When Zoning Reform Fails
Measurement, Municipal Accountability, and the Limits of Federal Action
Highlights
Federal reform keeps failing because zoning outcomes are not measured, allowing responsibility to drift upward even though municipalities control the decisions that block housing.
Without measurement, accountability cannot attach to municipalities, leaving senior governments exposed when reform efforts fall short.
Prescriptive zoning programs are attractive because they are quick to deploy, but speed substitutes for safeguards that ensure implementation.
The Housing Accelerator Fund revealed a scale problem, showing that significant financial incentives cannot work without metrics that allow oversight to operate broadly rather than on a case-by-case basis.
The Design Catalogue exposed a different vulnerability, demonstrating that visibility alone does not guarantee improved zoning outcomes.
Provincial zoning mandates face the same failure mode without measurement, enabling formal compliance while housing remains blocked in practice.
Without metrics, zoning reform will fail regardless of jurisdiction, because responsibility never lands where zoning decisions are actually made.
The Trap Every Zoning Reform Falls Into
Every attempt by the federal government to promote zoning reform has fallen into the same trap for the same reason. When zoning reform fails, the federal government ends up responsible for the outcome, even though municipalities control the decisions that determine whether reform succeeds or fails.
A primary cause of this is a lack of measurement. Without the ability to measure zoning and transparently show the inadequacy of the development envelopes municipalities provide, accountability never attaches to cities.
Without this attachment, responsibility for policy failures defaults to Ottawa as the most visible actor. Federal zoning programs are launched openly and get scrutinized intensely, while municipal zoning decisions remain largely unseen and consequently insulated from judgment.
Solving this problem matters because it is not otherwise possible to build up the kind of pressure that pushes local decision-makers to make zoning reform a success. Without municipal co-operation, economically viable housing cannot be legally built, and Canadians go without the homes they need. It is as simple as that.
Why Prescription Looks Attractive for Ottawa
When the federal government wants to do something, its first instinct is to prescribe terms and cut a large enough cheque to entice collaboration. On the face of it, this approach is an appealing way for Ottawa to get what it wants.
Prescriptive approaches appear attractive because they require little upfront work. The federal government can seem responsive because it enables rapid program deployment. But this front-end light feature comes with massive back-end bugs.
While the federal government does some initial grunt work to develop solutions, it does little to build guardrails that ensure they are meaningfully implemented by the party responsible for that part of the program.
Doing that requires measurement, but it can’t be done quickly. Moving swiftly to solve a problem as deep-rooted and complicated as zoning is always going to carry a high risk of failure. But these compounding failures end up wasting more time, not less.
Zoning isn’t an issue that landed on the federal government’s desk yesterday. Ottawa has now been attempting to reform it for a couple of years, with few meaningful results to show. With prices and rents down due to economic headwinds and lower immigration, there is now the breathing room to get zoning reform right.
A long implementation lead time should not be the federal government’s primary concern. It should be adding more failed programs to the tally of trying to solve this issue.
If it wants to avoid falling back into the responsibility trap or appearing to retreat on zoning reform altogether, the federal government needs to design its next program with clear metrics. However, utilizing metrics alone is not enough. They only work if Ottawa understands the vulnerabilities its past reform programs had in their absence.
Even Large Incentives Don’t Have the Scale to Succeed Without Proper Metrics
Without measurements to guide implementation, the federal government is drawn into local zoning disputes to prevent its programs from failing. But Ottawa cannot be present in hundreds of communities at once, weighing in on zoning–bylaw–level details. Its institutional capacity for attention was never designed to scale this way.
The federal government’s first serious attempt to reform zoning shows this clearly. Outside of Quebec, the Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF) sought to induce zoning reform through federal–municipal agreements. It tied more than $4 billion to prescribed changes targeting specific local zoning rules, such as height and density caps.
The program relied on financial incentives to reward municipalities that signalled a willingness to implement reforms. But agreements cannot rely on good intentions alone, even when backed by large sums of money. Entrenched Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) disincentives do not disappear because a cheque is cut. When municipalities do not constrain their own actions to avoid undermining agreements, the only remaining option is enforcement.
That is how Ottawa ends up acting as the zoning police. In a small number of high-profile cases, the federal government has stepped in to pressure municipalities to follow through, as Toronto’s ongoing saga to legalize sixplexes citywide demonstrates. But depending on the minister, it seems to loathe doing so.
It also lacks the constitutional mandate for this role. In the end, all it can do with offending cities is shred agreements, which still shows up as Ottawa’s failure to anyone looking.
Without measurements, enforcement has become selective and reactive rather than broad and proactive. As a result, cities do not have a strong enough reason to stop passing new rules that frustrate the housing forms that federal programs are meant to unlock. This includes rules like bedroom caps, angular planes, and other constraints that undermine liveability and marketability.
No comprehensive accounting of these rules exists, nor can Ottawa realistically create one, which is the problem in a nutshell. Ironically, even the HAF agreements, like the zoning they are trying to fix, are often inaccessible to the public without a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.
The result is predictable. Municipalities remain largely undeterred, while blame flows upward to Ottawa, the program’s author and holder of the purse strings. Without measurement to make zoning decisions understandable, visible, and comparable, even significant financial incentives fail to scale.
