The Ontario Rivers Alliance …

The Ontario Rivers Alliance (ORA) is a not-for-profit grassroots organization with a mission to protect, conserve, and restore riverine ecosystems across the province. The ORA advocates for effective policy and legislation to ensure that development affecting Ontario rivers is environmentally and socially sustainable.

1. Introduction

The ORA is strongly opposed to the proposed amendments to the Planning Act in Schedule 10 of Bill 60, Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025. These changes further erode Ontario’s already weakened land-use planning system, remove core environmental and climate safeguards, undermine public and Indigenous rights, and consolidate extraordinary discretionary powers in the hands of the Minister.

These proposals follow a multi-year trend of dismantling core environmental protections, accelerating sprawl, and sidelining evidence-based planning in favour of political expediency. Schedule 10 is not a “streamlining” measure—it is a structural restructuring of Ontario’s planning regime at the direct expense of watershed health, climate resilience, and public accountability.

ORA urges the Province to withdraw Schedule 10 in its entirety.

2. Core Concerns with Schedule 10

2.1. Exempting Ministerial Decisions from the Provincial Planning Statement (PPS)

Schedule 10 proposes to make the Provincial Planning Statement, 2024, inapplicable to all Ministers’ decisions under the Planning Act outside the Greenbelt¹. This is a profound departure from the long-standing legal requirement that all decisions affecting planning matters “shall be consistent with” provincial policy.

Exempting the Minister from the PPS:
• Creates a two-tiered planning system—one rules-based (municipalities, conservation authorities, communities), and one entirely discretionary (the Minister).
• Removes binding safeguards for natural heritage protection, climate resilience, hazard avoidance, and agricultural land preservation.
• Allows politically driven approvals to override watershed science, municipal plans, and Indigenous rights considerations.
• Increases litigation risk and undermines the rule of law.

At a time when extreme rainfall, flooding, heat stress, and watershed degradation are escalating, eliminating PPS obligations for the most powerful decision-maker in Ontario is reckless and indefensible.

2.2. As-of-Right Variances to Height, Lot Coverage, Setbacks and Other Performance Standards

Schedule 10 introduces a new regulatory authority allowing “minor” performance standards to be varied as of right on entire categories of urban lands². This circumvents the transparent minor variance process and eliminates the requirement to meet the well-established four-part Planning Act test³.

This change:
• Cuts out public notice, Indigenous oversight, neighbour engagement, and any opportunity to assess cumulative impacts (tree canopy loss, shadowing, stormwater loading, spillover effects, etc.).
• Allows intensification across broad areas without verifying capacity in stormwater systems, wastewater systems, or receiving rivers and streams.
• Removes climate-risk screening at the exact moment Ontario’s own science shows increasing basement flooding, sewer overflows, and flood hazards.
The Auditor General has repeatedly warned that Ontario’s wetland protection and flood resilience systems are failing, and that gaps in hazard mapping exacerbate climate risk⁴. As-of-right variances will only accelerate these vulnerabilities.

2.3. Transforming Minister’s Zoning Orders (MZOs) into Non-Regulatory Instruments
Schedule 10 allows MZOs to be issued as non-regulatory orders, posted only on a government website rather than as formal regulations subject to the Legislation Act⁵.

This shift:
• Removes an essential layer of legislative scrutiny and procedural safeguards.
• Makes it even easier to rezone environmentally sensitive lands—including wetlands, floodplains, headwaters, and agricultural systems—without evidence-based justification.
• Overlooks the Auditor General’s 2024 findings of systemic problems in MZO issuance: preferential treatment, lack of fairness, weak documentation, and disregard for environmental protections⁶.

Rather than implementing the Auditor General’s recommendations to tighten MZO controls, Schedule 10 does the opposite—it expands Ministerial discretion while reducing transparency.

