Natural justice demands that MRA remain at OMB

By Kate Harries AWARE News Network June 21 2013
If natural justice were the objective, the Ontario Municipal Board will toss out the motion bought by Simcoe County to dismiss the Midhurst Ratepayers Association from the hearing into the County’s Official Plan.
The decision was reserved by a two-person OMB panel at a pre-hearing yesterday.

County lawyer Roger Beaman and lawyers representing various developers argued that the MRA had no place at the hearing. Now, I like lawyers and enjoy nothing more than to see arguments well-marshalled and put forward in a respectful manner. That happened yesterday. The hired guns did their job, and they did it well.
All the legal ‘i’s have been dotted, the legal ‘t’s crossed, right down to the transition regulation introduced at the same time as Amendment 1. That was the legislation enacted in January 2012 by then Infrastructure Minister Bob Chiarelli that gave the go-ahead for Simcoe County to do more or less as it pleases in terms of population growth.
We didn’t realize that when he announced it, because he told us it did the opposite. And we didn’t know about the poison pill buried in the transition regulation, that trumps anything that any other legislation says or any tribunal decides. That’s what happens when those who pay the politicians get to write the law.
Deck stacked
Legally, the deck is stacked against the Midhurst group.
MRA representative Margaret Hutchison, who is not a lawyer but has gained some understanding of municipal planning by assisting groups like the one in Midhurst, had the task of presenting their case at yesterday’s OMB hearing in Alliston.
“I have never encountered a case like this where the public has been so efficiently discriminated against,” she told the panel.
The first assault on public participation came 14 years ago, when the Midhurst “study area” morphed into the Midhurst “settlement area” and no one can pinpoint when, or by whose decision, that happened, leading to the entire area under study being cast as the outer limits of the future Midhurst.
“There has never been an opportunity for the public to address those boundaries,” Hutchison said. As farmer Rob Wright says in an affidavit submitted to the OMB, no line to appeal. Never an opportunity to contest a decision of which there is apparently no record (township officials admit that).
When Springwater council adopted the Midhurst Secondary Plan on November 3, 2008, it went to Simcoe County for approval. That approval was refused because, as county planning director Bryan MacKell explained in a letter to the township, it violated provincial legislation on a number of points, including the fact that “approval of the Official Plan Amendments 37 (Hillsdale) and 38 (Midhurst) would significantly exceed the Township’s population allocation as identified in the Growth Management Study and the adopted County Official Plan.”
And there it sat, until suddenly, with no prior notice to the public, it reappeared, one of 24 items approved in minutes with no debate by the county’s corporate services committee on October 12, 2011.
Fateful decision
As the clock started ticking on a 20-day appeal period. Midhurst and other Springwater residents had no idea of the fateful decision made that day by a handful of county councillors. After three years of silence on the issue, the Midhurst Ratepayers Association assumed the Midhurst Secondary Plan had been shelved, Hutchison told the OMB panel.
Here’s a curious thing: county lawyer Roger Beaman introduced a list of names to whom County Clerk Brenda Clark sent notice of the 2011 corporate services decision, people who had participated in the 2008 consultation process. This is evidence they could have appealed.  But on that list are the names of three people, including well-known Midhurst defender Connie Spek, who have submitted sworn affidavits to the OMB that they received no notice of the county approval.
For most of those active in the opposition to the 10-fold expansion, the first intimation came when the township – trickily waiting until after the appeal deadline had expired – called a meeting on November 14, 2011 to explain what had happened.
Speaking yesterday at the end of a long day, the MRA’s representative Margaret Hutchison struggled to work within the parameters of the system and was rebuked by chair Sylvia Sutherland for putting forward evidence rather than planning arguments.
Massive disconnect
What became clear during the afternoon was the massive disconnect between the picture of extensive consultation on the Midhurst expansion that was painted by the county and developers’ lawyers and the actual situation on the ground: People did not know in 2011 what was about to hit them.
Responsibility for that disconnect can be laid at the door of the incumbents who ran in 2010 and had participated in the 2008 process that would turn the village of Midhurst into a town the size of Orillia. (Two of them, Linda Collins and Dan Clement, were re-elected.)
They chose not to lead a public debate.
They chose not to mention their support for this seismic change to our quiet rural township during their election campaign.
They buried the most important file at the bottom of a massive pile of irrelevancy and made sure the public didn’t find out about it.
The size of the attendance and intensity of those present at meetings organized this year by the MRA – both in Midhurst and across the township – demonstrates that, had the matter been an election issue, the politicians would have heard loud and clear what the public wants.
They didn’t want to hear that.
I doubt that justice will enter into the Ontario Municipal Board panel’s decision. It is not their job to look to the big picture, to the seventh generation. They are focused on legal detail. After all, they are not (like the rest of us) just part of the system that has brought our world to its current perilous state where water is threatened and natural processes are breaking down.  They ARE the system.
Still, the motion did not have to be before them. The County of Simcoe did that to its own residents. Councillors had an opportunity to rein in its staff and their legal mercenaries when Penetanguishene Mayor Gerry Marshall raised the matter at corporate services. But there was no outcry from other councillors in support of his position. Just a testy defence from Warden Cal Patterson. And silence from Linda Collins, the Mayor of Springwater. Shame.