CONTENTS
Tuesday 2 February 1993
Agency review
Ontario Municipal Board
John Sewell, chair, Commission on Planning and Development Reform in Ontario
STANDING COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
*Chair / Président: Runciman, Robert W. (Leeds-Grenville PC)
*Vice-Chair / Vice-Président: McLean, Allan K. (Simcoe East/-Est PC)
*Bradley, James J. (St Catharines L)
Carter, Jenny (Peterborough ND)
*Cleary, John C. (Cornwall L)
Ferguson, Will, (Kitchener ND)
*Frankford, Robert (Scarborough East/-Est ND)
*Grandmaître, Bernard (Ottawa East/-Est L)
*Marchese, Rosario (Fort York ND)
Stockwell, Chris (Etobicoke West/-Ouest PC)
Waters, Daniel (Muskoka-Georgian Bay ND)
Wiseman, Jim (Durham West/-Ouest ND)
*In attendance / présents
Substitutions present/ Membres remplaçants présents:
Abel, Donald (Wentworth North/-Nord ND) for Mr Ferguson
Drainville, Dennis (Victoria-Haliburton ND) for Ms Carter
Mills, Gordon (Durham East/-Est ND) for Mr Waters
Murdoch, Bill (Grey PC) for Mr Stockwell
Rizzo, Tony (Oakwood ND) for Mr Wiseman
Clerk pro tem / Greffière par intérim: Manikel, Tannis
Staff / Personnel: Pond, David, research officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1008 in committee room 2.
AGENCY REVIEW
Consideration of the operations of certain agencies, boards and commissions.
ONTARIO MUNICIPAL BOARD
The Chair (Mr Robert W. Runciman): Can we come to order, please, and get under way. Our first and only witness today is John Sewell, who's the chair of the Commission on Planning and Development Reform in Ontario.
Mr Sewell, would you like to come forward and have a seat? Welcome to the committee.
Mr John Sewell: Thank you very much. Pleased to be here.
The Chair: You understand why the invitation was extended. The committee has been reviewing for some time now the operations of the Ontario Municipal Board.
Mr Sewell: That's correct.
The Chair: Before we finalized our report, we felt it would be appropriate to have you in for a discussion of what you've been doing and perhaps bring us up to date on how you see your study impacting on the operations of the Ontario Municipal Board.
Mr Sewell: Okay.
The Chair: Would you like to say something --
Mr Sewell: Sure. Why don't I talk about the general kinds of approaches we're suggesting.
I think people have seen the draft report. In there we have a chapter on conflicts, disputes and appeals. We believe that in any kind of planning system -- and that's the only aspect, by the way; I think I'm talking about planning questions; I don't know much about assessment appeals -- there are bound to be disputes, whether it's disputes between various governments, whether it's disputes between private parties and governments or disputes between private parties. There are bound to be disputes and it's important that there be a good, strong way of resolving those disputes.
We've suggested a couple of approaches. We're suggesting that there should be ways of making the planning system itself less adversarial. We've made a hint, which I think we'd like to pick up on, that there should be alternative dispute resolution mechanisms at the municipal level before a council decision is made. A number of people have suggested to us that it would be really helpful if there were some way the parties who are having the dispute were forced to get together in the same room before a council decision. We're trying to figure out how that might be done. We're also suggesting that there must be a really good dispute resolution mechanism after municipal decisions. Of course, that's the role of the OMB, although it's possible that it could play a role in dispute resolution before council decisions are made. That's one thing that people talked about.
Our suggestion is that the OMB should be required to hold a meeting within 30 days of receiving an appeal. So when the clerk mails off the appeal, if he mails it off on January 1, we think the OMB has to get the parties together at a meeting before the end of January. We call it a preliminary meeting, for lack of a better term. At that meeting the board should be in a position -- and we've listed the things on page 75, but just to go through them -- of talking generally about the case and what the dispute is about; who the parties happen to be; what kind of information each of them has; whether any statutory requirements have been met or haven't been met; they can talk about the need to share information -- there might be some information that one party has not disclosed to the other, so the board should be able to require that information be shared; we think the board should be trying to narrow issues in dispute, trying to settle a case if possible, maybe explore the kinds of ways that settlement might occur; and think about how long a hearing might take if there was one to be held.
We think that at that kind of meeting an awful lot will get cleared off the table. We think that in some of those cases there will be a settlement, or someone will say, "Hey, I didn't really want to go too far but I think this is awful and here's why." Or, as we've heard from a number of developers, often the first time they know what the case against them is is when they get to the OMB, and this would be an opportunity for the developer, as an example, to say: "Oh, that's what they're concerned about. Well, hey, we can do this and this in order to try to accommodate them." So we very much expect that this meeting will do an awful lot to narrow issues and create some settlement opportunities.
Another thing that we think would happen at that meeting is that the meeting would talk about the possibility of intervenor funding. We've suggested that that should be an opportunity the board has available to it, where it feels there is a public interest that otherwise wouldn't be readily represented, to consider intervenor funding. We have some suggestions about that and I can get back to that in just a minute, but we do believe that's a real requirement at the board.
We believe that these preliminary meetings could be convened or could be presided over by an OMB member or by someone appointed by the OMB. We think there are lots of people in communities who could easily be brought in to look at these meetings and say: "Come on, let's get together. Let's figure out how we can have a settlement here or at least narrow all the issues." So the possibility of actually bringing non-board members in to hold these preliminary meetings is, we think, very good. We think that's a terrific opportunity, I might say, for not only local input -- really local input -- but also introducing new ideas into the board in a nice, informal way, getting new talents and new ways of doing things floating around in terms of what the board is up to. It should also ensure that we don't find that this preliminary meeting being held in 30 days drags on to 60 days, 90 days and so forth, so that we can actually bring in people to respond to the kind of demand that's there.
Some people have suggested that using the board in this way, as the dispute resolution mechanism, is going to put a very heavy load on it. We think that in fact it will change the load. It will be a heavy load, but it will change the nature of the work that the OMB does. Instead of having an awful lot of long hearings that go on for two or three weeks or two or three months, we think that the number of hearings might increase but in fact they might be two or three days. A lot of them could be cleared up in terms of this first preliminary meeting, or maybe that first meeting will go to a number of other meetings. So we think there's a really good opportunity for this to considerably shrink the process at the OMB without an increase in the resources needed, and we think it will provide a much more conciliatory way of proceeding.
We believe that to do this, the board doesn't need resources, but it does need more training. I know that's a recommendation that the committee is now thinking of. We have no question but that training will be required so board members can have good negotiation and mediation skills. We aren't born with those skills, but people can be trained in them, and we think they should be.
I guess the only other thing I'd like to comment on is the question of intervenor funding. Let me spend just a moment on that. Our recommendations are based on the idea that the provincial government expresses policies in regard to planning and that in fact there should be good, clear policy that everybody recognizes that's sitting right there. We've made some proposals in the draft report about what that policy should be. Generally, our position is that the policy should be the kinds of policies that are sort of expressed now by ministries, often not openly enough. What we're trying to do is make it clear to the world what the policy actually is, so we think it should be stated.
We think those policies will provide a very good framework for planning at the municipal level so municipalities know the kinds of things that are expected of them. We think that having policy there in and of itself will give very strong direction to municipalities, and we don't think that very many municipalities are going to knowingly go out and do things contrary to the policy. The experience in Ontario is that if you have planning policy expressed, most municipalities try to meet it. We only have four policies at the present time, but in fact, often municipalities try to meet them. Some municipalities don't, but that's the nature of the world. So having the policies there will be a really good way of ensuring that public interests are protected.
However, we think there are going to be some cases where public interests are not protected; where, for instance, there's a real question about the applicability of the policy in a particular area. In those cases, there might be a group of local citizens who feel very strongly about how that policy should be interpreted, and unless they have some funding available, they won't be able to fairly express themselves.
We think there's a second area of concern, and that is that there are going to be some areas where there isn't public policy but indeed there should be. That's going to happen simply because, as you know, often the public and the private sectors lag behind public concerns. There are going to be some cases where a concern has not yet found its way up into provincial policy, but it's clear that it's there. In those cases where there's a clear public concern that hasn't found its way into policy, we think there should be some funding available. So there are the two instances where we think intervenor funding should be provided.
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Our suggestion is that the provincial government should get out of approvals. Right now, the check on the system is that most things municipalities do are then checked over by the province. We think that's a great waste of energy. It doesn't add very much in terms of value. If we're getting rid of that, it's more important than ever that the citizenry have some device to ensure that public interests are strongly protected. It's in those cases that we think intervenor funding would be required, and we've got some clear ideas about how it is given and the extent and so forth.
I've recognized in the report that John Kruger suggested it would be required about 20 times a year, and we think that's about right. We've suggested that while we're waiting for the legislation to be changed, the province should be putting in some money so the OMB can have a fund to draw on for intervenor funding right away. We suggested $500,000, but that's just a transitional thing. I think I'll stop at this point. I think those are our major proposals about the OMB.
The Chair: Thanks, Mr Sewell. I'm going to open up the questions, and what we'll try to do, as a guideline, is 20 minutes per caucus, per round. So we'll try to make it as fair as possible.
Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): Is Mr Sewell coming back this afternoon?
The Chair: No, he's not. Mr Sewell is only with us this morning, so we'll have to make the best of it.
Mr Bradley: I see. It said, "If required," on your agenda.
The Chair: The committee will meet if required. Mr Grandmaître, do you want to start?
Mr Bernard Grandmaître (Ottawa East): John, what you're going through is not new. Other governments have tried to do exactly what you're trying to do.
Mr Sewell: Yes, no question.
Mr Grandmaître: Nothing has ever materialized, but it seems your people are determined to bring about some changes. Last week, we were examining and reviewing Bill 61, the Toronto Islands affair, a sweetheart deal. What are your thoughts? You're interested in changing the Planning Act, the way we do business in the province of Ontario. We're excluding the Toronto Islands from the Planning Act. What are your thoughts on that one?
Mr Sewell: It's something I'm not aware of at all, I'm afraid. I've been so caught up that I have no idea about Bill 61.
Mr Grandmaître: That's strange, because I asked if your people were involved. The fact is that the ministry or the minister is saying, "Well, no, the Toronto Islands are excluded from the Planning Act." I've been trying to get an answer from the parliamentary assistant and even the minister.
