A rendering of the front of a proposed four-storey residential condominium at 2151 Gerrard St. E in Toronto., designed by In Tech House Design.Galbraith & Associates/Supplied
The two adjacent dwellings on Gerrard Street East in Toronto – one derelict, one occupied by the daughter of the owner of both properties – have been sandwiched for generations between small apartment buildings. Together, they had represented a site tailor-made for the type of missing middle apartment projects the city says it wants to see lining this kind of arterial.
In fact, council’s new “major streets” zoning bylaw allowed a six-storey building. But the owners opted for four – with 16 two-bedroom units, each with windows on two sides, as well as one level of parking underneath – to avoid the complications of what’s known as site plan review, a more intensive approvals process.
“There were aspects of that we did not take advantage of,” says Sean Galbraith, the planning consultant for the project, being developed by In Tech House Design Corp. “This is good enough, right? This is a big enough building. It’s good for its context.”
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Yet the proposal required four minor variances to existing setback requirements, which meant a hearing at the Toronto and East York Committee of Adjustment earlier this month. Even though the footprint of the proposed building will cover significantly more of the lots than its predecessors, the application sailed through. The linchpin: all that underground parking, which, says Mr. Galbraith, was “really important” to the neighbours. “We had a lot of community support for this project, like more than almost any project I’ve worked on in the last few years.”
Though just a single example, the outcome challenges the contention of some other multiplex builders that have run into walls of opposition at Committees of Adjustment, even if their projects largely conform with council’s goal of allowing small-scale apartments across much of the city. Earlier this winter, Mayor Olivia Chow even moved a motion asking for reforms to the CoA process following media accounts of a multiplex project on Pharmacy Road in Scarborough that was blocked by committee members who expressed opposition to council’s policies. A staff report on potential changes is expected later this spring.
The question here is whether the CoA, which was set up by provincial planning law to adjudicate minor conflicts such as fence heights, encroaching decks or additions that exceed zoning bylaw restrictions that go back decades, is equipped to deal with the more dramatic changes in neighbourhood construction unleashed by a suite of policies known as “Expanding Housing Options Now.”
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On one side are builders who have seized on both the new rules and market demand, and on the other, residents and resident associations that want a say in how their neighbourhoods are changing at a time when governments are pushing to build more housing, more efficiently. In an effort to remove roadblocks, Queen’s Park two years ago repealed the right of residents to appeal a CoA decision to approve an application.
“The subject matter of what a Committee of Adjustment is hearing has become far more complicated than I think the original framers of the Planning Act ever contemplated,” says Neil Smiley, a real estate lawyer at the Fasken law firm, who says these hearings provide an important venue for residents to make their voices heard. “That whole idea of engagement is critical to a democratic [system] and an informed basis for decisions.”
Still, the sheer volume of cases (an average of 3,300 vetted in 95 hearings per year between 2020 and 2025) is huge. As Mr. Galbraith says, “It’s just a massive number of files.”
A rendering of the back of the proposed condo building on Gerrard Street East.Galbraith & Associates/Supplied
Under Ontario planning law, the committee vets minor variance applications according to four tests: Does the proposal meet the “general intent” of the official plan and the local zoning bylaw? Is it minor in nature? And is it an “appropriate” or “desirable” change for the property and the surrounding neighbourhood? The first three questions are mostly technical, while the last one is subjective and often political.
Toronto’s CoA system, with 35 committee members, is far larger than any other city in Ontario. The same is true for most large municipalities outside the province, which handle minor variance applications quite differently, either entirely by city staff (e.g., Calgary, where they’re known as “alternative solutions”) or by subcommittees of council (Winnipeg). In Vancouver, the Board of Variance hears such appeals, but the volumes tend to be low, with just a handful of cases each meeting. (A typical Toronto and East York CoA session has several dozen.)
In 2021, Toronto City Council decided to send its unwieldy CoA system in for a tune-up, hiring consultants KPMG to conduct a thorough inspection. KPMG’s audit found numerous concerns, including inconsistent evaluations by the eight city divisions that comment on applications, unclear standards, missed deadlines and user dissatisfaction.
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KPMG recommended 15 far-reaching changes, including “streaming” cases based on their complexity. Council, however, voted to slow-walk those reforms, some of which are being implemented now, including changes in the fees so they are commensurate with the complexity of the case, according to Oren Tamir, interim executive director of development review. He says reforms to streamline applications won’t surface until next year.
Some experts liken the notion of streaming CoA applications to triaging, or the way physicians now delegate more straightforward cases to nurse practitioners and pharmacists.
“Are there some that are easier than others? How do we move the easier ones along faster and make the time for the ones that need the attention,” says Pamela Robinson, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning, stressing that the CoA should do “the same high calibre work more efficiently with better public outcomes.”
Mr. Smiley agrees: “Some triage … would be a bonus.” But, he observes, the law doesn’t actually specify what “minor” is, and says the city could seek to enact provisions that make the definition more precise, allowing truly minor cases to be delegated to a professional planner instead of sent to a committee hearing.
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City officials say timelines on CoA applications, 90 per cent of which are approved, have fallen substantially. “It’s now roughly six weeks from the time of a completed application to a hearing date,” says Allyson Power, the Toronto CoA’s director of policy. “That’s actually a 50-per-cent improvement in the last few years.”
Some residents’ associations, however, challenge the assumption that “economic efficiency” should dictate the way the CoA operates, and also stress that its role is to assess individual applications, not deliver on housing policy goals.
Geoff Kettel, co-chair of the Federation of North Toronto Residents Associations adds that the CoA was never designed to deal with large, complicated planning applications, such as those brought by high-rise developers that want more floors on a project that’s already been through a complicated zoning bylaw amendment.
“It seemed improper that a tribunal that was designed for minor variances, where you could understand that they were minor, is really imposing a mid-rise building on top of an existing high-rise building,” he says. “How can that possibly be a minor variance?”