SIDEBAR: Halton Region political fallout from growth decisions
Welcome to another issue of #munipoli Matters, where we discuss all about municipal elections and the often unreported area of local government across Canada and beyond.
Today I’m using the sidebar to focus on the Regional Municipality of Halton; there’s some updates regarding a locally elected position and how it may have something to do with an important vote that took place in the region.
Burlington MPP leaving Queen’s Park to seek election as regional chair
First is the news that Jane McKenna, the current Progressive Conservative MPP for Burlington, is not running again in June’s provincial election. McKenna made her announcement on the same day as two of her colleagues, Bill Walker (Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound) and Daryl Kramp (Hastings, Lennox and Addington) also announced they were retiring from provincial politics.
First elected in 2011 to the Burlington riding, McKenna lost in 2014 to Liberal Eleanor McMahon before winning back her seat in 2018 as the Liberal government was swept out of office. McKenna also previously ran for Burlington City Council in Ward 1 during the 2010 election.
But McKenna had another reason to announce her departure from Queen’s Park: she intends to run for Halton Regional Chair in the fall municipal elections. Since 2000, Halton became one of the few regional governments to directly elect their chair, along with Waterloo and subsequently Durham Region.
Ironically a previous chair, Joyce Savoline, was also later elected as PC MPP for Burlington from 2007 to 2011, but prior to that she was the first elected Chair of Halton Region. Now, McKenna seeks to do the same. Also ironic is the current incumbent Gary Carr is a former PC MPP, former Ontario Legislative Speaker as well as former federal Liberal MP.
The rumour floating around is that Carr, who has been chair since 2006, is not planning to run for a fifth term this fall. Besides McKenna, other candidates that may jump in or have been courted include former Oakville Liberal MP John Oliver, who served one term from 2015-2019, and Lisa Raitt, a former federal Conservative cabinet minister who was Milton’s MP from 2008 to 2019.
The decision to switch from the provincial to municipal government level by McKenna comes on the heels of a very contentious decision made by the Halton Regional Council.
Urban growth boundary “frozen” until 2041
On February 16, Halton Region voted to limit their urban growth boundary until at least 2041. An urban growth boundary is a regional boundary set to try to contain urban sprawl by mandating that the area inside the boundary be used for development and the area outside be preserved in its natural state, for say agricultural use.
Recently the City of Hamilton voted to maintain their existing urban boundary; now Halton has done the same. The motion, spearheaded by Burlington Mayor Marianne Meed Ward and Oakville Mayor Rob Burton, “asks staff to develop a regional official plan amendment that fits the projected population and employment growth within the existing approved urban boundary to 2041, with no urban boundary expansion.”
“The growth plan that was originally generated by regional staff proposed to open up 2,120 hectares (5,200 acres) of mostly agricultural land near Halton Hills and Milton for commercial and residential development.”
You would think that the region’s more developed areas, namely south Oakville and Burlington, would vote in favour of the boundary freeze while the rural and undeveloped areas, such as Milton and Halton Hills, would be unanimous in voting to not freeze the boundary.
The vote was 15-9 in favour of freezing the urban growth boundary, and this is how each councillor voted:
Regional Chair Carr voted in favour of the urban boundary freeze.
Breaking down the vote
The way Oakville voted as though in a “bloc” shows the sway Burton has on council over his 15 years as mayor, starting in 2006. He was one of those ‘deputants’ who would call for smart growth during council meetings, in contrast to his predecessor, Ann Mulvale, who was more growth friendly.
In 2003, Burton came 28 votes shy of beating Mulvale for Oakville mayor. Burton ran again in 2006 and beat Mulvale by nearly 2000 votes and in 2010, Burton held the mayor’s seat in a rematch with Mulvale by 4,000 votes.
Since then, Burton’s vision of a more “Livable Oakville” has rarely been challenged, Even Pavan Parmar, the Ward 7 councillor who represents a still mostly undeveloped North Oakville, voted to freeze the boundary.
As for Meed Ward, she won the mayoralty in 2018 against then-incumbent Rick Goldring by fighting against tall towers in downtown Burlington, or at least strongly pushed back on rapid densification. That same year, all but one incumbent councillor from the prior term were either turfed out or declined to run again, so Meed Ward had a whole new council to steer in her direction.
What is interesting is the 4-3 split amongst Burlington councillors, with downtown councillor Lisa Kearns voting against the freeze while someone like Rory Nisan, who represents a more rural part of the city, voting with Meed Ward for the boundary freeze.
With Milton and Halton Hills, most of their councils were decisively in favour of expanding the growth boundary, with the exception of Milton regional councillor Colin Best and Halton Hills councillor Jane Fogal. Fogal and Burlington councillor Paul Sharman can be heard discussing their rationale behind their vote in a recent episode of the 905er podcast.
Best’s actions against, no pun intended, the “best interests” of Milton were pointed out by one of the other Milton regional councillors, Mike Cluett:
Cluett contends that no concrete data was used by his colleagues to justify freezing the boundary and Milton has been developing its own local growth plan that emphasizes smart growth principles by creating mixed use, complete communities.
Does McKenna’s candidacy have wider reasons?
It’s no secret that the Ford provincial government’s policies are more pro-growth than its predecessors. Ford himself was caught on video prior to the 2018 promising developers that he was going to “open up the (environmentally sensitive) Greenbelt” for developers to build new housing.
Ford later backtracked on that statement, but the government’s increasing use of Ministerial Zoning Orders (MZOs) to fast track the construction of ‘critical infrastructure’, as well as supporting the construction of a whole new highway on environmentally sensitive land, has only amplified the perception that it is all about the economy and “growth” above all other considerations.
Halton Regional Council’s position on the urban growth boundary comes off looking like a direct political challenge to the “pro-development” provincial government by affirming how they wish to manage a growing population in the coming years.
Being from that provincial Tory government, McKenna’s pending candidacy for regional chair could be presented as one fighting for a different vision of growth that is more aligned with Doug Ford’s Conservatives.
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Cover photo courtesy of Region of Halton