Mr Gordon Mills (Durham East): We gave it to you.
Mr Bradley: What he should have done was check the poll results on the islands. He would have had the answer to that: all NDP.
Mr Grandmaître: But now Mr Sewell is telling me that he's not even aware of it. How can the minister have an answer if you're not aware and you're responsible to improve the planning mechanisms of this province? What appeal mechanism will the islanders have if a development goes up and these people are not in favour of the future developments of the islands?
Mr Sewell: I have no idea. It's not something I'm aware of at all. Sorry; I can't help you.
Mr Mills: We told you last week.
Mr Grandmaître: Gord, you didn't give me an answer. It's a provincial interest and I kept repeating myself -- Rosario will remind me of this -- asking what mechanism these people will have to appeal to the OMB or appeal to the minister. What is the appeal mechanism? You're honest enough to tell me the truth. You're not even aware of it. Your responsibility is to streamline planning in the province of Ontario or accommodate municipal planning with provincial interest. Now you're telling me you're not aware of it.
My next question, the Niagara Escarpment: Again, former governments have been dealing with the Niagara Escarpment for the last 20 years and some 26 or 27 municipalities, five or six regions are involved in this. You've got all kinds of official plans, and back in the early 1970s, if I'm not mistaken, a Tory government wanted to approve these official plans and give them back to the individual municipalities and this has never happened. How involved are you in this process?
Mr Sewell: We've looked in a fleeting way at whether we should be dealing with the Niagara Escarpment Commission and decided we shouldn't. There are two reasons for that. One is that we're aware a review is being undertaken on it right now by the Ministry of Natural Resources and we thought we didn't want to duplicate that. But the second thing, and I think it's the more important thing, is that we've decided to not be location-specific in regard to any of our recommendations.
There are a number of planning matters that are happening throughout the province and a number of planning concerns throughout the province, and we've decided that our job is to look at the larger question of the Planning Act and how it might apply in a general way throughout the province and not to deal with the location-specific concerns. The Niagara Escarpment Commission is one of them, the greater Toronto area is another, the parkway belt west is another, and the kinds of proposals they're talking about in Ottawa and the National Capital Commission is another.
There are a number of very specific problems like that, and we made a decision that we would not get involved in those. You simply can't do everything at the speed with which we're moving, and we believe it's important to move quickly in planning. Planning faced much too much delay in the last 20 years. We decided we simply couldn't take that on our plate.
We have suggested a formula or an approach that could be used for the province in dealing with area-specific concerns. We suggest that there could be some proposals to have policy that is area-specific. If, for instance, you wanted to have some planning proposals for the Highway 11 corridor north of North Bay, and there's been a lot of talk about that for the last 10 or 15 years, the best way to do that, we think, would be in declaring provincial policy on an area-specific basis. But that's all we've done. We've provided that mechanism, but we decided not to get involved in the specifics of matters such as the Niagara Escarpment Commission or the office for the greater Toronto area and so forth.
I might say that we've heard a number of presentations about the commission. Last week we had a very interesting meeting in St Catharines, a couple of hundred people, mostly about the tender fruit farms but also about the commission. I understand that the Niagara region has now asked the Niagara Escarpment Commission, or maybe it's the Minister of Municipal Affairs, for the policy of the commission to be given to the Niagara region for administration. They're using our proposal as the model for that kind of approach. I don't know what's happening about that proposal. I gather it was just made at the beginning of January, but we aren't dealing with that directly.
Mr Grandmaître: But the fact, Mr Sewell, is that your responsibility is to streamline the planning procedures in the province of Ontario. You did point out that some of the strategic planning areas, such as the parkway belt and the Niagara Escarpment and the NCC and so on and so forth, cover a large area of our province, and it seems to me that -- and this is not new; it's been going on for a number of years -- people are totally dissatisfied with the Niagara Escarpment Commission. Don't you think it would have been an ideal opportunity for the ministry or your people to look into the planning procedures of the Niagara Escarpment?
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Mr Sewell: I can't speak for the ministry. We're an independent commission. We do what we want, but in terms of our agenda and our work, I've indicated that we decided no. We simply didn't have the energy and the time to do it.
You must recognize that if you're trying to deal with area-specific questions, you have to get into a staggering amount of detail, which is going to take an awful lot of time, and that's the reason we avoided those. If we got involved with the NEC, we believe that we would have no choice but to look at other area-specific matters, and they're very contentious. The OGTA is very contentious, the NCC is very contentious, and we simply said that would not be a good use of our resources.
Mr Bradley: Can I get a supplementary on this? Because I happen to be a fan of the Niagara Escarpment Commission and managed to wrestle it from Municipal Affairs to Environment in the dying days of the previous administration, over the dead bodies of a few people, I assure you -- I know you didn't look at the Niagara Escarpment Commission, but you've never been a person who has in the past in the least shied away from making comments, so I'll ask you this question --
Mr Sewell: I might shy away this time.
Mr Bradley: -- and hope that I can elicit an answer from you, and I'll try not to load the question too much. Do you believe that it would be unwise for the Niagara Escarpment Commission to yield control to local municipalities, many of which would like to pave every last centimetre of that municipality?
Mr Sewell: Well, I'm glad the question was not loaded. It makes it a lot easier to answer.
One of the proposals we've made very strongly is that when you're dealing with major environmental questions or questions of settlement, they should be dealt with by the upper-tier municipality, not the lower-tier municipality. We think that is a very good use of public funds, rather than trying to put it right down, and so that's where those policy questions should be lodged. in no case -- well, that's not true, "in no case." In most cases we believe that those larger questions should be at the upper-tier, not at the lower-tier municipality.
Mr Bradley: Like a regional municipality.
Mr Sewell: A region, as an example, or a county. There are a few examples where you have very large lower-tier municipalities, like the six in Metro Toronto as an example, and we've had some trouble satisfying them about their status. So I really can't comment on that.
As to whether that should happen, I don't know at this point. There's no question that there's a strong disagreement on what should happen. There are some people who are very substantial admirers of the commission and think that without the commission the escarpment would have gone --
Mr Bradley: Precisely.
Mr Sewell: -- and there are some who say: "Wait a minute now. Administratively, we don't like the way the commission is run. They've mucked up this and they've mucked up that and therefore we'd like to see some changes."
Mr Bradley: Those are the people who didn't get their development right smack in the middle of the escarpment.
Mr Sewell: Well, yes. There might be others as well. So it's a very contentious matter, but almost in no case would we think that the administration of commission policy should be transferred to the lower tier. If it was going to be transferred anywhere, it should be transferred to the upper tier.
I might say that one of the problems with doing that which we've become aware of -- because we've been pulled into this debate on an informal basis -- is that development applications are not dealt with by the upper tier; they're dealt with by the lower tier, which makes a real problem. If the policy is being administered by the upper tier, what's the hook-in with the lower tier in terms of this? So there is some difficulty there and that's why some defenders of the escarpment are very worried about that transfer. That's why it's complicated.
Mr Bradley: I'll load the question again with this one and say, "But don't you believe," and that's an awful way to frame it. You can quarrel with this, but don't you believe that whether you put it at the lower tier or the upper tier, there are municipal politicians, often in the midst of difficult economic circumstances, competition for economics, who think that unless you put that development smack in the middle of the Niagara Escarpment, somehow their municipality is going to lose out and there'll be lots of unemployment in that area? So don't you think that the commission, independent of local pressures, is the only body that can really protect, in the long-term interests, the lands that are within the boundaries of the Niagara Escarpment Commission?
Mr Sewell: I'm not well enough informed to answer that question, but I would like to comment that while some local politicians end up making bad decisions that are harmful to the environment or to the escarpment, there are lots of others who are really good. I have a lot of faith in municipal politicians, having been there for some time. I have a lot of respect for the kinds of decisions they make. I realize they can get too ambitious about getting things done, but that's a sin that some MPPs have too.
Mr Bradley: Are we going to have --
The Chair: I've been generous with you, Mr Bradley. Mr Grandmaître, it's back to you.
Mr Bradley: Are we going to be able to get another 20 minutes after this?
The Chair: Oh, sure. We'll have a rotation on that.
Mr Grandmaître: We'll take a rest.
Mr Allan K. McLean (Simcoe East): Mr Sewell, one of your recommendations is that the OMB should not refer any decisions to cabinet for any reason.
Mr Sewell: That's correct.
Mr McLean: What's going to happen if the OMB members feel and know that their decision is final? Do you think that'll have a bearing on a decision they would make?
Mr Sewell: I hope it will, yes. I hope it means they'll take their job very seriously, as I believe they do now. The number of times that matters have been referred from the OMB to the cabinet -- and there are very few, but they seem to be upsetting. The Etobicoke waterfront is an example, and it's not the only one. There are other ones as well where people say: "Wait a second, now. What's going on?" What we were trying to do was remove that area of discretion, because there's no question that in certain cases the cabinet of the day will try to use it.
We think there are other ways the government of the day can intervene. We've suggested that it should be allowed to have a holding bylaw, comparable to the one municipalities now have, so that in situations where something is going on that's inappropriate, the government can rush in and say, "We're putting a hold on that while we develop a policy that responds to it."
Mr McLean: Are you making recommendations that the upper-tier county or regional governments will all have official plans and zoning bylaws? Is that one of your recommendations?
Mr Sewell: We believe that upper tiers -- counties and regions -- must have plans, and we're specific about the kinds of plans we think they should have.
Mr McLean: As it is now in a lot of counties, there are some counties -- a lot of them -- that don't have plans.
Mr Sewell: Two thirds of the counties do not have plans, and one third of the counties don't even have planners. We'd like to change that. Our proposal is a fairly simple one: that in those situations planning goes on at the lower tier, at the township level. According to the studies that we did, there is no economic saving in terms of doing planning at the township level rather than at the county level. In other words, the counties that are doing good planning aren't spending any more money on a per-capita basis than the ones where the townships are.
We believe that many townships, not only having a small population but having a very small economic base in order to draw money for planning, aren't in a position really to start dealing with the kinds of questions planning should deal with: What are the options, where would we like to go, and so forth.
