The Ontario Liberals say the government has missed an opportunity to quickly increase housing in the centre of cities by voting down a private members bill designed to substantially speed up the process of converting unused offices into homes.
Liberal MPP Karen McCrimmon had tabled a bill she said would save two years from the process of turning an office into an apartment but it was struck down by the government on Wednesday.
“It was a very simple change that I’m really disappointed the government held,” McCrimmon told reporters.
“We’ve got to do something about housing and this was a very simple change that would have made a change of up to two years of work in order to do a conversion from commercial to residential. And they vote it down; it just makes no sense.”
The Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks — whose legislation would have been amended by McCrimmon’s proposed law — said it was looking to make it easier to convert offices into apartments but the bill could have had unintended consequences by using legislation to amend regulations.
“Our government is removing unnecessary burdens to build new homes,” a spokesperson for the government said. “We continue to look at further options to reduce record of site condition (RSC) requirements for certain redevelopment projects, including conversions of larger commercial office buildings to residential or mixed use.”
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McCrimmon told reporters Wednesday she wasn’t given a reason by the government for not supporting her bill, which she said had support from the Ontario Real Estate Association and the Professional Engineers of Ontario.
The government’s decision not to support McCrimmon’s law, and to seek its own internal process without a public timeline, comes at a time when the province appears to be failing to hit its housing targets.
Since 2022, the Ford government has been committed to adding 1.5 million new homes over the decade that followed. The target meant it needed to see an average of 150,000 new housing starts every year until 2031.
The province, however, has not built more than 110,000 new units in that time — even after it started counting long-term care beds as new homes.
At the same time, offices in Ontario’s largest city are lying vacant.
The percentage of vacant office space in Toronto rose throughout every quarter last year, closing out 2023 at 17.5 per cent – a three-per cent increase from the same period in 2022, and a 13.6-per cent spike from the fourth quarter of 2019.
In response, the local council launched a study asking for input on if, and how, it should start converting downtown office blocks into homes amidst “elevated pressure” on the housing market.
“In part, this increased pressure has led to development applications that propose to add residential uses above existing office buildings, convert office to residential uses, or demolish office buildings entirely,” the city said in May this year when it launched the study.
“The loss of office space is typically a permanent outcome that cannot be reversed later if market conditions change.”
The Ford government insisted its opposition to McCrimmon’s bill was on technical grounds — worrying the legislation would make an existing regulation moot — and that there is an appetite for the kind of changes it included.
— with a file from The Canadian Press