Legislative ‘clean slate’ still needs cleanup

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This article was published 07/10/2021 (1819 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ON Sept. 1, the Association of Manitoba Municipalities (AMM) was grateful to receive a phone call from Kelvin Goertzen following his swearing-in as Manitoba’s 23rd premier. During this discussion, a new tone was set to help guide our respectful working relationship.

Upon assuming his new role, interim Premier Goertzen has helped reset the government’s direction by committing to withdraw a series of proposed government bills that would further centralize authority on Broadway. However, pundits who have written that this represents a “clean slate” strategy aren’t quite correct, since some bills that caused so much controversy have already passed.

For the sake of Manitoba’s economy and provincial-municipal relations, Goertzen and his successor should reverse the changes that take autonomy away from municipalities and limit the scope and parameters of appeals under Bill 37 — the Planning Amendment and City of Winnipeg Charter Amendment Act — in legislation rather than regulation.

One of former premier Brian Pallister’s key legacies is a significant increase in job-creating, private-sector capital investments in Manitoba. The COVID-19 pandemic has hidden the benefits of this success in the short term; however, the construction or expansion of new private sector factories and facilities improved Manitoba’s competitiveness as a producer and exporter in the long term.

And when it comes to investments such as those totalling more than $1 billion by Simplot and Roquette outside Portage la Prairie, municipalities did their part, co-operating with and expediting these new projects. Bill 37 may slow this progress.

However, while we acknowledge Bill 37 does include some positive changes from its original Bill 48 version, the legislation still does not limit planning appeals to bona fide cases of legal or administrative fairness as a real legal appeals system would. But Manitoba municipalities also warned of another problem: the high risk that more appeals will create exactly the kind of delays in development planning that the government claims it was trying to prevent in the first place.

As Bill 37 progressed, the AMM and its member municipalities from across Manitoba raised concerns and put forth practical recommendations to improve the legislation by urging the province to include necessary safeguards to keep the process speedy, fair and most of all, democratically respectful.

In fact, in meetings with AMM members and during public hearings on the bill last April, industry leaders expressed similar concerns about the legislation as well. Various groups proposed compromise amendments to the bill which would have limited grounds for appeal to a specific list of issues drawn from rules already in place in other provinces.

In its current form, Bill 37 may encourage frivolous or vexatious appeals, which would slow development and economic growth as Manitobans look to recover from the ongoing pandemic. Even filing a doomed appeal will give critics or competitors a shot at delaying a project for many months or even years.

Moreover, giving applicants the right to appeal without even requiring them to explain their grounds for appeal isn’t “streamlining development approvals” — it encourages the fast-tracking of an appeal to circumvent local decisions made by democratically elected local councils.

In Alberta and Ontario, you’re required to state why you’re appealing, right in your notice of appeal. In Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Alberta, there are specific limits to why you can appeal. These examples illustrate the need for clear parameters in legislation to guide the appeals process, so appeals are a last resort, not the first step.

Manitoba’s mayors, reeves and councillors have also demonstrated how a similarly open-ended appeals system in Ontario led to backlogs of 18 to 24 months, or more, on major development decisions. However, Ontario is drowning in major real-estate investments; it can afford to drag out its decisions. In Manitoba, we don’t have the same luxury. Decisions must

happen quickly — even if they are a no — or investors will walk away in frustration.

Moving forward, the AMM has formally written to the two candidates vying to become PC Party leader and Manitoba’s next premier — Heather Stefanson and Shelly Glover — to urge them to make fundamental changes to Bill 37 if elected. We are looking forward to meeting with both candidates as the leadership campaign unfolds to discuss not only this issue but also other top priorities for municipalities, including putting an end to the five-year municipal operating funding freeze.

Meanwhile, Goertzen has already done Manitoba and his government a great service by demonstrating that it’s possible for Manitobans to work together, even if there are policy disagreements on the table. In the wake of the new premier’s efforts to create a legislative clean slate, we can only ask that the slate be just a little cleaner — not just for the sake of local democracy, but for the sake of investment in Manitoba, as well.

Kam Blight is president of the Association of Manitoba Municipalities, which identifies and addresses the needs and concerns of its members in order to achieve strong and effective municipal government.