Mr McLean: But what you're trying to do is make one overall planning for the whole county. Suppose the county of Simcoe --
Mr Sewell: Yes, that's correct.
Mr McLean: One whole planning. You would have an office staff there that would treat every municipality the same. You would have an office staff there that could deny a request for a variance. Then that application could be made to the committee of adjustment. Are you going to be recommending a committee of adjustment for every county, whereby it would rule on whether consent or minor variances --
Mr Sewell: Yes. Right now most counties do have a land division committee that makes those, and we think, yes, land division committees should continue. They are a useful thing. But we think there should be county policy about severances so that we've got some handle on them.
As we've learned, there are a lot of problems with severances at the moment, and there are a lot of severances that have already occurred that have never been built on. I don't know what the figure is; 100,000, maybe, in the province. But there are a number of very substantial problems that are caused, not only in terms of preserving resources of some kind or another, whether it's an aggregate resource, whether it's a farming resource, whether it's the natural heritage or whether it's cultural resources. What happens is, you used to have a nice county road; now it's lined with houses. So I think it's really important that the county get a handle on where it thinks severances should happen and how they occur.
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Mr McLean: And how you get the severances. I want to get on to the process here. After the committee of adjustment has dealt with it and the individual is still not satisfied, would he then go to the OMB?
Mr Sewell: That's correct.
Mr McLean: He could make his application and an appeal that would be dealt with within 30 days. That's your recommendation?
Mr Sewell: It wouldn't be finally dealt with, but what the OMB would do is to hold a preliminary hearing within 30 days so you could get on with dealing with it. In some cases you're going to find that all you need is that preliminary hearing and people are satisfied; they can reach a settlement. In other cases, you might find there's a very frivolous but obnoxious appellant, and we think the OMB should have a very speedy hearing in those cases and so forth.
Mr McLean: But I thought we were trying to get away from these going to the OMB; they would be dealt with at the upper tier.
Mr Sewell: Well, we think the upper tier should have policies, but what do you do in cases where there's still a dispute, where somebody says, "Sorry, I don't like the way you've interpreted this"? We think there has to be some --
Mr McLean: And I agree. The problem I've had with the OMB over the years -- years ago, I remember, it used to be there for anybody. Anybody could appeal and be heard.
Mr Sewell: Yes.
Mr McLean: Now you've either got to take your lawyer with you -- and there are mostly lawyers and accountants who are on it, which bothers me; the ordinary person can't go and be heard and treated with a commonsense approach. Are we going to have a stage in there where we'll get that? Will that be the stage after we have the minor variance turned down by the committee of adjustment?
Mr Sewell: Yes.
Mr McLean: That person could go and be heard without having to take lawyers?
Mr Sewell: Well, we would very much like it, and we think the preliminary hearing would be an informal hearing around a table. It doesn't mean you wouldn't have your lawyer there. Unfortunately -- I don't know. When the other side has a bunch of lawyers, they can be pretty intimidating. Obviously the OMB person who is chairing it can have a real influence on that in terms of how that meeting goes, and we'd like it then to have as much of a calming influence in saying: "Wait a second. Let's just try and reach a settlement."
Mr McLean: I want to move on --
Mr Sewell: I think the other problem with the OMB -- not only the lawyerliness, but the delay has been really, really unfair to a lot of people. Getting around that delay, getting people together quite quickly, is, we think, a real step forward.
Mr McLean: Yes, it is.
The other area that I want to bring to your attention and I want your comments on is that as the policy is now with the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of the Environment now requires 150 acres to expand a rural school. It's unacceptable to most people in rural Ontario.
In the county of Simcoe, the board got approval to put an addition on to a rural school, and the letter from the ministry was, "Well, deal with the local Ministry of the Environment to see how you can work it out." And yet they're saying, "You can't produce." I have Dale Martin looking into it as a conciliator. But the problem we've got is that we have rural Ontario now that can't expand a rural school because the MOE is saying --
Mr Sewell: It's a septic problem.
Mr McLean: A septic problem. The minister is saying, "Well, if you could move it five miles, into an urban area, you can expand it." But that's not going to happen, so it's a real dilemma.
Mr Sewell: It's a serious dilemma, no question about that.
I think there are two issues. One is trying to be clear about where you'd like to see development happen and where you wouldn't like to see it happen. One of our proposals is that we should be doing that more than we're doing it now in rural areas. This is one of the reasons why you want to have county plans, so they can actually say: "Where do we want to see development happen? Let's be clear about it up front."
The second thing is dealing with the sewage questions. We have, I think, some very useful proposals about dealing with sewage, particularly the idea of inspections. We found that, what, a third of septic systems in Ontario have failed, so trying to get inspections is going to help; secondly, getting into alternative systems. It seems to me that using alternative systems for schools would be really useful. We've got some proposals about that, trying to push MOE into actually looking into other ways of dealing with sewage. I must say the most remarkable one we've seen is a privately owned system in a new development near Fergus, where a private developer is actually building 200 units, and he's putting groups of 40 units on a common septic system with a rotor. The system processes sewage so that the effluent that comes out is probably at least as good as at any sewage treatment facility. It also deals with nitrates. Of course, what's interesting is that not one chemical is used in this process; it's all a natural process.
That kind of system is one we think really should be encouraged in many other places in Ontario. I know one of MOE's problems is that: "Hey, this system depends on a rotor, a big machine, stirring everything up. What happens when hydro fails?" If hydro fails, we're all in trouble, right?
Mr McLean: Right. Inflexible.
Mr Sewell: So we think that that kind of a proposal really should be encouraged. There are others as well. I think that's one of the big problems about that school, not just the development areas but that one as well.
Mr McLean: But every septic system that's gone in for schools has been put in because the amount of rooms have all been approved by the Simcoe County District Health Unit, the MOE -- everything's been approved and there are no problems. All of a sudden now, they're saying, "Whoa," and yet there have been no problems to show that there has been one.
Mr Sewell: Well, as we say, one of the things we really want to do is have really clear ministerial policy so you know what it is in advance. Part of the problem we have now is that it seems policy is developed as applications come in. "Oh, here's an interesting application. I wonder what we should do with this. What policy should we apply to this one?" We'd like to get out of that position. We know there are many people in the ministries who would also agree. Let's write down our policy. If it's not working, we'll change it.
Mr McLean: So what you're saying then is, there would be no further severances in rural Ontario unless there's a criterion, or there will be no severances unless it has central water and a sewage system.
Mr Sewell: No, no, not at all. We have some proposals about it, but our basic position is that you shouldn't be able to create a lot unless it's clear you're going to be able to have water for that lot and that the sewage can be treated in some way. Their criteria for it; it doesn't mean you have to be on a central system. We're saying you shouldn't be looking at that. That should not be the criterion. The criterion should be, how well do you deal with the sewage?
Mr McLean: Okay. So you're saying, no more septic tanks with a sewage bed.
Mr Sewell: No, we aren't saying that. Not at all.
Mr McLean: Well, how would you treat that septic system?
Mr Sewell: We don't have any problem with septic systems. Some lots can't take a septic system, anywhere basically down in Kent county and that whole area, the other side of London. You shouldn't be putting septics in there. They don't work and the evidence is overwhelming in that area. But in lots of parts of Ontario, septics are perfectly okay. In parts where you can't use septics because of the ground conditions, you should be looking at other systems. There are some other systems that can be used. Some places, you aren't going to find any system that's going to work and in that case we say, "Sorry, can't work."
If we can actually get seriously into composting toilets, which I think we should be, then there are a lot of areas where you don't have any problems. We know that, right now, if you want to build a cottage on a rock in Georgian Bay, you have to show you can have a septic system. Dumb, right? Septic systems shouldn't be allowed in Georgian Bay. It should only be composting toilets, right? -- given the nature. So we've got to have some changes. That's one question about severances.
But the other question we see is that in rural areas, if you're looking at lot creation of any kind, you have to look at where you want to encourage development. If you're dealing with what we call large-scale development -- and I don't know what that is; 10 units, 15 units; depends on the situation -- then you should be putting that in an area which you've already designated as an area for development.
But if you're talking about small-scale development -- a lot here, a lot there -- you should be talking about the kinds of rural characteristics you want to preserve. Rather than just allowing them anywhere, you should be saying: "Now, what are the characteristics we want to preserve? Maybe we want to ensure that houses are set back a good distance from the road. Maybe we want to ensure that it feels like it's a rural area." That has to do with tree plantings and so on. We think counties can do that quite well. They can say, "Here are the rural characteristics we want to preserve." People sit down, have a talk about it, and severances or lot creations of any kind that protect those rural characteristics are fine. They'd be within the municipal plan.
Outside of quality agricultural land, where we're saying that's a resource that must be protected -- we can't afford to just keep throwing up our hands and saying we won't save quality agricultural land -- apart from that, we don't have any restrictions whatsoever on lot creation, apart from sewage and water questions, which seem normal, and this thing about rural characteristics that we want the county to define.
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Mr McLean: Good. The other area I want to speak briefly about is, would you see the OMB staff or members increase substantially?
Mr Sewell: No. We get to meet the OMB members next week, and they go at us on this stuff. But that with the proposals we've got for the OMB playing much more of a dispute resolution role by these early meetings, we think they can do that within their existing resources. We don't see their need to increase members or to increase funding. We might be wrong about that, but we see no reason why it's going to require more. We see outside people coming in and helping out and we don't see that as being a very large expense.
Mr McLean: You indicated about $500,000 that you'd like to see set aside with regard to intervenor funding.
Mr Sewell: Intervenor; yes.
Mr McLean: What major groups would be looking at using that $500,000 or part of it? A dump site?
Mr Sewell: No, not dump sites, because we're saying they still don't fall under the Planning Act; they fall under the Environmental Assessment Act. I'm afraid we've decided to avoid that issue, for some reasons, eh?
Mr Bradley: A very wise decision.
Mr Sewell: But there's been some debate in the commission about that because we have some proposals to take a number of municipal infrastructures from under the Environmental Assessment Act and put them under the Planning Act and completely simplify the way they're dealt with, in what everybody seems to think is a wise move. So we've backed away from that.
