Research

Political science PhD student Zack Taylor on the power of the OMB

From big box stores in Leslieville to tall buildings in tony neighbourhoods, the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) takes a lot of heat for its decisions on city construction. Zack Taylor is a professional urban planner and doctoral candidate in U of T’s department of political science where he is studying the political history of regional planning in Toronto, Vancouver, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Portland, Oregon.

Give us a primer on the Ontario Municipal Board and its role.
First and foremost, the OMB exists to adjudicate disputes that take place over planning or land use. It makes decisions based on what it hears from two sides of an issue. It also is charged with making sure that the buildings, homes and additions that get built conform with municipal and provincial policies. Many times those plans and policies have been made long before a project is disputed.

So they look at everyday kinds of building projects, from home renovations on up?
Yes, the vast majority of activity the OMB engages in is completely invisible to most people. Say you want to put an addition on your house and the city tells you that you can’t. You can appeal to the OMB, making the argument that your addition won’t have any negative effect on your neighbours. Things get more controversial, when, for example, a community doesn’t want a condominium to go up in their neighbourhood.

In Toronto, there have been a couple of high profile rulings just like that.
Yes, a few years back, in the Yonge-Eglinton area, a developer proposed constructing some very tall condo buildings. Local residents appealed the project to the OMB. In the end, the OMB ruled that the development could proceed despite the community’s view that such construction would generate too much traffic and cast shadows on the neighbourhood.

The proposal to develop a mall with big box stores in Toronto’s Leslieville has been very controversial.
The Leslieville case is interesting because there were 58 days of hearings over a period of two years. The city was against the construction of the mall, arguing that it would affect the kind of long-term employment that they wanted to sustain the area, mainly in the sector called the creative industries (for example, the film industry). The developers’ argument was that they had designed the project in a way that was sensitive to the neighbourhood and they made arguments that it wouldn’t adversely affect other employment in the area. In the end, however, the ruling hinged on technicalities surrounding whether the project adhered to past policies—not on the present impact of the development on neighbourhood shopping.

The community seems to be claiming victory though.
It is, because it got its wish—the shopping complex is not going to be built. My understanding of the ruling is that it did not turn on the high profile debate around whether big box stores would affect the existing independent shopping strips along Queen Street. In fact, the regulations that applied in this case actually affected the area south of the property in question, not north along Queen Street.

There’s a perception that the OMB tends to rule in favour of developers and in the Leslieville case, it didn’t.
That’s a common perception, but in fact, the one major study done on board rulings over time shows that in fact the board sides with cities and citizens almost as much as it does with developers. The key thing with the OMB is that it is not bound by precedent. It rules based on interpretation of the merits that are put before it, so it often ends up in the middle of very high profile cases where there’s a lot at stake.

So the OMB is not as controversial as it appears to be?
It seems that the board often becomes an arena or flashpoint for high profile disputes, but the vast majority of what it does is ordinary, day-to-day stuff.

Tags: Behind the Headlines, cities, Society, Zack Taylor