Comment: Ford might have to pay bigly to make our housing dreams come true

I’ve been attending some Ontario association conferences over the last month and a major feature of each of them has been a steady drumbeat of complaint about municipal development charges. It’s certainly the position of RESCON and many at the Ontario Homebuilders Association that these charges are far too high, are escalating out of control, are not delivering the value they claim to be, are being redirected to purposes other than supporting development and, overall, are strangling builders ability to fund new projects and get the building going that the province desperately needs. In a nutshell, development charges have driven the price of new housing up to a point where it is unaffordable and builders won’t build because buyers can’t buy. Even Ontario premier Doug Ford appeared aligned with this message in his speech at the RESCON meeting, bemoaning the high fees and taxes afflicting builders and praising the efforts of places like Vaughan and Brampton to cut back DCs.

Let’s turn to the mayor of Ajax, Ont., Shaun Collier, for another perspective. He was one of five mayors on a panel at the Durham Homebuilders’ Central Ontario Summit. Durham region is an area of Ontario bordering Toronto to the east.

“I heard there is a comment this morning that we don’t understand DCs or they have no use for us, which is completely wrong,” Collier said in a blunt tone. “We absolutely do. But what’s happening is DCS we collected 10 years ago, when we go to build a road or a sewer or any type of infrastructure today, is only maybe a quarter of what it actually cost me to do. And you know, I also chair the police board. And guess what? DCs are going up. Because we have to start looking at the long term, how to pay for the growth. And I don’t think policing has ever been factored into DCs. But there are some major capital investments coming. So just a bit of a heads up. We do know what they are. We do know how they work, and that is one of the big challenges going forward.”

DCs are going up? Needle scratch.

Collier’s comments dovetailed nicely with an anecdote from Steven Del Duca, the mayor of Vaughan, Ont., made in his RESCON speech. Del Duca has cut development charges nearly in half in Vaughan, though they were some of the highest in the country when he started. He told a story about sitting in a meeting of York region (the regional authority just west of Durham) and asking for staff to prepare a report on strategies for reducing development charges.

“I put my hand on the video on council and I said I’m not going to argue with the pre-budget submission or the budget submission but I do have a request,” Del Duca related. “And I moved a motion in new business that we have regional staff report back to council before the end of Q1 on strategies such that we can consider a reduction in residential development charges. The chart was at the regional level. I didn’t pick a number, didn’t say we had to do it. I just wanted a report back. I just wanted to empower the elected officials, the 22 of us in that chamber, with enough information to make an informed choice, given the gravity of the housing affordability crisis that we all face.”

It didn’t go well. “Every single other member of regional council who spoke that day – other mayors that we all know well, all dear friends and colleagues of mine – went on to speak after I made that request in such strong terms, in such critical terms, against the simple concept of a staff report back to even consider,” Del Duca remembered. “Another mayor, a very dear friend of mine, some of you know well, used the term fools three times in a five-minute intervention to describe the very concept of even considering a reduction in residential development charts.”

It’s pretty clear that Ontario municipalities, with some prominent exceptions, don’t feel they can afford to bring development charges down. And they are probably right. Ontario municipalities have had to shoulder a frankly incredible burden of expenses since the Harris government of the late ’90s downloaded responsibility for funding almost everything to them, including such items as welfare. Over the time since, we’ve seen a steady erosion in the quality and upkeep of our local infrastructure, right across the province. An erosion that has left us deeply unprepared for the development we now need.

With U.S. tariffs on the backburner for now and perhaps permanently (we’ll see how that fentanyl czar performs), housing is going to be back at the top of the list of issues in the upcoming election. Ford’s government has been engaged with the issue to an extent I’ve never seen before in this province. But in order to cut the charges and fees to the extent that we need, he may need to do something that runs quite against the grain for an Ontario PC: collect more taxes from everyone and distribute them to the municipalities that need them.