Intervenor funding: I can go to some examples we've heard in the past, where people have fought what seemed to be quite reasonable battles to protect a very significant wetland, to try to protect a large aquifer from getting polluted: those kinds of very large public interests. Sure, they often look as though it's somebody who's crazy out there, fighting alone. They mortgage their house and all those kinds of things, and at the end of it everybody says, "Gee, you did a good job." They're the kinds of things we're thinking of, but not private interests. That's the other point I want to make. We don't believe that any intervenor funding should be made available to defend private interests.
Mr McLean: I have the Rama reserve, which is in the township. Would they come under the planning for that area? Would they be under the jurisdiction of the county as far as planning goes or would they be left out?
Mr Sewell: We have a chapter on planning in aboriginal communities. Our recommendations are basically that we've got to start notifying first nations. Municipalities have an obligation to do that. But we believe that self-government is going far enough along at this point that the only way to ensure that they're actively involved in planning and may be represented on planning structures of some sort is with their consent. We don't know how else to deal with that, and that's a really difficult issue, I might say.
Mr McLean: They have representatives who sit on school boards.
Mr Sewell: Yes. We're suggesting that if they'd like to have representatives sitting on these other bodies, it would be good.
We were down in Brantford last week -- St Catharines one night and then Brantford the next -- where we had a really terrific meeting. At the end of it a couple of chiefs came from the Six Nations Indian Reserve and made two speeches. The traditional thing is long and sort of rambling. The room was jammed. You could have heard a pin drop. It was very powerful stuff, just talking about the native perspective on planning. One of the gentlemen said: "I heard tonight that you were talking about land. We know a lot about land so I decided to come."
What I realized after the meeting was that this is probably unusual for people in Brantford. They probably don't normally hear natives talking about planning issues even though they're right there. That's not a problem just in Brantford; we know it's a problem in many other places, and anything we can do to encourage those two interests to talk would be really good. We've made some proposals in that regard.
Mr McLean: Is my time used up?
Mr Bradley: Can I get a clarification on this one? My mind drifted to something else. Did you say that yes, you do control the reservations, or no?
Mr Sewell: We said no, meaning first that self-government is far enough along that we can't make any suggestions on that.
Mr Bradley: That, in my view, is going to be a jackpot in the future.
Mr Sewell: It's going to be a big problem. It's going to be very difficult, no question about that.
Mr Bradley: I mean a jackpot in more ways than one.
Mr Sewell: It's not going to be easy.
Mr Robert Frankford (Scarborough East): It's nice to see you here.
Mr Sewell: Thank you.
Mr Frankford: The OMB is a topic that comes up frequently from my constituents in Scarborough East, individuals and community associations. I'm sure any assistance in presenting their case would be very welcome. I guess one of the problems I have all the time is just explaining the nature of the OMB. I'm often asked, "Can't you stop this going to the OMB?" One has to point out that it's a quasi-judicial tribunal and one can't interfere with a process going forward. I think your thoughts about pre-hearings would be very welcome, and the possibility of intervenor funding, although from what you've said I can see you're not thinking it would be that easily available to all community groups.
Mr Sewell: That's right.
Mr Frankford: I'm wondering whether, instead of funding per se, the board might offer technical assistance or advice at the pre-hearing or even pre-pre-hearing to community groups.
Mr Sewell: Of what kind, as an example?
Mr Frankford: I think it's a matter of preparing one's best case, whether it's of a legal planning nature or --
Mr Grandmaître: Demystify the process.
Mr Sewell: Sure, yes. We're very hopeful that this is one of the things the procedural meeting will deal with, that it'll start to get it out. "What's the problem here? What do we want to say?" -- those kinds of questions.
We certainly believe that the meeting should be able to proceed without somebody having to hire a lawyer, just to get back to Mr McLean's question. We certainly hope that's the case. We think that if we can build in some certainty at the beginning of the process, one certainty being what provincial policy is, it should be written down. Second, what is municipal policy? We think it should be written down. Third, can we get the parties together before a decision is made? Can we ensure that the public is involved from day one? We think all those things will help in terms of resolving those disputes so that they won't be as big and ugly as they now are.
There is one change that really is worth noting. At the present time, a public meeting is required under the Planning Act before council makes a decision. For some people, that's the first time they ever hear of it, right at the end of the process, after all the deals have been made. I don't mean deals in the bad sense. We're saying that it should happen at the beginning of the process: Let people know right then.
Of course, the development industry says: "Terrific. We like that. We hate being ambushed." So it seems that councillors might have some problem with that in that they lose a bit of their negotiating room, but we think that will really significantly help in terms of looking at projects.
Mr Frankford: I very much appreciate what you're saying there. You said previously that you wouldn't see intervenor funding for private interests. When I think of my area and home owners, I think it's difficult to differentiate. There's a private interest that the home owners are putting forward, but there's also a community interest and a sort of community planning aspect.
Mr Sewell: I think the point we make is there has to be that public, community interest. There's always bound to be a bit of private interest. We are human beings after all. But yes, there has to be that larger interest. You can't go simply because you're saying: "Wait a minute, now. This isn't fair. What's happening to me?" Well, you can go, but the point is that there shouldn't be intervenor funding in those situations. It should be a public interest that's being defended.
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Mr Dennis Drainville (Victoria-Haliburton): It's a very quick question. It has to do with some of the questions Mr McLean had raised and I want to give you a specific case to show you some of the difficulties of what's being proposed. I'm not at all saying that I don't agree with the proposal, but some of the challenges, and that is, I bring to your attention Haliburton county. Haliburton county is the smallest county in Ontario: 13,000 permanent residents. There are no incorporated villages, hamlets or towns within that county. The tax base is exceedingly small. Reliance upon tourism is the major industry and there is 30% unemployment at present.
What is happening in the area of planning is that more and more is being required from various levels of government, from the ministries, particularly Environment, Natural Resources and Municipal Affairs. The problem is that there is not a substantial enough tax base to be able to provide the resources whereby many of the plans that you are suggesting can be undertaken by the county and can be provided to the province.
I'm acknowledging the very real need for change in this area and also acknowledging and affirming some of the very strong proposals that have been set forward. The difficulty is, how do you take a community like that and set up guidelines that are enforceable by the province? These people, not having the resources, cannot possibly provide what's being expected and demanded of them, and what do we do about those very special cases?
Mr Sewell: That's one of the big questions. I don't want to duck that one. It's not just a problem in Haliburton. It's a problem in other counties where they might have more resources than Haliburton, but they say, "Hey, we don't have enough to do any reasonable planning." So it's a problem that we've heard in a number of counties, or if we haven't heard, we expect to hear.
We haven't got a good answer to that one yet and we're going to have to find one obviously if this thing is going to work. One approach is to say, "Oh, well, let the province fund the planning." There are a couple of problems with that. The province doesn't have a lot of money. Secondly, the minute the province gets in there, it starts to own what the county is doing and we don't want that. We want the county to own its plan and that's been the problem with provincial approval systems, right? If you always have to go to the province to get approval, you don't own anything.
So we haven't got a good answer to how do we actually get the Haliburtons of the world to do the planning. What's the incentive we give them to do it? We know that planning doesn't have to cost as much as it does. We know that most communities have very good resources that could be used for very little money. We think of doing a lot of environmental planning, as an example, and rather than hiring a consultant for $500,000, get the naturalists' groups together along with some of the developers and start mapping that stuff. It's not all that hard. It's certainly not expensive. There's a sort of a shift that's required there, in terms of getting information for planning.
We don't have a good answer as to how we ensure that the Haliburtons of the world do really good planning, and we'd like to find a better one. We have no question that they should be doing planning. They'll be better off. They'll be making much better use of the resources in the future. How do we get them to do it? We agree that just requiring them is not going to be a good enough solution.
That's a real problem that I must say has come up. The closer we've gotten to saying, "They should be doing planning," the more we think, "Wow." So we don't have the answer to that one yet. We'd really appreciate advice on what we do, on whether we get into a joint funding arrangement with the province. I don't know. Certainly, as for asking the developers to fund the cost of planning, as happens in some of the larger municipalities, the developers in Haliburton just aren't large enough. They don't have the funds for that stuff. It's a very serious problem and we don't have a good answer.
Mr Tony Rizzo (Oakwood): You may have given the answer to Mr Frankford already, but I wasn't here. I'm a little concerned about the condition to introduce intervenor funding. I'm afraid that applicants for funding would be hiring lawyers to get advice on how to get funding and the end result would be that in the long run the costs would not justify the benefits that may be anticipated now. What do you have to say about that?
Mr Sewell: One of the things that I think has to be looked at by the OMB, in trying to figure out whether it wants to grant an application for intervenor funding, is what the money's going to be used for. If I were making that decision I'd want to ensure that a lot of that money's going for the expert testimony that people think you need, that it's not all being sunk into the lawyers.
I don't know how to ensure that it's going to be the case, but we say that it's one of the criteria. On page 76, we say that the intervenor has to have a clear proposal for the use of any funds that might be awarded. That's something the OMB would be looking at: What do you want the money for? If it's all going to the lawyer -- but I don't know how to avoid that one. I agree that you don't want the lawyers running away with everything, and --
Mr Bradley: They will.
Mr Sewell: Well, we're trying to build in a more conciliatory planning process so that the opportunities for parties to talk to each other, the requirement for them to talk to each other before we get past the council decision, will have significantly improved, and we think that will be very, very helpful at the end of the day.
It's not going to get past obstreperous people, the ones who say, "I don't care what you say; I'm disagreeing," and there are some of those in the world. We think we can nip them off quickly at the OMB. We don't think they'll get any intervenor funds.
I don't know how else to deal with it, except by trying to ensure that there's as much attempt to conciliate before a council decision as possible.
Mr Rizzo: May I suggest that maybe consideration should be given to use ratepayers' organizations, and only they can apply for intervenor funds.
Mr Rosario Marchese (Fort York): I have a number of points and concerns. The first one is connected to planning in aboriginal communities. I know that Mr Bradley made a comment about how difficult this will be, and I agree. I think it will raise some very interesting problems as we go on. Ontario has stated its position about acknowledging the inherent right of aboriginal people to govern themselves, and within that framework we're going to have to solve some of the questions that will be raised.
My question is, have you talked to people with the ministry of native affairs and/or the chiefs of Ontario, off reserve and on reserve, about this?
