This long blog post/article is about Guelph’s Official Plan hereafter expressed as OPA 80. For those unfamiliar with the technical nature of community planning, an Official Plan is a blueprint or template for growth. It comprises projections on population, housing, employment, and more. It is a legal document that can be revised by the Province or revised upon request from a municipality. It is what all the drama has been about as the Provincial Government arbitrarily changed Official Plans province-wide and opened Ontario up to rapid housing development in The Green Belt and elsewhere.
Guelph’s Official Plan 80
The City of Guelph Council opted to revise the city’s Official Plan this autumn after having approved OPA 80 in July 2022. Earlier in the year, the Province made modifications to OPs. Then it reversed its decision because it recognized that the very decision to modify OPs across Ontario was flawed.
The province still left the door open for heads of Council to submit comments on the Province’s original modifications to official plans. Locally, I have many concerns about what this will affect. As one person asked me, “Has Guelph gone from being a green city to being a greed city?”
Council’s decision was taken by a democratic vote for which I have the ultimate respect. Yet, the outcome was perceived by many as flawed. Below, I will outline some of the concerns.
Public Consultation and Input
In amending OPA 80 some have argued that there was a lack of public notification and consultation. For clarity, the public was made aware that OPA 80 was being revisited and that there were changes afoot from October 23rd, 2023 as per Calandra’s public announcement. Yet few were truly cognizant of this. Instead, those with a vested interest in changes largely from the development community requested standing before the Council
Some residents question if Guelph has misread Minister Calandra when he stated:
“Since becoming Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, I have made it a priority to review past decisions, including minister’s zoning orders and official plans, to ensure that they support our goal of building at least 1.5 million homes in a manner that maintains and reinforces public trust.”
Has Guelph diminished public trust by making some amendments to our Official Plan and by making them in this fashion? This is not a casual question. It gets to the heart of many concerns including Indigenous reconciliation, Guelph’s future water needs, our commitment to the tree canopy, and our intent to develop employment lands.
Indigenous Relations, Reconciliation, and the Requirement to Consult Indigenous Communities
One concern I heard was that Guelph City Council may have bypassed required Indigenous consultation with these changes.
The “Duty to Consult” has been required by the Province since 2014. When OPA 80 was adopted by the Council, it included consultation with Indigenous communities.
Let’s be clear – The City of Guelph staff and Council fulfilled their duty when revising the Official Plan with the following consultations:
Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation meeting on May 11, 2021.
Grand River Metis Council meeting on May 13, 2021.
Six Nations of the Grand River meeting on May 25, 2021.
In making the most recent changes, it has been suggested that the duty to consult by the province may have been skipped.
According to this Canadian Bar Association essay MUNICIPAL DUTY TO CONSULT AND LAND USE PLANNING LAW IN ONTARIO provided to me by a constituent, it is the Crown’s Duty to engage Indigenous Governments:
Consultation with impacted parties has been a requirement under the Constitution Act since the early 1980s.
At a minimum, planning decisions require municipal governments to give advanced notice, hold public meetings, and make relevant documents available to the public.
Since part of the Amendment to OPA apparently affects a known archeological site:
1.2.2 Planning authorities shall engage with Indigenous communities and coordinate on land use planning matters.
2.6.5 Planning authorities shall engage with Indigenous communities and consider their interests when identifying, protecting and managing cultural heritage and archaeological resources.
This is a potentially serious omission that can be remediated by serious consultation in the new year but before changes to OPA 80 are enacted.
If the Province embraces the recommended changes without appropriate and meaningful consultation with Indigenous Communities, has Ontario failed in its Duty to Consult?
Guelph’s Future Ground Water Supply
Six months ago, I voiced serious concern that Guelph’s water supply might not be enough for our future population needs. I mused that to conserve our water, former Mayor Karen Farbridge had successfully lobbied the provincial government to reduce our expansion goals thereby keeping Guelph’s population projections under 200,000.
As our cap has recently been raised to 208,000, I wondered if conservation could truly make up for what seemed to be a dwindling supply proportionate to our projected population increases. I supported and still support our conservation goals – but with some unease:
Conservation alone is not the answer to a rapidly growing population’s needs. Bluntly, Guelph needs new water sources to rapidly grow beyond 200,000. These could be acquired two ways: annexation of land in proximity to the city or embrace a pipeline to Lake Erie.
