Bill 23 is flawed and a…

Bill 23 is flawed and a tremendous cost to the ways of life of people in this province.

In a sense, this bill has so much against it that it is hard to know where to begin. It affects the environment, in particular the Greenbelt. It affects the ability of conservation authorities to ensure that housing is safe from flooding and that animals can live outside urban areas. It affects the ability of municipal governments to make decisions about the character of their communities. It affects the rights of citizens to comment on legislation and bylaws. It affects the heritage of our communities.

I want to focus on the latter.

Schedule 6 should be deleted from Bill 23. It has made a mess of heritage conservation efforts by dozens of municipalities in the province. Each municipal government has spent thousands of hours with staff and community volunteers assessing the heritage values of thousands of properties.

Having listed properties eliminated after two years would make all that work pointless. The legislation should abandon the two-year time limit for listing heritage properties and the five-year wait until they can be listed again. Re-listing after five years is unlikely to happen. If a property is considered to have heritage value, no staff would list it since it only has a two-year timeframe. Instead, it would be added to the designated list for greater protection. The changes to the listed property regulation would have more of an impact on developers’ plans to build new housing.

This bill would give the minister the ability to change any municipal property owned by the province. An order in council could be put in place to opt out of standards and guidelines if property is required for transit, housing, health/long-term care, and other infrastructure. Ontario Place could be converted into long term care. Heritage standards and guidelines would be null and void and allow for the demolition of current designated provincially owned buildings.

In my region of Waterloo, we have hundreds of beautiful, relevant heritage homes that are a part of the affordable housing strategy and beautiful landscapes. My street, with many heritage buildings, is in an older district. Families from China, Vietnam, Syria, Africa and the Caribbean have lived and thrived here. Rents in these century-old houses are low and the families live in a community surrounded by trees, a park and a lake. We are a thriving community. Heritage buildings provide a sense of place and an understanding of our past.

Heritage cultural landscapes have been identified by several municipalities in our region and we are richer for knowing about them. No Indigenous landscapes have been identified. We have almost no knowledge of the Indigenous heritage of our region, in part because we have not taken seriously the rights of Indigenous people. The criteria for designation will not include contextual value, i.e, what is “important in defining, maintaining or supporting the character of an area, is physically, functionally, visually or historically linked to its surroundings, or is a landmark” (Ontario Regulation 9/06). Indigenous heritage is not in buildings because they no longer exist, and so heritage value must be about the contextual value. Indigenous people view their heritage in terms of the land, the water, the animals and plants in them, not the built structures. The legislation therefore makes it impossible to designate Indigenous cultural heritage landscape. In short, Indigenous heritage has been devalued with this legislation.

With this legislation, we are wiping out the past. To quote a famous book:
“Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there… Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right” (George Orwell, 1984).
We need to know about our past. If immigrants arrive at our doors, what are we to tell them? We may be able to house them, but they will know less about the community in which they are expected to live. When we show them what a nice place they are coming to, do we show them high rise buildings? No. We show them pictures of old buildings. Just look at a calendar showing scenes of Ontario -- old buildings, trees and parks.