Mark Winfield is a professor of environmental and urban change at York University. He served on the ministerial advisory committee for the implementation of the former growth plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe region.
Handing control of the planning process to the development industry, as Ontario effectively did, exacerbated these dynamics. Left to its own devices, the development sector focused not on the types of housing that were, but on where it thought it could make the fastest profit and return on investment. In existing urban areas, that turned out to be high-rise condominium projects withThe free-for-all created by the province has led to a cascade of further problems.
These problems have been reinforced by provincial constraints, again imposed at the behest of the development industry, on the ability of municipalities to applyIn the end, Ontario’s experiment with an urban development process almost entirely oriented toward the interests of private capital has ended in a predictable failure.