Mr Sewell: When it was clear to us that this was an issue we should be addressing, we convened a small group of people from the Ontario Native Affairs Secretariat and then some people from the federal government, some representatives of first nations and other interests. We sat down and said, "Hey, what shall we do?" We actually had a little draft and we had a chance to talk about that draft, and our proposals in here are a result of that. So they've been involved in developing it.
We have sent this out to all Indian and native organizations in Ontario. We haven't sent it out to every single first nation -- or maybe we have. We sent it out to an awful lot of organizations, all the groups we could, saying, "What do you think of this?" In fact, when we went to Brantford, we convened a meeting in the Six Nations. Nobody showed up. We found that this is really low on their priority list. Their interests are really in the self-government field at the moment, we think, and one of the things we found is that they don't have the resources to look at all the paper that's coming through their mailbox. I mean, it really is true: People are consulting them about everything and they don't have that kind of structure.
But we've tried to do everything we can to talk to people, and the Metis association and all that. They were involved in our group as well. I noticed that one of my staff had a letter from the chiefs yesterday. I didn't have a chance to ask her what it said; I don't get it for a day or two. We haven't had a lot of reaction, but we've certainly had no negative reaction. We think that's because this proposal was developed along with --
Mr Marchese: It could be, John. My suspicion is that there may be low interest now, but if there were developments that were connected to the aboriginal community, you'll have to deal with it.
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Mr Sewell: That's correct, particularly one where there's development activity going on.
Mr Marchese: Absolutely. It says here, "Municipalities and planning boards should be specifically authorized under the act to enter into agreements with aboriginal communities." What if there are no agreements? What if they do not reach an agreement, and aboriginal people say, "You can't go ahead without our agreement"?
Mr Sewell: That's true. You can't go ahead without their agreement.
Mr Marchese: And that's what would happen.
Mr Sewell: Exactly.
Mr Marchese: If there's no agreement, there's no development.
Mr Sewell: That's right. The problem we've got at the moment -- and Six Nations, I think, is a good example of it, where the municipality wants to do something and the first nations say, "Wait a minute now; let's settle our land claim." The municipality says, "I can't settle the land claim." "Well," they say, "if we enter into an agreement and let you do this development, what happens to our land claim? Maybe it's going to be adversely affected."
So we've said that municipalities should be allowed to enter into agreements with first nations about development questions and it should be clear that those agreements have nothing to do with land claims, because they are settled somewhere else. That's the only way we think it can proceed.
We know that this has happened. The best place it's happened is North Bay, the first nations just outside North Bay, where Phil Fontaine was the chief; I think that's who it was. North Bay and that first nation have really done interesting things. They've extended services. So North Bay has extended the services into the first nation for, I think, water and sewage and some fire services. They did it some years ago, sort of, "Oh, we'll do this, isn't it nice?" Now it's on a full-cost basis.
One of the reasons for doing it was to permit an industrial plant processing furs to open up on first nation land. Of course, North Bay is delighted about that. That's an agreement that's been made, and I don't know what legal authority exists for it. That's the problem.
Nobody is saying there's a problem with it. But we think that should become the rule and that in fact having that ability on the part of municipalities would really start to improve relations considerably.
Mr Marchese: I hope that is the case. It will present some interesting difficulties as we go on, I have no doubt, but I'm glad you did the consultation, because I thought without it, it would be a problem.
Mr Sewell: I just think of the Niagara Escarpment thing, where there's a first nation that now wants to open a gravel dump on the Niagara Escarpment. Now what do we do? Right?
Mr Marchese: John, a quick question. Mr Chair, how much time do I have?
The Chair: You have time for a quick question.
Mr Marchese: A quick one. Then I'll avoid the other one and get to the intervenor funding. I'm a supporter of intervenor funding. I think what you have developed, however, in terms of what the panel should consider, are good possible restrictions on nuisance applications. That's what I was worried about in terms of people's ability to intervene. But I think what you've done is put good checks on that.
There are a number of things: The intervenor has demonstrated a concern for this issue at the municipal level. The intervenor has made reasonable efforts to raise funding from other sources. That's an interesting one that could raise some difficulties. The intervenor has attempted to join together with other objectors and so on.
So there is a whole list of checks and balances, I think, that will avoid nuisance objections. Presumably, if we're going to make this less adversarial -- if it works, hopefully it will become so -- then this, I think, is a useful way to deal with the nuisance intervenor. Do you agree with that?
Mr Sewell: Yes, we very much hope so, and we notice that there's a report on the interim intervenor funding act, which was recently released. Has it been publicly released? I don't know. We've seen something recently which seems to confirm this kind of approach.
Mr McLean: I have a supplementary on that, just very briefly. Who's going to determine the final say of approval?
Mr Sewell: For intervenor funding? The OMB would. They would establish a separate panel of people who would not be involved in the hearing of the case; they'd just hear this application for intervenor funding.
Mr John C. Cleary (Cornwall): I wanted to talk about intervenor funding too, but I guess we know now who will be making the decisions. But you say that once a municipality has served notice on the OMB, within 30 days there would be a hearing. You had said also that they could appoint someone other than an OMB member from the community to sit in and try to settle that dispute.
Mr Sewell: It wouldn't be a hearing; it would be a meeting, so it would be more informal than a hearing. You wouldn't be swearing witnesses or anything. You'd get the parties around the table and say, "What's this all about? Come on, how can we get you together on this? What is the fight all about?" and try to put those questions out.
Yes, we think that that hearing could be convened by someone from the community who's got good skills at bringing people together.
Mr Cleary: Would those people be appointed by the OMB to do that?
Mr Sewell: Yes.
Mr Cleary: Or for each individual case?
Mr Sewell: We haven't sorted out the administrative arrangements, but I expect that probably the OMB would have a panel of people. They'd say, "Hey, get so-and-so here. She knows how to deal with these things. Get her on this one and let's follow on this," and so forth. So in a community, they would have a roster of people, and they would probably pay a per diem or something like that and call them in.
We don't think all cases should be dealt with that way. We think the OMB members should be involved in this themselves. We believe that since this will so substantially shorten the cases, they'll have the time to do that. That's our hope, anyway. As I say, we've got to talk to the OMB about it.
Mr Cleary: Having been a municipal politician for many years, I understand what faces municipal councils with groups that form overnight. I am just concerned how that would be sorted out. Who would sort the group out to see it they're real or not? You had said earlier that that would be an OMB decision?
Mr Sewell: I think at this procedural meeting, the OMB would get together and hear the parties and have a meeting of all the parties. So if you got a whole bunch of objectors, they might have a bigger room and say, "Now, look, have you got two spokespeople?" and that sort of thing. They would sit down and hear what the case is in a very preliminary sort of way and say: "So this is the point that we disagree on. Is there any way we can try and settle this? We'll try and do that."
As we know, in some cases there isn't. We have to say, "No, this is a real disagreement about what should happen." In that case, the OMB is going to have to say: "Okay, we're going to have to have a hearing about this, but let's narrow the case down so that we aren't fighting about side issues. Let's make sure that both sides have exactly the information that the other one's going to file before the board so that there aren't any surprises; you know what's going to be expected." In fact, we think that at this kind of a situation, probably the person convening the meeting can say: "I don't think you've got a case. I think you'll find you're going to be in real trouble, and you should go away and think about whether there's some way of resolving this."
As we know, good mediators do that all the time, right? They're really good at pulling out the case. We think that people either on the board or used by the board can develop those kinds of skills. It will help everybody.
Mr Cleary: Okay, the next question I wanted to speak about is the areas of county government in the province. We're talking about land severances. We know that not all municipalities in the county system belong to the county system of land division committees.
Mr Sewell: Right. Some have their own.
Mr Cleary: Some of them have their own. What are you recommending there?
Mr Sewell: At the county level?
Mr Cleary: At the county level.
Mr Sewell: That's correct: We think only in certain situations should the lower tier be allowed to exercise severance powers.
Mr Cleary: And what would allow them? What certain circumstances?
Mr Sewell: We're saying they have to have a municipal plan and they have to have a qualified planner on staff full-time. We think too many severances have just been granted like that, and they end up costing a staggering amount of money.
The biggest story we hear is the school bus story, how there are too many rural roads right now where, because there are houses scattered everywhere, there are seven school buses. There's one for the primary public school and one for the secondary public school; there's one for the primary separate and for the secondary separate. That makes four. There's one for the French primary and one for the secondary French. That's six. Of course, the seventh one is for all the kids who've been too bad and have been kicked off the other ones and have to be driven around --
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The Chair: Are you blaming all of that on severances?
Mr Sewell: Pretty strong argument. That's one of the costs of having uncontrolled severances, and we've got to start controlling that. We found the information in one county in Ontario very scary, where the average amount of money collected on a per-household basis for education is $850 a year. The cost of running the school bus on a per-household basis is $700 a year, so almost all the money that's collected is spent on the school buses. This is crazy.
When we're talking about rural characteristics, we want people to look at those questions, that's all. We think that would happen best at the county level.
Mr Cleary: Another thing that I wanted to mention here is that in many areas in this province under county government there are estate residential developments. You've mentioned here that it would not be allowed in woodlots, and a lot of these estate residential are in woodlots. I'd like to know more about your views on that.
Mr Sewell: We believe that significant woodlots should be protected from development. We think the municipality should sit down and say: "Have we got any significant woodlots? What are they? Can we put a map on them?" And they should be protected.
We suggest in fact that there are a number of other natural features that should be protected from any development. The recent policy -- of course, it's been years in the making -- is the wetlands policy, saying in southern Ontario, no development in the class 1 to 3 wetlands, boom, period; that's the new rule. We found developers say, "Hey, we don't care what the rules are; just tell us what they are and we won't buy the land." So we feel the same way about woodlots, but we're going to have to wait to hear what the public says about that proposal.
Our general proposal about development in rural areas is found on page 27 of our report, where we say you can have development in non-agricultural rural areas -- forgetting about quality agricultural -- but that there are a number of things you should look at: You should look at protecting rural characteristics; you should look at cumulative impact; you should look at water and sewage treatment, as already mentioned; you should look at the costs of the development. We don't say anything about estate residential particularly. We're just saying: "Here are the criteria. If you can find development that fits in that, terrific."
Mr Cleary: I guess what I meant there was that no development -- and it says "woodlots."
