While I recognize the…

While I recognize the importance of improving access to affordable housing and building more homes, this Act oversteps on too many important areas. I am deeply concerned with the following:
- Limiting of upper-tier municipal official planning powers, which will cause turmoil in the planning world in many communities, including my own;
- Limiting of municipal ability to ensure new homes are built to strong design standards. The Province has already dragged its feet on matching the emergent federal net-zero direction for new construction; municipalities have been filling this gap through development standards, which are now being blocked. This is a horrible overstepping of authority on the development of such standards that, in some cases took a decade to develop and was done in a very consultative process with many stakeholders. We should not be baking in higher long-term energy costs and carbon emissions by allowing the cheapest and least efficient homes legally allowable to be built.
- While I think there is some merit to the approach to limiting of development charges for affordable housing, this is financially problematic for almost all municipalities. As you know, they rely on this revenue for infrastructure service. If this is to be approved, then there must be compensatory funding from somewhere to make up for the short and long-term financial shortfalls that will result.
Too many provisions of this Act are problematic and should be eliminated. It is a blatant attempt to cram through unpopular policy under the guise of "housing affordability" that will limit municipal agency and responsiveness to constituent concerns, many of which will not materially address the affordability crisis either in the short or long term.