Other councillors have also opined that our water is in short supply. This sentiment was relayed in a staff report dated December 5 stating that there would be supply issues as well. Hence the following are logical questions for the future:
* Will we need a costly pipeline from Lake Erie to support our population? The last estimate Guelph had on its share for this was $800 million. That estimate occurred approximately two decades ago. Since then construction costs have grown exponentially.
* Will we need to annex some or all of Puslinch so we can exploit that aquifer?
* Will the provincial government – and specifically the Ministry of Municipal Affairs – help to finance and negotiate these costly endeavours? I do know that the Region of Waterloo is equally challenged by water and virtually all communities along the Grand River Watershed. Will the Province be amenable to providing financing for all these?
As importantly, what is the status of indigenous consultation and communities within the watershed?
Guelph’s Tree Canopy Initiative in Tatters?
Guelph committed to covering the city with at least 40 percent of the tree canopy in the coming years. This is commendable in many ways. Trees help address global climate change and make a cityscape more appealing.
For decades, Guelph has prided itself on protecting our trees. I heard from one person who noted that in approving one amendment to our official plan we gave approval to a single large project to eviscerate the tree replacement policy by permitting a heritage forest to be removed.
In the opinion of some, we have a tree compensation policy that has now been seriously challenged.
Are we doing a disservice to our stated efforts to address global warming by giving short shrift to the tree replacement policy?
Are we merely virtue signaling or “Green Washing” a commitment to reducing greenhouse gases and cooling Guelph?
Might we be promising but not delivering on increasing our tree canopy to 40%?
Will the promised jobs and tax base materialize that was the expressed rationale for approving this specific change to OPA 80?
Are we signaling to small property owners that the tree canopy is not worth protecting?
Now can anyone anywhere take down a tree without a solid plan to replace it?
Clearly, deforestation of a natural heritage like trees is very uncool and I expect will be received rather coldly by many residents of this city.
Employment Lands and Guelph’s Legacy as a Green City
In its early stages, the developer of the Guelph Innovation District (GID) provided the Council with a great award-winning plan and vision of what lands adjacent to the University of Guelph can be.
Further damage to Guelph’s legacy might have occurred by significantly shrinking our employment lands in the GID with Council approved changes to OPA 80. While the argument has been made that we are doing this to house people affordably, I suspect that the added costs of commuting will render affordability absurd.
The costs of cars, insurance, and fuel will dampen any affordable housing plans that benefit the working population. Without close proximity to work and with more growth toward Highway 401 the “Bramptonization” of Guelph has possibly begun. We are at risk of becoming the dormitory town that Brampton, Whitby, Markham, and other centres surrounding Toronto have been for some time.
By removing employment lands from Guelph, we are also creating an economic deficit as commuters instead of coming into Guelph head to employers elsewhere.
This is neither sensible economically nor environmentally. Furthermore, the argument that, post-COVID, office work is actually homework, defies some trends showing a reversal of these phenomena among office workers as the demand of employers to have their staff show up to the office has increased.
Of course, those working in manufacturing or in commercial retail have not seen any shift to home work. These jobs are in far greater number than those for people working from home. Guelph needs to attract employers located within the City to help our tax base. I am certain we wish to ensure that the tax base does not fall further to residents as we fail to attract employers in the future.
Finally
I have nothing against a democratically determined decision – in a democracy sometimes we achieve our end and sometimes we are on the losing side of a decision. I was on the losing end of the Official Plan 80 Amendments. That is how democracy works.
Even in being on the losing side, democracy is an undeniably good thing and we must respect it. I respect Justin Trudeau’s government as being democratically elected with the right to govern even if I don’t like some of the laws it has passed. I respect my colleagues if they voted differently than did I. I might however question why they did so as they might question me.
But democracy is not a sport where we say “suck it up buttercup” and move on – some decisions must be reflected upon for some time to come.
I strongly respect the “Loyal Opposition’s” role in a democracy. Dissent is fundamental to our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I admire people like Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and war resisters who asserted their right to dissent as I am so doing. They change the world.
If we want water, if we want to house the under-housed and the unhoused, if we want bike lanes, walkable cities, employment lands, and good solid planning we need to speak up and in volume.
If you care about Guelph, please write to: Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Paul.Calandra@pc.ola.org
Your voice counts as we protect the Green City before it is unrecognizably transformed.