Mr Sewell: Right. In a woodlot, we're saying we think significant woodlots should be protected. If people say, "Wait a minute now; you can have development in woodlots that protects them," we'd be interested in hearing that idea. We're not sure it's true. We think that many estate residential developments are happening on the edges of woodlots, which is a different thing. We think that would be okay.
Mr Cleary: The next thing I want to talk a little bit about is prime agricultural land, where you have a number 1 farm operation on prime land and there's an underground water supply there that may supply towns downstream. There are all kinds of rumours around that that farm operation is going to be restricted, what he can do on X number of acres or X number of acres wide. Have you dealt with that?
Mr Sewell: No, we haven't. We haven't dealt in any way with the effects of farming. We understand it's a big issue, but it's not one we've gotten into. We heard the story of somebody who's got the hog farm with 30,000 hogs; of course, the amount of sewage produced there is mammoth.
Mr Cleary: If the severances are cut down in the rural area and that water supply has to supply the village or town or something and this farm operation or these farm operations have to be limited, would you recommend in your report that intervenor funding could apply?
Mr Sewell: If it's a planning matter and there's a public interest -- and that might be a public interest -- sure. But we don't deal with the question of limiting agricultural uses or the effects they have on the natural environment.
Mr Cleary: In the December copy of Municipal World there was quite an article on that underground water.
Mr Sewell: I'll try to look at it.
Mr Cleary: It's a big issue in a number of areas in this province.
Mr Sewell: There's no question about that. It's a very significant issue.
Mr Cleary: I think those agricultural people have got to have some protection some way.
Mr Sewell: Sure. As we know, there are some areas -- Simcoe county is an example -- where they're running out of water. It's been really bad planning.
Mr Cleary: Not only in Simcoe; there are other areas as well.
Mr Sewell: There are other areas as well, and we're aware of the situation in Waterloo where underground water is contaminated -- very worrisome. We've got to plan so that hardly ever happens, because the cost of fixing it up is horrendous.
The example I use is Toronto residences. Look at the cost of fixing the Don River now that we've wrecked it. We can't afford to fix it. We've got to make sure we plan so that we don't create those problems any more. We find them everywhere. We've found a number of communities on septics where the water's polluted and the province has had to go in there and put in sewage systems or water systems, and the cost is horrendous. Down near London the cost is $45,000 a house, and up in Sudbury, $155,000. We can't afford that cost, so we're trying to create a planning system that tries to ensure that we don't have to bear those costs in future. That means we've got to look very carefully at protecting underground water supplies.
Mr Bradley: I'd like to go to something that was called project X, which you would be familiar with. Project X was an allegation that was made that under the previous government, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing and treasury -- I always thought the treasury department was behind it all -- were attempting to wrest from the Ministry of the Environment as many approvals as possible and as many other powers as possible so we'd have some kind of central planning. There was a great hullabaloo about that. My contention is that that's exactly what's happened, and all the environmentalists and aggressive environmental reporters have gone to sleep, or worse.
Do you believe that if you wrest these powers from the Ministry of the Environment, the only ministry which will bloody well defend against all these things, and stick them in Municipal Affairs, that in the future, at least -- if not under a government that purports to care about avoiding these problems; any future government -- you're going to hand over to the developers in this province the opportunity to simply develop the whole province?
Mr Sewell: I can't speak in any detail about project X. I was aware of it at the time in terms of the reaction, but I haven't made a comparison between --
Mr Bradley: It got stopped in its tracks --
Mr Sewell: I'm aware of that.
Mr Bradley: -- and it's happening now.
Mr Sewell: I can't make a comparison between what it says and what we say, but our proposal's pretty simple. We think ministries, including the Ministry of the Environment, should have clear policy that is stated, that municipal planning decisions should be made consistent with those policies. We think that's only reasonable. We think that ministries should have clear standards that have to be met; the world should know what they are, so there's as little delay and uncertainty as possible in terms of dealing with various ministries. They are the proposals we've made.
Mr Bradley: You'll pay an awful penalty, in my view, for efficiency in terms of what people will steamroller over.
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I like the way you've set out plans. I must say, your commission report has laid the groundwork for avoiding some of these. That's very important. I still have a concern that this is going to happen.
It leads me into the sewer and water corporation, which the government will announce in the next budget, for various reasons; again a proposal of the previous government. I remember that the present Minister of the Environment expressed a very grave concern -- I thought wisely -- about the establishment of a sewer and water corporation. Do you see the sewer and water corporation as again simply being a tool for government, largely the creation and mindset of the ministry of treasury in the Ontario government, and that as a result of the sewer and water corporation you're simply going to see all kinds of development that may be unwise for the province of Ontario? Because that, in my view, is going to be the job of the sewer and water corporation: You take it away from the Ministry of the Environment and you stick it in the sewer and water corporation, and it puts the trunk sewers in and then everything's developed.
Mr Sewell: I have no comment on that. I simply don't know what's happening about those things. I'm afraid our nose has been too close to this grindstone.
Mr Bradley: Well, if we don't have you, who's ever going to save us from this?
Mr Sewell: That's always been my view of the world too.
Mr Bradley: Apparently, the government is not going to save them. Government members, perhaps internally, are doing it. I shouldn't be unfair to them: They are probably expressing these concerns. But you're the guru in this field, whether you like it or not; a lot of people who have this point of view look to you to save this, and if you don't express views on that, certainly Martin Mittelstaedt is not going to.
Mr Sewell: One of the things we've tried to say to people is that these proposals call for a number of changes and the acceptance of new roles by a whole bunch of different actors. One of the things we have to watch out for are the dragons, and various people have various dragons they see leaping out of these pages. For some provincial civil servants, their dragon is municipal planners and municipal councils: They don't trust municipalities to do anything right, ever. You agree with that.
Our argument is that that's a dragon; it's an interesting animal, but it might not be reality, though. Because of course the municipal politicians say that what you've got to watch out for is the province: "The policy will be so complicated -- sure, it'll start out simple, but give them a year, and it'll be so complicated we'll be tied up in knots." We've been saying that's a dragon too.
Some developers have said: "You're letting the environmentalists walk away with the world here." Just look at all these statements. We've been saying that's a dragon too, just as some environmentalists have been saying, "Oh, you've handed it all over to the developers."
We think this is a fair balance of interests, and we think the dragons are interesting, but I'm not sure they're real. If, in fact, there is something here that weakens the concerns of the natural environment, we'd like to hear about it. We think there's a considerable strengthening by being really clear about where development can happen and where it can't, and trying to ensure that criteria for the standards are as clear as they can be.
Mr Bradley: I understand what you're doing, and again I commend you for many of the changes you're recommending, because they will solve certain problems. I will go back to the fact that I believe the best interests of the environment can be protected by only one ministry: the Ministry of the Environment. I spent five years, three months and four days sharpening the elbows of the Ministry of the Environment so that at long last, within the government structure, the Ministry of the Environment would have some clout.
What I see happening -- and in fairness, you've put some safeguards. I didn't do it for myself, because I was obviously not going to be there for ever; I did it for the future. Now I see Municipal Affairs and I see the big hand of Treasury in everything, of course; that cell within treasury that is out to debunk and emasculate -- if we can still use that word -- the Ministry of the Environment. I see that happening. As I say, your safeguards are there, but I hope -- I'll ask you to comment on this -- that you will go back and re-examine the role of the Ministry of the Environment and put back in the hands of the Ministry of the Environment, through your recommendations, more of the powers than I see here, because I think Municipal Affairs can't be trusted, and treasury certainly can't be trusted, to protect the land of Ontario.
Interjection: It's a personal point of view.
Mr Bradley: A personal point of view.
Mr Sewell: I would be interested in specific suggestions on that. I'd be delighted to get some, because I don't think we've removed anything from MOE here. But you have a great deal of experience in that, and if you have some specific ideas, we'd be very interested.
Mr Bradley: These are my personal views.
Mr Sewell: I realize that, and I wasn't after a party position. I'm saying we would very much appreciate it, because we recognize you have a lot of knowledge in this field; no question about that.
Mr McLean: Mr Cleary asked some of the questions I wanted to deal with in regard to the lot creation, subdivision and consent. I want to make it clear, though. It says, "Whether at the upper- or lower-tier level, decisions about lot creation could be made by council or delegated to a committee appointed by council or to a qualified planner on staff." I understand there has to be a qualified planner on staff. But the lower tier's policies have to conform with the upper tier.
Mr Sewell: That's correct.
Mr McLean: What is the point in having a lower-tier plan? Why don't we just have the one tier?
Mr Sewell: We think that in some situations there will only be a one-tier plan. As an example, in Oxford county there are only upper-tier plans; it's only done at the county level. It seems to work very, very well. I think Oxford's a bit strange, actually, in that regard, because it seems to work so well there in terms of planning.
But there are many other situations where you really need a more detailed plan. Take the case of Metro Toronto, where you have the region, Metro Toronto, but then you have these six municipalities. To think that North York, Scarborough or Toronto could develop with just the general Metro plan, I think -- no. You need a lower-tier plan. We think there will be many situations where lower tiers will want to have good, strong plans, because they've got a lot more detail they want to chunk in. Take Port Hope as an example. They might say, "We want to have a really strong plan to protect the integrity of our main street and the way it's working," so they have a plan worked out.
Mr McLean: I'd like you to expand on this: "Private sewage and waterworks systems, including onsite systems, are owned, operated and managed privately and used by five or fewer properties or units." Are you saying that for anything under five units you've got to have the complete system?
Mr Sewell: No. We're saying that if you've got more than five units, if you're putting in more than five units, you really should be looking at a communal system, where all five are on one kind of system. Environmentally, it's much better. We think from a cost point of view it's much better as well. We're suggesting that that could be privately owned, with appropriate guarantees back to the municipalities in case of breakdown and so forth.
Mr McLean: Have you been looking at piped water from Georgian Bay to Toronto or that aspect of service being provided? I don't suppose you looked at that.
Mr Sewell: No, that's one of those location-specific things. I've read about it in the paper, but that's all.
Mr McLean: The other thing I wanted to mention was with regard to sewage. We have the SOS study, Save Our Simcoe, around Lake Simcoe. My opinion is that septic tanks in cottage country is where our greatest amount of pollution is coming from.
