LETTER: Did Oro-Medonte open Pandora’s box of severances?

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From OrilliaMatters, May 24, 2022
A Letter to the Editor

On Feb. 8, 2022, I sent a letter to Oro-Medonte Council regarding a Consent Application subject to an Ontario Land Tribunal (OLT) inquiry that was eventually heard on April 5, 2022, by video hearing.

In my letter to the clerk’s office, I stated that “it is unclear to me why the Development Services Committee (the “committee”) elected to ignore provincial policy, the County of Simcoe Official Plan and their own Official Plan policies. Instead, the committee appeared to acquiesce to the applicant’s wishes, thus breaking away from compliance to multi-level regulatory governance.”

During an unrelated matter, Mayor Harry Hughes admonished the council about the dangers of not complying with professional reports, professional recommendations, and the advice of legal counsel.

He was understood to say that “…there’s one reminder I think that everyone needs to keep in mind…is that failure to comply with the regulations isn’t something that a council can take lightly…it is the council who is personally responsible for those decisions and…when the expectations are that a council follow the advice of the professional people who say, you need to do this in order to be in compliance, and if you aren’t in compliance, you can have severe penalties, which could affect you – everything that you own personally, along with potential criminal charges…council really needs to make sure that all of the ability to defend their decisions on the basis of qualified professional advice is there…there are a lot of consequences that are involved.” (Oro-Medonte, Council Meeting Audio Recording, 2021)

In my opinion, the committee put the Township between a rock and a hard place back in February, for the Township was then burdened with two rather awkward options:

• Engage legal staff and hire an external planning consultant to support the consent application, a decision that had no business being supported in the first place based on past and best practices in the Township, County, and Province.
• Not provide any support to the applicant and let them provide their own justification and funding for the application. In the second option, the applicant was on their own “to provide their own representation, at their cost, to support their application at the OLT hearing” on April 5. The first would have been far more advantageous to the applicant for apparent reasons, thus having the benefit of extra-legal staff and a dedicated professional planner.

I believed back in February that both of these options were questionable. Either way, ratepayers were going to have to pay a hefty price once the final bill was tabulated.

Why yield to the applicant in the first place? This seems to contradict the warnings to the council by Mayor Hughes in late April of 2021. By sidestepping Township, county, and provincial policy, the decision of the committee to approve the application put this matter squarely in the sights of the OLT unnecessarily, in my judgment.

What if the council adopted the first option and the OLT ruled in favour of the appellant? I posed this question to the council at that time, yet my submission was not viewed by anyone in public. What happened to the idea of accountability, transparency, free speech and the exchange of ideas in an open and free democracy?

Could the notice of decision be considered ultra vires of the County of Simcoe and the Province of Ontario? This could leave the Township with unwanted liability risk, given that they did not apparently adhere to the advice of professionals, the county, and the province of Ontario?

At that time, I guessed that the Township would pick the second option, leaving the applicant and their agent with the burden “to provide evidence in support of the application.” In this particular scenario, the Township would have been seen as helping a local landowner without the high financial and political cost of defending an application that had no business seeing the light of day in the first place. By leapfrogging multiple levels of regulatory governance, the Township would also have been seen by the applicant as an ally.

But what now?

On May 9, 2022, the OLT issued the following order: “The tribunal orders that the appeal is allowed, and consent is not given.”

Notwithstanding the complicated nature of this particular application, I believe that the OLT made the correct decision in the end.

On May 25, staff recommends receiving the OLT order for “information only.” So, it is out of the question that the council will “receive, proclaim, or endorse under the mayor’s signature given that the mayor voted to defeat his own staff’s recommendation – ‘on the basis that the application is not consistent with the Provincial Policy Statement and does not conform [to] either the County Official Plan or the Township Official Plan.’” (Development Services Committee, Motion No. DSC211103-12, November 3, 2021)

In fact, the recorded vote on this motion was 3-3, leaving the mayor with the tie-breaking vote to not comply with the multi-governmental policy.

In my assessment, the price of this manoeuvre may be costly to the applicant, the Township, the appellant and the ratepayers of the Township and the county. In the end, taxpayer money has been engaged unreasonably and unnecessarily.

To be sure, the OLT ruled in favour of the County of Simcoe. This order could set a precedent for severance applications across the Township, county, and the province. Implications could be far-reaching. In my humble opinion, the Township has possibly opened a Pandora’s box of future severance issues in Oro-Medonte, whether we are talking about major or minor consent applications.

The clerk’s office did not allow my letter of Feb. 8, 2022, to enter the public agenda, citing that “no person shall use offensive, insulting or improper language in or against the council/committee or any member thereof, employees of the Township or any other person.” However, they did explain that “as you have emailed council as a body, they will have had an opportunity to review your comments. You can also telephone committee members with respect to your comments.”

In my mind, this was a baffling exchange. For a while, they considered the content to be “offensive,” “insulting” or “improper,” but they still recommended that I contact committee members by telephone.

Why would the clerk recommend contacting members by telephone when they found my writing to be off-putting? Not sure what the problem was at the time since I was simply quoting the public record. In back-and-forth emails until 8 p.m., I repeatedly asked the clerk to give me examples of inappropriate speech. No examples were given.

The message conveyed loudly and clearly was that they just didn’t want my comments in the public record at all. They didn’t pick the first option and consent was not given by the OLT. The fact that I called this on Feb. 8 caused strife within the inner circles of the Township in my estimation.

To add insult to injury, the council changed the rules for public participation once again this spring. Byaw No. 2022-033 on March 23 keeps public comments out of the agenda, an agenda that was historically revised when concerned citizens submitted letters regarding specific agenda items.

While these letters still make it into the public record, the public will not see them on the agenda in the future. Long gone are the days when the public had the ability to read hundreds of submissions by concerned constituents. Instead, these letters are tucked away from the watching eyes of the scrutinizing public. This is yet another disintegration and devolution of democracy in Oro-Medonte.

What’s next?

Tim Taylor
Oro-Medonte

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