-create the document from the beginning or simpler, flexible regulations, a CPPS would just be zoning by a different name – and worse, without the ability for citizens to appeal individual development proposals. Critics are rightly suspicious that this could become a Trojan horse for stifling local democracy and allowing stronger developer influence and bureaucratic control. Besides, what’s good for Peterborough may not work for a huge city like Toronto, which flirted with but ultimately rejected the idea of a development permit system a decade ago.
But the whole city wouldn’t need to come under one CPPS bylaw, but rather a collection of bylaws catered to individual neighbourhoods’ unique qualities (similar to secondary plans). A representative sample from these communities can become more deeply engaged in co-producing the system from the outset through innovative methods such as citizens’ assemblies; cities can implement standards to keep the document brief, useful and up-to-date.
It’s shown enough promise that it’s worth trying. Zoning is not the only way to manage a city’s land, after all, and for too long it’s been misused as a blocker to growth. The housing-shortage crisis is too critical now to accept reform efforts that just carry forward the system’s flaws. Instead, we need to bring in the wider public to shape a land-use control system that can provide certainty and flexibility – and deliver on democratic potential.