Mr Sewell: Hear, hear. You're correct.
Mr McLean: It's the old septic tanks that have been there for years. And here we are holding up additions to schools in rural Ontario, where it's been all approved, and the local municipalities are proceeding with new homes on these lots. What's happening there?
Mr Sewell: MOE has been doing some studies about septics in cottage country, and what it found generally is that two thirds of the systems have failed. I believe that's something we have to get on to right away and we have to be requiring in systems that have failed that we put in systems that work, whether that's a new septic or, as I say, perhaps a new composting toilet.
Mr McLean: Are you making any recommendations in here on that?
Mr Sewell: We're suggesting that septics have to be inspected regularly and that municipalities should have the right to close down ones that aren't working, and we're suggesting that septics should also be pumped out on a regular basis. We aren't quite sure what "regular" means; it depends on the circumstances. We think we'll get much better monitoring of septics, and that will, in my opinion, substantially improve lake quality. We're into this position now of doing extremely expensive studies on the carrying capacity of lakes. Usually it's, "How much more pollution can they really take?" If we get into regular inspection of septics and ensuring they work, I don't think we're going to have to worry about carrying capacity of lakes any more.
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Mr McLean: You haven't looked, of course, at Holland Marsh. I've always indicated that one of the problems with Lake Simcoe is the Holland Marsh, the amount of fertilizer that's being used. I was on a committee 20 years ago when we looked at the phosphorus in Lake Simcoe and recommended that there be a dam and a filtration system there. The other aspect was the sewage and the cottages, and that's where our phosphorous problem is. We've done enough studies, but nobody's doing anything to rectify it.
Mr Sewell: We think this will provide the basis for dealing with the cottages. We have not dealt with the question of the environmental effects of agricultural uses, as I'd indicated to Mr Cleary. It's not a question we've dealt with.
Mr McLean: Have you looked at the aggregate situation, with regard to gravel pits and that type of thing? You had one policy in here with regard to mineral aggregate, but I'm not so sure there are any proposals there.
Mr Sewell: There are a few proposals. The government has advised us -- and that's the letter on the very last page of the report -- that it does not intend changing the four existing policies. One of them has to do with aggregates. So we've sort of laid off the four existing policies, but we have suggested that there are some problems in aggregates that haven't got to do with policy but probably have to do with management. In fact, we spend most of page 84 talking about that.
We've suggested that there are three problems. One is the extent to which some of the aggregate policies interfere with other policies, and we think there might be some priority given to where aggregates are extracted, so you don't start by extracting them out of wetlands or woodlots. Secondly, there are some management problems at the municipal level: Municipalities complain to us that the royalties they get are very low; 6 cents out of $100 or something, the delivered cost per tonne or something.
Mr McLean: It's more than they used to get, anyway.
Mr Sewell: Anyway, it's very low. There are also some questions about the amount of dust and those kinds of things, which we think have to be dealt with. And the third problem is wayside pits, which sometimes don't work the way one thinks. We're suggesting a special committee should be set up, and MNR has some problems with that.
Mr McLean: I want to just finalize my questions on the topic I pretty near started out with: the MOE and the approvals of the additions to schools. I don't know what you're going to do with regard to the final report, but I do find it unacceptable that a ministry would recommend there would have to be 150 acres to put an addition. I would think they should be able to put an addition subject to meeting all the criteria and approvals of the Ministry of the Environment.
Mr Sewell: I don't understand. You mean they're really saying 150 acres?
Mr McLean: That's what they're saying, and there's something wrong.
Mr Sewell: I don't understand that.
Mr McLean: Nobody else does either. I know what the problem is in rural Ontario, and it's a disaster.
Mr Sewell: I think one of the salutary effects of our exercise is that a number of ministries have now put out what their policies actually are in certain areas. Of course, that's caused some debate, but at least they're in writing, which is allowing us to clarify exactly what's going on. So the more policies we can get out like this, the more we can look at them and say, "Hey, what are we trying to accomplish here?" If the purpose is trying to ensure that sewage is dealt with well, let's address that. I mean, it might not be an acreage problem. I simply don't have enough information on that.
Mr McLean: Mr Murdoch probably has some questions.
Mr Sewell: He usually does. He has statements too.
The Chair: You've got about 10 minutes.
Mr Bill Murdoch (Grey): Ten minutes? That's more than I got on the radio, isn't it, John?
You know what I think of the report, so we won't need to go into that. The first thing I'll clear up, though, is that I don't think you'd even be doing this report if the Ministry of the Environment hadn't got involved with Municipal Affairs. I disagree boldly with Jim Bradley that you should be giving the Ministry of the Environment more of the control. I think Municipal Affairs can handle it regardless of what government's in power. I think that's where the whole problem started, when Mr Bradley was Minister of the Environment and tried to take over the Ministry of Municipal Affairs. They got into the arguing and fighting over it and then we get into all these problems, and the present government picked up on all this and ended up with the problems. I think they could have handled it quite easily. I think Mr Cooke could have done without creating the commission he did.
Mr Bradley: The reaction to all those severances.
Mr Murdoch: Jim, you had your turn. If you want five minutes, I can give you some.
Anyway, I don't think they needed to do the commission at all. I think Municipal Affairs could have handled its problems too, but it didn't, so they put you in charge.
The thing I find offensive in here, and I think you're going to find it from municipalities, is that you're letting on to them that they're going to get control back, but they're really not, because the government's going to set all the control down, and all the municipalities are going to do is the dirty work for the government. If I'd seen somewhere in there that you believed in flexibility of some of the government policies, then I might be able to go along with it. But all I see coming out of the Sewell commission is that the government's going to lay down the rules and the municipalities are going to do the dirty work.
I don't think they're going to fall for it. When you go back out on your road trip very soon, I think you're going to find that. You're going to hear from the municipalities, "Hey, we're not going to do the dirty work." They already tried to force it on the municipalities; not all municipalities, but a lot of them, all the ones that were stuck with the Niagara Escarpment. They said: "Here's the rules. You enforce them."
Sure, fine, I can see guidelines coming out of Toronto, but there's got to be flexibility, because they just don't work all over the province. It's so different: Southern Ontario is so different from northern Ontario; our region is so much different from, say, Essex county, and things like that. I don't see anywhere where you recognize that, and I think you're going to have to start doing that if you ever want to sell any of this to the municipalities in Ontario. I just wonder if you'd like to comment.
Mr Sewell: I agree it would be possible to have very flexible policy that could mean one thing in one part of the province and another thing in another part of the province. I'm not sure that would do anybody any good. If we're going to have policy that doesn't mean anything, then I don't think it's worth having it. I think it's really important that the province states very clearly what its interest is so that everybody understands exactly what that means and then tries to see how they can implement that on a local basis.
I would argue that the policy that's laid down here is policy that most good planners don't have any problem with whatsoever, in any part of the province. There are a couple of points that people have questions about: the medium-density question and compact form is one example, but that's about it. Most people think these are reasonable statements of how planning should work in Ontario.
Mr Murdoch: Who do you mean by "most people," though? You're talking about planners.
Mr Sewell: Most planners, that's right; most people who have to work with planning policies.
Mr Murdoch: I guess we could talk about planners, but I only have 10 minutes, so I haven't got all day to tell you what I think of some planners. Some of them are okay, but they certainly aren't all okay. A lot of them, I believe, aren't taught properly when they go to school. They're taught to say no to everything, and that seems to be what they do.
Mr Bradley: They'd soon get fired in Grey county.
Mr Murdoch: That's right. Good, Jim. I'm glad to hear that.
So I disagree with you there. If you're going to say what the province feels, that's fine: that you shouldn't develop on number 1 farm land is a fair statement. But if number 1 farm land in our area happens to be covered in stones and thorn trees and down in Middlesex maybe it isn't, you've got to look at the diversity between the two counties. If you said that, that we'd look locally, that's what I'm talking about: flexibility. But I don't see that in here. We've run into this problem for a long time.
Mr Sewell: We're trying to provide a basis where there's stated government policy so you know what it is. Often, that's not the case at the moment. And if there are disputes, the disputes get resolved by an independent body, which is also a major difference.
So there are two major differences from the position we're in now: one, that there would be stated government policy so you can see what it is. We're quite willing to say: "Well, this is the policy. It should be something else." That's fine, but we don't think it should be elastic policy: It should mean something, and the same thing to everyone.
The second thing is that if you get rid of provincial approvals, then you're in a position where if there is a dispute about how you interpret the implementation of a policy, you get an independent hearing. You don't have to be in a position where the province makes the final decision. In other words, we're trying to get away from the position where the government ministry is acting like a judge and a jury when the municipality doesn't know what the rules are. If there's any easier way of clearing that up, I'd like to know what it is, but I don't believe you can have a position that says we're going to have policy that doesn't mean anything. That doesn't make any sense.
Mr Murdoch: No, nobody has said that either.
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Mr Sewell: So assuming we have policy that does mean something -- and as I say, if these aren't the words, let's have some other ones -- then I don't know what kind of better system you could ask for. You have policy that means something, and the municipality is then in a position where it says: "This is the policy in Ontario. We're going to have to interpret this locally to figure out how it implements, and if people don't like the way we do it, there's an independent body they can go to to resolve any dispute." If there's a better system, I'd like to know what it is.
Mr Murdoch: It depends on the independent body too, who that happens to be. If it's going to be full of all the minority groups and stuff like that --
Mr Sewell: If you have a better suggestion than the Ontario Municipal Board, we'd be very interested in hearing what it would be.
Mr Murdoch: I think you might be able to work with it if there are some changes there.
Mr Sewell: I know that's the purpose of this committee, and we've suggested what those changes might be.
Mr Murdoch: Just a quick question: I noticed in here that there was a spot -- and I did talk about that one on the radio -- where in the future, you want to see all development geared to areas where there would be no vehicle traffic.
Mr Sewell: I don't know where that statement comes from. What we've suggested, and I'd just like to clarify, is two policies. The first one is on page 29: "Patterns of land use and development will be planned and modified to reduce the need for private automobile use in daily life." We think that's really important, that the more we can make our communities amenable to existence without the need for private automobile use in daily life, the better it will be. There are a couple of really simple things you can do there. One is by having corner stores so people don't have to drive long distances to do it; that's one way. Another is having road systems that are amenable to public transit, so at least there's an opportunity to use some road systems there.
