Preamble:…

Preamble:

The Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) is recognized globally as a mechanism for dispute resolution, an observation that must be taken in the context that many jurisdictions have no appeals body at all. While there may be widespread agreement that having an independent body is necessary in order to advance integration of seemingly conflicting objectives associated with sustainability, the devil lies in the details.

The ORM Partnership is in line with other organizations, including the Ontario Greenbelt Alliance, with the issues raised in its submission. We would however like to highlight specific areas that from the ORM Partnership’s perspective are particularly important: 1) municipal conformity to implement provincial plans and 2) the depth of knowledge and qualification of panel members. While our primary focus is the Oak Ridges Moraine, many of these comments should be extended to the other provincial plans, i.e., the Greenbelt and Growth Plans.

1. Protect public interests for the future: no appeal of municipal conformity to implement provincial plans

In our submission to the Coordinated Review of the Growth and Green Plans, we commented on the incongruity of allowing third party appeals to municipal official plans amended to conform to provincial policy such as the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan (ORMCP). Conformity means conformity – if the revised policies are themselves not subject to an appeal and an upper tier amends its official plan to conform to the provincial amendments, how can a third party appeal this? This would be like appealing the original amendments, especially the revisions to the ORMCP, given that it is a Minister’s regulation. What would be the guiding legislation for the OMB in this instance, the Planning Act?

Ecological and hydrological health and integrity, and healthy ecosystems that have biological diversity and as such exhibit resiliency are matters of public interest. However, our experience is that when a municipality tries to go beyond the environmental protections as outlined, for instance in the Provincial Policy Statement, that third party appeals almost always initiated by developers result. Our current land use planning and appeals process does not encourage bold actions in areas of environmental protection, social innovation, good urban design; all too often planners and politicians base their design and decision-making under the spectre of an appeal to the OMB.

It is our opinion that land and resource management within the ORM Plan Area has benefited and would continue to benefit from a no-appeals approach to municipal official plans and zoning by-law conformity.

Recommendation: That municipal conformity amendments to incorporate the policies of provincial plans such as the revised Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan and the Greenbelt Plan into official plans and zoning by-laws must not be appealable to the Ontario Municipal Board.

2. Depth of knowledge and qualifications of panel members

Without a doubt, the area where more complaints are raised lies in the disparity between OMB hearing officers with respect to understanding of ecological processes, environmental knowledge and sensitivity and willingness to accommodate members of the public. Our collective experiences with OMB hearings runs the gamut from hearing officers expressing outright disdain for protecting ecological functioning to another who saw no merit in arguments that the ORMCP policies apply to settlement areas to others who bent the rules to allow a participant to cross-examine witnesses.

We are already in a world of greater uncertainty and unpredictability as the old normal is being replaced by a new non-normal. All the research points to a management system that needs to be nimble and to be able to accommodate uncertainty. This will require not only a planning system that allows for innovation but also an appeals process that does not stifle creative solutions but instead understands that we must embrace principles of redundancy and uncertainty, multiple perspectives, opportunities for learning, etc.

In short, the Province in moving forward in this review has a duty to ensure that the OMB is a partner in building a more secure future and not an obstacle. This will require new skill sets to understand how land use planning must change to embrace the concept of building resilient societies and ecosystems. Inherent in this is understanding more than just legal and planning principles but also ecological processes and principles underlying complex systems.

Recommendation: That Ontario Municipal Board panel members must be proficient in matters that go beyond legal and planning knowledge to include knowledge of ecological processes, resilience and complex systems.

[Original Comment ID: 207250]