Category:Places to Grow Act

Southern Ontario is one of the fastest growing regions in North America. The area is already home to 94 per cent of the province’s population (or 36 per cent of Canada’s population of 32.8 million people) and the government projects that by 2031 an additional four million people will settle in the Greater Golden Horseshoe (the GGH is an area in southern Ontario, extending roughly from Niagara Falls to Georgian Bay to Peterborough). This rate of growth is unprecedented in Ontario.

To cope with the projected population and economic growth in southern Ontario over the next few decades, the Ontario government enacted the Places to Grow Act, 2005 to provide the legal and policy framework needed to facilitate the development of growth plans for different regions of Ontario, and to amend these plans as required. The Act, now the responsibility of the Ministry of Infrastructure, requires the Minister to prepare a proposed growth plan for designated areas.

The first growth plan prepared under the Act was the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, 2006 (GGH Plan). The GGH Plan is a framework that establishes specific density targets and planning priorities for managing growth in the region. The Act and the GGH Plan were seen as critical to the success of the Greenbelt Act and Greenbelt Plan. The goal of preserving outlying natural, rural, and agricultural lands is inextricably linked to the need to formulate and implement plans to direct, control and transform the nature of urban growth in southern Ontario.

The GGH Plan is guided by the province’s desire to plan and manage growth in a manner that supports a strong and competitive economy, protects the natural environment and agricultural lands, optimizes the use of existing and new infrastructure, and enhances quality of life in communities throughout the region. It is hoped that these goals will be achieved through the promotion of intensification and re-urbanization, including brownfield redevelopment, wherever possible.

The GGH Plan establishes overarching growth management policies and goals that address: where and how to grow; infrastructure needed to support growth; and protection of natural systems, prime agricultural areas and aggregate resources. Key policy directions and goals in the GGH Plan include the following: directing growth to built up areas within the Greater Golden Horseshoe by establishing urban growth centres and intensification corridors; establishing development intensification targets, by the year 2015 and on, of a minimum of 40 per cent of all residential development occurring annually within the built-up area of each upper- and single-tier municipality; establishing residential and employment density targets within urban growth centres in order to support public transit and promote mixed use development; and, making public transit the first priority for transportation infrastructure planning and major transportation investments.

While it is important to promote urban growth and intensification in southern Ontario, the GGH Plan does include policies that concern the ECO. For example, the Plan proposes that growth and intensification take place in watersheds where communities are already struggling with water supply and wastewater treatment issues. These communities will eventually require major upgrades to their water and wastewater infrastructure to accommodate the projected population growth.

The GGH Plan does include a requirement that, prior to expanding existing water and wastewater systems or building new systems, municipalities should implement water conservation and demand management strategies. However, the GGH Plan does not require that population allocations be appropriately adjusted in communities where watersheds are close to carrying capacity. Instead, the GGH Plan favours the artificial extension of water and wastewater capacity in such communities, through major infrastructure projects designed to pipe water in from outside of the local watershed and, in some cases, to pipe wastewater back out.

Long-distance transport of water and wastewater also requires costly infrastructure and significant ongoing energy supplies to run the pumps that move water and wastewater. In addition, such projects are exempt from the natural heritage protection provisions set out in the PPS, the Greenbelt Plan and the ORMCP, even though their construction can cause significant environmental impacts.

The approach used in the GGH Plan reverses the sustainable planning process; it elevates the province’s goal of accommodating population increases – with economic growth as the central driver – over the need to live within ecosystem limits. The emphasis on large infrastructure projects sets up irreconcilable priorities. This approach is not sustainable over the long run, and may only serve to export the capacity challenges to more distant watersheds. It is unclear whether the GGH Plan will allow for radical reductions in growth allocations if major shortcomings in water and wastewater servicing emerge in communities targeted for growth. The plan does allow for population allocations to be revisited after five years, but does not indicate what factors were used to determine the existing allocations, or what factors might result in changing those allocations. It appears that accommodating economic growth by population expansion – rather than respecting ecosystem limits – has been the primary driving force in the allocation process. In the interim five-year period, municipalities are obligated to plan to accommodate the existing population projections outlined in the GGH Plan. In effect, this obligation will impose large-scale infrastructure projects as the solution to inadequate water and wastewater capacity in designated urban growth areas.