Heritage Day 2024: The Huge Potential of Ontario's Older Buildings for Housing and Other Uses

BRANCH: Provincial Office

TYPE: Member Documents

DATE: February 26, 2024

AUTHOR: ACO

On February 21st, 2024 ACO held its ninth annual Heritage Day in Toronto, meeting with MPPs from across the province.

Prepared by ACO's Policy Committee and Government and Community Relations Committee, the 2024 Heritage Day slide deck highlights the wide-ranging positive benefits of conserving our built heritage and landscapes: for housing, economic growth, tourism, and combatting climate change.

It also outlines the regressive and damaging changes the Build More Homes Faster Act (Bill 23) is having on heritage, making it much harder to protect what communities value and treasure.

Included at the end of the deck are useful statistics and an abundance of resource links.

Once again bringing the message of Keep, Fix, Reuse to Queen’s Park, this year ACO had 3 Priority Asks:

1. Five-year Extension for Listed Buildings: Extend the expiry date for listed buildings to Jan. 1, 2030. This would reduce the burden on municipalities to adhere to the current date of Jan. 1, 2025.

2. Housing-focused Heritage Building Grant: Create a new, application-based, matching grant program of $10M/year, to create new housing. The grant program, modelled on an existing Alberta program, would incentivize owners to keep, fix, and renovate/reuse heritage buildings.

3. Provincial Policy Statement Review: Amend the Provincial Policy Statement to prioritize the retention and re-use of Ontario’s existing building stock for housing and other purposes.