The second policy, we say, is that in new urban areas, transportation systems will be designed to give priority to energy-efficient, low-polluting travel, including priority to walking, bicycling and public transit. We know that in the design of many new urban areas now, that's not the case, where you really can't walk on most of the roads; they weren't made for walking. We're suggesting we should be changing those. If people think they're a problem, we're delighted. If people say, "No, we should be increasing automobile use" -- I don't think there's a public will for that at the moment.
Mr Murdoch: That's nice to say on paper, but what about all of rural Ontario? Those policies will work nice down here in Toronto, if you're going to expand Toronto. What have we got that's coming outside of Toronto?
Mr Sewell: The second policy is only in new urban areas. But in terms of the other one --
Mr Murdoch: Well, you can't have a corner store either, unfortunately. It would be nice if we could.
Mr Sewell: Of course not, and we aren't suggesting that people do unreasonable things. Where the opportunities arise --
Mr Murdoch: But what that does is that to rural people, it looks like there's going to be no development in the rural areas. It's all going to be stuck into places like Hamilton, Toronto and the urban centres. If that's the case, I think you should just come out and say, "Hey, rural Ontario's not going to be developed any more."
Mr Sewell: We don't believe that, which is why we didn't say it. If you can find the offensive words in policy 3, and if we should reword it to make it perfectly clear, we're delighted to do that. This is a draft report, so we want people to make change. But that policy only applies to urban areas. It doesn't apply to anywhere else.
Mr Murdoch: If you can explain that, you'll have a better chance, because that's where some of the hard feelings are.
Mr Sewell: I think the words are pretty clear. But if they aren't, the point is well taken.
Mr Murdoch: I'm just telling you what I hear, and that's what you want to hear, I think.
Mr Sewell: Thank you.
The Chair: Mr Marchese, did you want a quick question?
Mr Marchese: Sure, one. Is that all the time we have?
The Chair: We're cutting off at noon.
Mr Marchese: There's a question of the interministerial planning committee. I'm trying to find it.
Mr Sewell: It's on page 35.
Mr Marchese: One of the things you recommend is that Municipal Affairs, Environment, Natural Resources, Housing, Agriculture and Food, Transportation and treasury be part of that. One of the ministries that I think is often overlooked in terms of how it connects to all of this is the Ministry of Culture and Communications. They're the ones who deal with museums and archives, of course, but they deal with heritage, both tangible and intangible heritage. It would seem to me that they would have a strong interest, particularly the people interested in the whole field of cultural heritage, and they might want to be a part of this. Is there a rationale for not thinking about them?
Mr Sewell: Yes. We suggest that if the interministerial planning committee is going to work, it's going to have to be relatively small. Six or seven ministries we think is a reasonable number. Therefore, we had to figure out who had the most frequent interest. We think that other ministries could be called in as required, and we suggest that Culture and Communications is one of them.
We don't have any objection if people want to expand the IPC. That doesn't bother us. We have real problems both about the provincial planning advisory committee and the interministerial planning committee. The first is a citizen group arrangement with appointment by the minister; the other is the deputy group. Both of them are going to depend very much on the personnel on those committees to work well. If they get the wrong personnel, they aren't going to work at all, and that's a problem. We were trying to be as loose and as flexible as we could about how IPC actually works, but if it wants to have another ministry, that's perfectly okay.
The problem is trying to create a link between the three interests that are there: the cabinet, the public, the bureaucracy. We think there's a gulf right now between those three. There might also be a gulf between the cabinet and the House; that's a different question. But we were trying very much to address that kind of gulf and see how we could patch it over.
Some people have suggested that the provincial planning advisory committee might not be strong enough and that it should be a Premier's committee. We had originally suggested a standing committee to do this, but when we went and talked to all three parties individually, they said: "A standing committee? You've got to be kidding."
Mr Marchese: I appreciate what you're saying. I still believe that Culture and Communications can play a very important role as it relates to heritage. The great number of people who are involved in the field of heritage are many, and one should not lose sight of that. That's all. You might want to think that through again.
Mr Sewell: We will think it through. I've made a note of it.
Mr Marchese: My other question has to do with what it is that you think should move away from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Environment and into the Planning Act, because it wasn't entirely clear what shift, if any, will happen. There might be some minor shift. What is it exactly that might go from one to the other?
Mr Sewell: My reason for making the comment to him is that I wasn't quite clear. I don't think there are any functions that are being shifted from the Ministry of the Environment to the Ministry of Municipal Affairs. There's no question that we're saying that generally, approval powers on planning questions should not be in the hands of the government, period -- any ministry. I guess there's something that would go from MOE on that one, but it would go from all other ministries as well. I didn't see us making any shift, but I might have missed something, and that's why I asked Mr Bradley, if there was something, if he could --
Mr Bradley: To clarify, page 9 on our notes under "Municipal Infrastructure" says, "The commission recommends that the review of municipal infrastructure projects be moved into a class environmental process under the Planning Act, instead of under the Environmental Assessment Act."
Mr Sewell: But the parent document for that class assessment is prepared by MOE. That remains. So I'm not sure --
Mr Bradley: It's much easier, I can assure you, to get through a class environmental assessment under the Planning Act than it is to seriously examine the ramifications of a development under the Environmental Assessment Act. I know they don't like the Environmental Assessment Act. I know they don't like it, but --
Mr Marchese: Jim, you go right ahead with the supplementary.
Mr Sewell: Hold on a second. If I could explain --
Mr Bradley: But 25 years later, they're damned sorry they went to that.
The Chair: Let Mr Sewell respond, and then that's it.
Mr Sewell: What happens right now is that there is a class environmental assessment run under the Environmental Assessment Act. It applies to an ill-defined class of infrastructure projects. In fact, we haven't defined what a class is, but generally it's meant to be road widenings, road extensions, pipes that are being put in the ground, all of a relatively limited scope. The Ministry of the Environment, under the Environmental Assessment Act, prepares a document that says, "If you're doing one of these road widenings, here are all the matters you should be looking at." So the municipal engineer does what's called a self-assessment. He looks at the parent document which says, "Here's what you should be looking at," and goes through the project that the municipality wants to do to make sure that all the criteria have been fulfilled. On the basis of that, he then goes for approval; in fact, you have to have a hearing or notice and so forth. So it's a self-assessment process that happens right now, with the Ministry of the Environment preparing the document against which you assess a project.
There are a number of problems with it as it's now structured. One of them is that the class of projects that can be processed this way is very unclear; nobody knows what kind of project can go through this self-assessment. So we found some municipalities that are taking very large projects through this self-assessment process. The most interesting example at the moment is the Ashbridges Bay sewage treatment plant in Toronto, a $300-million improvement, where the Ministry of the Environment said, "Yes, that's okay." They've actually allowed that one to go through under the class process. That is a problem for a lot of people, and they think that what we should be doing is defining "class" in a much better way. We should actually say what a class of projects is. We're proposing to do that.
The second problem is that if you disagree with whether the project can be assessed under this class process, or if you disagree with the assessment that's actually done, then what you do is that you go to the minister and say, "We'd like to bump this up from a class process to a full environmental assessment under the Environmental Assessment Act." So you make a request of the minister to treat this in a different fashion.
Of course, the minister then has to figure out what to do. The minister has often taken a long time making a decision on that. We thought that's crazy. We should regularize that kind of appeal, and instead of leaving it to the discretion of the minister, we should make it an automatic right of appeal. If you don't think this fits within the definition of class, if you don't think the assessment has been a fair one, we think you should have an automatic right of appeal to the OMB with this 30-day procedural hearing coming into effect.
Instead of this request being made to the minister to bump up, and it sits there for a long time, and the minister's not quite clear how to deal with it, and it turns into a big political problem, we think we should regularize it like any other planning matter, which indeed we think it is.
So there are the two changes that we've suggested: Define the class so it's clear what can be processed and what can't; second, pull this into the Planning Act so that the rights of appeal are perfectly clear and reasonable, and so what could be mostly a technical matter doesn't turn into a horrendous political problem for anybody. There are the two changes.
Now, we still believe that this parent document against which projects will be assessed should be prepared by the Ministry of the Environment under the Environmental Assessment Act itself, so that when you're wondering how projects are assessed, you'll know they've been assessed according to a document that's prepared under a good public process.
We think they're both improvements. They strengthen attention to the environment, not weaken it. They strengthen it. Mr McLean: How many years will it take to draft that?
The Chair: You're not responding to that. This could go on for ever, Mr Sewell. You've extended an invitation to Mr Bradley to sit down with you as a private member. I'm sure you'd be more than willing to do that for any other member --
Mr Sewell: We'd be more than delighted.
The Chair: -- and listen to their views with respect to your final report. I want to thank you on behalf of the committee for taking time out of a very busy schedule to be here; most informative.
Mr Sewell: Thank you. I appreciate being given the opportunity of appearing.
The Chair: Before we adjourn, I want first to ask members if they feel there's any necessity to reconvene this afternoon. We don't have any witnesses scheduled to appear. In terms of deliberations, we do have on our schedule for tomorrow a review of the draft reports. Our researcher advises me that he should have the OMB draft ready for tomorrow as well?
Mr David Pond: You should already have a copy. I think the clerk distributed all of our draft reports. The only thing that's happened, obviously, since you saw the most recent draft report is that we've had Mr Martin and now Mr Sewell come in. What I can do is very quickly prepare a memo which lists all the committee's recommendations as already tentatively approved, with Mr Martin's and Mr Sewell's comments underneath, so you have a feel for what's happened at our last two meetings devoted to the OMB.
The Chair: Is that fine?
I just want to remind members to take a look at the agenda for tomorrow as well, if we're not meeting this afternoon, with regard to the review of the drafts and the direction to David in respect to drafts for Science North and the Central Lake Ontario Conservation Authority. You can put your mind to those matters in terms of having some recommendations ready for David. I know some of the members who are substitutes here did not participate in those hearings, but those who did hopefully will have some recommendations for David tomorrow. Of course, the afternoon is going to be devoted to appointments review.
That's it. Any questions, comments? We'll adjourn and reconvene tomorrow morning.
The committee adjourned at 1206.