Ontario's Building Homes Act (Bill 98) introduced a package of changes aimed at accelerating development approvals and increasing housing supply across the province. The legislation has been welcomed by the development industry, but the ground-level reality is more nuanced: approval timelines are legislated to improve, but the underlying servicing constraints that drive delays have not changed.
What Bill 98 Introduced
The key provisions of the Building Homes Act relevant to development approvals include:
- Mandatory timelines for municipal decisions on planning applications, with remedies available to applicants when municipalities miss the legislated deadlines
- Reduced Site Plan Approval scope for smaller residential projects (the 10-unit threshold discussed separately)
- Changes to Official Plan requirements affecting how municipalities must accommodate growth within their planning framework
- Streamlined Zoning By-law Amendment processes in certain circumstances
What Has Not Changed
The legislation cannot change the physical realities of municipal infrastructure. Servicing capacity constraints — where the trunk sanitary sewer, watermain, or storm system does not have capacity for additional development — are not addressed by planning legislation. These constraints are resolved through capital infrastructure investment by the municipality, not by faster review timelines.
A project that cannot connect to the municipal sanitary system without infrastructure upgrades faces the same delay under Bill 98 as it did before. The technical approval process — the engineering review of FSRs, SWM reports, and servicing drawings — proceeds at the pace of that review, not the pace that planning legislation mandates for planning decisions.
Practical Advice
Developers should not assume that legislative changes to approval timelines translate into faster project delivery. The critical path items — securing technical approvals, resolving servicing capacity issues, obtaining conservation authority permits where required — remain time-intensive and require thorough, complete submissions.
The most effective way to use the window that Bill 98 creates is to submit complete, high-quality applications that eliminate the revision rounds that typically extend timelines. Municipalities that are now subject to stricter decision timelines have an incentive to issue complete applications more quickly — but only if those applications don't require multiple rounds of engineering revision.