2.4. Weakening Oversight of Protected Major Transit Station Areas (PMTSAs) and Community Improvement Plans (CIPs)

While accelerating planning for transit-oriented communities can be beneficial, Schedule 10 removes critical oversight without adding any requirements for:
• Affordable housing delivery,
• Green infrastructure,
• Watershed compatibility,
• or climate-resilient design.

Similarly, expanding CIPs at the upper-tier level risks subsidizing sprawl and infrastructure extension into sensitive recharge areas, headwater streams, and agricultural lands—without any environmental criteria or cumulative-effects testing.

2.5. The Claim of “Neutral Environmental Impact” Is Not Supported by Evidence

The ERO posting claims that Schedule 10 will have a neutral impact on the environment⁷. This assertion is contradicted by well-established evidence:
1. Lands “designated for development” frequently contain wetlands, watercourses, recharge areas, mature trees, and local biodiversity that play central roles in climate adaptation.
2. Most environmentally significant lands lie outside the Greenbelt.
3. Ontario’s wetland and flood-risk mapping is incomplete and outdated⁴.
4. Small, repeated, and unreviewed changes to height, coverage, and zoning produce cumulative impacts that erode climate resilience and water quality.
5. Removing PPS consistency requirements for Ministerial decisions removes the last remaining binding safeguard protecting rivers, wetlands, and natural heritage.
There is no credible basis to claim environmental neutrality for these reforms.

3. Implications for Ontario’s Watersheds and Freshwater Systems

For 14 years, ORA has reviewed municipal, provincial, and federal proposals across Ontario. We have seen firsthand how incremental land-use decisions—variances, zoning changes, MZOs, site plan approvals—accumulate into measurable harm:
• Increased peak flows and stormwater surges into rivers and creeks.
• Loss of cold-water refugia and headwater supply essential for species like Brook Trout.
• Degraded wetlands and diminished flood storage.
• Higher sediment and nutrient loading into freshwater systems.
• Greater flood risk for downstream communities.

Ontario’s own Provincial Climate Change Impact Assessment confirms that riverine flooding, stormwater exceedance, and extreme precipitation will intensify over the coming decades.
Now is the time to strengthen—not dismantle—evidence-based planning safeguards.

4. Recommendations

ORA recommends the Province:
1. Withdraw Schedule 10 of Bill 60 in its entirety.
2. If the Province proceeds despite overwhelming risk, it must at minimum:
a. Restore the requirement that all Ministers’ decisions be consistent with the Provincial Planning Statement.
PPS compliance is a foundational rule-of-law safeguard.
b. Abandon the proposal to convert MZOs into non-regulatory orders.
MZOs must remain subject to the Legislation Act and embedded procedural safeguards.
c. Reject the introduction of as-of-right performance-standard variances.
If any regime is created, it must explicitly exclude hazard lands, flood-prone areas, areas with overloaded stormwater systems, and watersheds with sensitive cold-water or inland-lake ecosystems.
d. Embed climate-risk and watershed-impact tests into all streamlined planning tools.
No fast-tracked approval should proceed without demonstrating:
• No net increase in downstream flood risk;
• No net loss of wetlands or natural heritage; and
• Compatibility with municipal watershed, stormwater, and climate adaptation plans.
e. Restore meaningful public and Indigenous governance rights.

Public notice, Indigenous consultation, and transparent oversight must be reinstated—especially where environmental and cumulative impacts may affect Treaty and inherent rights.

5. Conclusion

Ontario faces mounting climate pressures—extreme rain events, riverine floods, ecological degradation, and infrastructure failures. The response should be to strengthen watershed-based planning, reinforce environmental safeguards, and uphold transparent, evidence-based decision-making that respects public and Indigenous rights.

Schedule 10 moves Ontario in the opposite direction.

ORA urges the Province to withdraw these amendments and work collaboratively with Indigenous Nations, municipalities, conservation authorities, and civil society to build a planning framework that is resilient, transparent, fair, and climate-ready.