Neither zoning reform nor federalism can operate like this. Federal attention was never designed to scale in a way that would allow it to respond nationwide, rule-by-rule, without metrics.
The wrong lesson to take from this is that if prescribing isolated rules can’t induce municipalities to cooperate, then targeting the legalization of building designs can get around the problems the HAF had. Unfortunately, this is precisely what the federal government did next.
Why Visibility Without Measurement Fails
The Design Catalogue’s proposition is straightforward. If municipalities are unwilling to reform their zoning bylaws broadly enough to allow more housing, the federal government would create a program to address the problem directly.
At first glance, this approach has many merits. Highest among them is that it treats zoning as a complete system and makes reform immediately visible. But visibility is not the same thing as measurement.
While still using a prescriptive approach that dictates solutions to municipalities, it seeks to reform development envelopes by legalizing entire building designs rather than focusing on individual rules, as the HAF did.
Seeing that a design has been legalized does not tell you whether a local zoning bylaw has changed in ways that allow a wider range of housing to be built without conflicts with the rules. Projects within the same housing type can face vastly different zoning constraints. This is the Catalogue’s core vulnerability.
That leaves plenty of wiggle room for municipalities to respond in unproductive ways that continue to obstruct the construction of more homes. All they have to do is shrink-wrap the development envelopes in their zoning codes so they fit precisely over the designs, leaving no extra space.
Any project that deviates even slightly from those designs is pushed into a variance or rezoning process, where the high costs of uncertainty, delay, and rejection remain unchanged. Cities can claim to reform on paper while preserving discretionary controls that continue to block homes.
Critically, this defeats the purpose of zoning reform, which was never meant to funnel people into government-designed homes. It was about giving people the freedom to decide what kinds of homes they wanted to build without zoning rules blocking those choices.
Visibility is important because people need to be aware of changes to respond to them. Absent this, zoning reform that provides ample development envelopes will not work either. However, visibility is much easier to create than metrics because raising awareness is not difficult. Run an ad, create a website that lists adopted designs, post a picture on social media, the list goes on.
Despite this program, the federal government has still not resolved the recurring measurement blind spot. No one can see if municipalities are shrink-wrapping their zoning to subject housing to arbitrary roadblocks. What they can see is another federal program that has come up short.
Unlike the HAF, which launched amid rising prices and intense pressure to act, the Catalogue is emerging amid softening prices and rising local opposition. That shift in environment gives municipalities more reason, not less, to act defiantly by creating new kinds of plausible deniability.
So long as zoning outcomes remain unmeasured, any senior government will inherit failure, no matter how it structures the deal.
Measurement Failures Don’t Stop at the Federal Level
The responsibility trap is not unique to the federal government. Provinces have long struggled with the same problem because they also fail to measure zoning and other land-use planning decisions consistently.
Given the scale of dealing with hundreds of municipalities and the limited leverage visibility alone provides, it is tempting for Ottawa to pursue an accord with the provinces, which hold constitutional authority over zoning and municipalities. On paper, this is a great way to fix the problem by moving implementation up a level.
In practice, it leaves a lot to be desired. It replaces one finger-pointing exercise with another while leaving municipalities with enough room to keep doing what they’ve always done. Give cities an inch, and they are always going to take a mile wherever they can.
The only way a provincial accord can work without measurement is if provinces impose wholesale zoning codes that leave municipalities with no discretion at all. That would effectively straitjacket cities, preventing them from adding or modifying their own rules.
That kind of reform would be among the most sweeping changes to housing regulation in decades. Aside from British Columbia, there has been little appetite even to consider such an approach.
What provincial-federal accords are more likely to produce is partial oversight, with provinces limiting some zoning rules while leaving municipalities free to change or add others. Ontario’s recent experience with additional dwelling units (ADUs) is one such example.
When the province set minimum requirements for this housing form, municipalities responded almost immediately by adding new rules that blocked them while remaining formally compliant. In a few high-profile cases, such as Toronto, attention from senior governments and housing advocates eventually forced some acquiescence. But across the rest of the province, there is no way to know where similar circumvention occurred, where it was prevented, or where it has quietly succeeded.
Without a way to measure zoning outcomes, even constitutionally backed provincial mandates leave cities free to block housing while asserting they are meeting planning conformity requirements. The result is familiar. When homes don’t appear, responsibility flows upward, and senior governments own failures they don’t have direct control over.
Why Responsibility Never Lands Without Metrics
The fatal flaw with the HAF and the Design Catalogue was not jurisdiction. That mattered, but it was never decisive. As the limits of federal–provincial approaches show, authority alone does not ensure that zoning reform works out.
The primary problem is more straightforward. Without metrics, prescriptive reforms never land responsibility where it belongs. They leave municipalities just enough room to comply on paper while continuing to block housing in practice. With opacity covering their decisions, that gap is all local governments need to avoid being held accountable for the outcomes that fall short.
Without measurement, senior governments are forced into reaction mode. They chase individual disputes and intervene selectively to avoid backlash from either side of the issue, rather than setting clear expectations and letting responsibility attach to where the decisions are made. That is why zoning reform keeps circling the same failures.
Measurement is not an optional add-on. It is the mechanism that enables accountability. Without it, responsibility will continue to drift upward, municipalities will remain insulated from judgment, and every new zoning program will end the same way as the last.
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