I’ve been keeping mental tally of section 47 orders for about four years now, and the number which actually sticks with me is the one from 2020. That year the housing ministry issued roughly 44 Minister’s Zoning Orders in a single calendar year. For context the same office had averaged something like one a year for most of the previous decade. One a year was the baseline. Forty-four is the thing which made me start paying attention.
If you’ve never heard of an MZO don’t worry, neither had most of the planners I ended up calling about this, and half of them work for municipalities these orders land on. An MZO is a Planning Act tool which lets the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing override a local council’s zoning on a specific piece of land, by ministerial signature, with no public hearing, no appeal, no consultation. Sign the order, the land is rezoned. That’s the whole process.
The tool, and what it was supposed to be for
Section 47 of Ontario’s Planning Act has existed in roughly its current form since the 1980s. The idea was simple. Sometimes a project which actually mattered for the province, a long-term care facility on a timeline, a piece of transit infrastructure, a utility expansion, runs into a local zoning dispute which can’t be resolved through normal channels. The province needed a safety valve. The MZO was that safety valve and for decades it was used like one, rarely, cautiously, for things which met an obvious public-interest test.
That’s the part which changed.
Under the Ford government the volume of MZOs went up by a factor somewhere between 30 and 40, depending on how you count. 44 orders in 2020 was the peak year but 2019 and 2021 weren’t far behind, and by early 2022 the cumulative count since 2018 was somewhere around 100. Nobody disputes the raw numbers, the government has never tried to, the debate is whether the shift reflects a legitimate re-tooling of the instrument or a habit of using it for things it was not designed for.
What’s actually in the orders
This is where I started getting uncomfortable. A lot of the MZOs from 2020 through 2022 aren’t for hospitals or transit. They’re for private developments on private land, requested by developers, sometimes with direct political ties to the governing party. The Auditor General flagged this in her 2021 annual report and she was not subtle about it.
Context: A Minister’s Zoning Order bypasses the Ontario Land Tribunal, the municipal council process, and provincial policy statement conformity checks. It is the single most powerful planning instrument a provincial cabinet minister in Canada can wield over a specific piece of land.
Here are the ones which made the news, and I’ll let you decide what to make of them. An MZO for a warehouse complex in Pickering which sat on a wetland the ministry had previously designated for protection, right next to Duffins Creek. Public outcry, it was eventually rescinded, the developer walked away. An MZO for a Durham Live casino expansion. Several MZOs for long-term care facilities on sites local councils had been trying to rezone for denser housing. An MZO which carved a 20-storey condo opportunity out of a neighbourhood planned for low-rise.
What I kept seeing was less “emergency provincial infrastructure” and more “fast-track tool for favoured projects.” Not all of them, to be fair. Some MZOs in that period genuinely were for long-term care capacity and the province had a legitimate argument that the waitlist for LTC beds couldn’t wait another year of hearings at tribunal. But the mix was not close to what the original Planning Act provision contemplated.
Who was supposed to be holding the minister accountable for any of this? Nobody, because nobody had to.
Bill 257 and the retroactive fix
Here’s the part I think deserves more attention than it got. In 2021 the government passed Bill 257, the Supporting Broader Public Sector Accountability Act, and tucked into it was a provision which retroactively exempted MZOs from having to conform to the Provincial Policy Statement. Translation: a bunch of MZOs had been issued which, under existing planning law, probably shouldn’t have been legal. Bill 257 made them legal after the fact.
If you’re going to defend that move you’d say the Provincial Policy Statement is a creature of provincial choice and the province can change the rules whenever it wants. Fair enough, that’s technically true. But retroactive law is a pretty big ask for a government to make on a planning matter, and there’s basically no precedent for doing it to tidy up paperwork on orders which were already served and acted on. The NDP and Greens voted against. Liberals too (fewer of them in the 42nd Parliament, but on the record). Not enough votes to stop it.
Where the politics sit now
The 2025 snap election changed the MPP names but not really the underlying dynamic. Rob Flack is Minister of Housing in the 44th Parliament and MZOs haven’t gone away, they’ve just become less visible, which I’d argue is worse outcome for public accountability than the 2020 fire hose. Less public fights over specific orders means less pressure on the minister’s office, less news coverage, less for opposition to work with. An MZO you never hear about is an MZO which passes without friction at all.
Look at the Ford government’s argument: Ontario has a housing crisis, the municipal planning process is too slow, MZOs are a pressure-release valve. I don’t fully buy the framing but I take the point. Municipal planning is slow. The Ontario Land Tribunal backlog is its own article (look it up, it’s bad, some appeals wait three years for a hearing). If you believe the housing supply gap is measured in hundreds of thousands of units, any tool which can shave a year off an approval has appeal.
But the MZO isn’t actually a speed tool. It’s a sidestep. The difference matters. A speed tool would run the full review faster, a sidestep skips the review altogether. Sidestepping is fine when the process is broken for reasons you can’t fix, less fine when the process is broken partly because your own government gutted it with Bill 23 in the first place.
What’s actually missing
Three things would make MZOs less politically corrosive without giving up the safety-valve function. Any of these would be trivial to legislate.
One, a sunset clause. If an MZO rezones land and the development doesn’t proceed within a fixed window the rezoning reverts. Prevents land banking via ministerial signature.
Disclosure would be the second. Who requested the MZO, when, what communications preceded it. That kind of obligation exists for regulated lobbying in Ontario but not for MZO correspondence which travels through a ministry.
And third, a conformity test back to the provincial policy statement, this time without the 2021 retroactive carve-out. If the province has a statement of policy it would be nice if ministerial orders had to conform to it. That’s not a radical position, that’s just what planning law used to require.
None of these are on the order paper. I don’t expect them to be any time soon. The Ford government won a third majority, the opposition parties have other things to fight about, and planning reform is the kind of issue voters tell pollsters they care about right before they rank it fourteenth on their list of priorities.
One thing I will give credit for
Here’s where I’ll be fair. The volume of MZOs has come down from the 2022 peak. I don’t know whether that’s a deliberate policy choice or the result of a government which stopped needing the tool for optics reasons after the Greenbelt scandal, but the number of orders being issued in the current session is lower than four years ago. That’s not nothing. It’s also not a reform.
A quieter misuse of a planning instrument is still a misuse. And the structure is still there, the legal authority is still unamended, the next housing minister in any future government can open the tap as wide as 2020 saw. The 2021 amendments are still on the books. The provincial policy statement still can’t be enforced against an order made under section 47. Which brings me back to where I started. Section 47 is doing a job that section 47 was never supposed to do, and nobody at Queen’s Park has made a serious move to put it back in the box.
Sources and verification: Annual MZO counts for 2018 through 2022 are drawn from the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario’s 2021 and 2022 annual reports, and from ministry responses to freedom of information requests reported by The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and The Narwhal. Bill 257 passage and retroactive language can be confirmed at ola.org. Specific examples (Pickering’s Duffins Creek warehouse, Durham Live) were widely reported at the time of issue. MZO totals for the current session and Minister Rob Flack’s handling of the file should be checked against the most recent ministry filings before any precise count is quoted. OLT backlog figures noted in passing are drawn from the tribunal’s own annual reports at elto.gov.on.ca.
Want to see how your MPP voted on Bill 257 or other planning legislation? Look them up on Ontario Pulse.