Bill 23, the More Homes…

Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act, 2022, is a bulldozer destroying key parts of the Ontario Heritage Act and Ontario’s cultural heritage protection system.
To enable clear sailing for development, this bill takes aim at how we define cultural heritage itself. The proposed change would effectively narrow the places our cities and towns can recognize and protect.
Bill 23 must be withdrawn.
Ironically, it is the new “minister of heritage,” the Minister of Citizenship and Multiculturalism, Michael Ford, who is abetting this travesty.
The seemingly simple proposal to redefine our cultural heritage — based on TWO legislated criteria rather than one — means that many of the places of value to Ontario’s diverse communities risk exclusion from the official “heritage” of the province.
In Bill 23 the government seems to be signalling that much of our (public’s) is decidedly second-rate and not worth considering - Because it (somehow) gets in the way of housing starts.
For rural communities whose economic drivers are rooted in both natural and cultural heritage, the impact of changes to the OHA and its regulations represents a threat to their sustainability.
Regulation 9/06
The Ontario Heritage Act, going back to 1975, provides a suite of tools for municipalities, and the province itself, to use to identify and protect our cultural heritage resources. The main protection tool is heritage designation
Because the Act is primarily concerned with land or real property, there are a great many different kinds of places that could be subject to designation which includes but is not limited to : buildings, bridges, battlegrounds, cemeteries and other burial sites, gardens, parks, ruins, archaeological sites, landscapes, streetscapes, trees and other natural features (at least those with a cultural component), memorials, and engineering works.
But lists like this don’t tell us which buildings, bridges, etc. are heritage buildings, bridges, etc. and eligible for designation. And there is no definition in the Act to help.
2005 saw comprehensive amendments made to the OHA where a property was eligible for designation if it met specific criteria “for determining cultural heritage value or interest” — and these were set out in Regulation 9/06 adopted the next year. The regulation provides a now almost universally used definition of heritage in Ontario.
The criteria themselves — nine in all, with three in each of three categories: physical/design, historic/associative, and contextual — didn’t come out of nowhere.
What had been developed and fine-tuned over decades as best practices gradually gained official recognition as governments adopted this professional praxis. The Standards for the Conservation of Historic Places in Canada and Ontario’s Standards & Guidelines for Provincial Heritage Properties are other examples of this.
The designation criteria don’t stand alone. As important as the criteria themselves is how they are applied: Following a systematic evaluation process in which all are considered, one or more must be met.
Is it unclear why requiring two or more heritage criteria be met. Government says to provide further “rigour” in designations. Any number other than one is arbitrary and professionally unintelligible. The opposite of rigour.
This all results in on-the-ground consequences, intended or not.
With the early and widespread emphasis in the preservation field on buildings, on architecture more generally, use of designation has historically been skewed in favour of the homes and buildings of Ontario’s settler societies and mostly well-to-do, Physical or design values such as the style of a mansion or town hall were uppermost in the minds of municipalities embarking on designation programs. As the field progressed, other, less obvious values of heritage places came to be better understood. Historic/associative value and contextual value received greater attention.
The criteria in Reg. 9/06 reflect this evolution.
Historic/associative value. Currently a property can be recognized and designated for its historic/associative value alone — by demonstrating that it has "direct associations with a theme, event, belief, person, activity, organization, or institution that is significant to a community.” In many cases there may be no building on the property or no physical/design elements that would satisfy the physical/design criteria (no “rare, unique, representative or early example of a style, type, expression, material or construction method”). Nor may there be contextual value (where a property is “important in defining, maintaining or supporting the character of an area”).
The one-to-two change in the criteria would rule out designation and legal protection of London’s Fugitive Slave Chapel — and countless historic places like it. Similarly with buildings of “only” contextual importance in places like Kensington Market and Little Jamaica and other communities throughout Ontario.
Ontario municipalities large and small — encouraged by local groups of all kinds and heritage organizations like the Ontario Historical Society and Architectural Conservancy Ontario — are making slow strides in recognizing and celebrating the unsung heritage places of Ontario’s diverse communities.
Then we have Mr. Ford, Minister of Citizenship and Multiculturalism — who has just taken over the heritage portfolio and responsibility for the Ontario Heritage Act, and whose ministry “leads the government’s anti-racism and inclusion initiatives to build an equitable Ontario”— who wants to make this more difficult.
Bill 23 sets Ontarians back 4 decades. Cultural and Natural Heritage, which impacts our quality of life and our identities are being systematically attacked for the sole purpose of creating more housing – primarily of a kind that does not prioritize affordable housing but creates single family dwellings only accessible by major wage earners and in the process ignores the carbon benefits of re-use of heritage properties.

Bill 23 must be withdrawn.