The Old Guardian | Housing & Planning
Chris Allen | The Old Guardian | August 2026
On June 24 and 25, 2026, Toronto City Council adopted By-law 650-2026. It passed without amendment. It incorporated 201 low-rise residential properties across all six Scarborough wards into the city-wide zoning framework — extending parking minimum removal to each of them in the process.
The residents on those streets were not in the room. Most had no idea the vote was happening. The ward councillor for Scarborough Centre had written a letter asking for deferral two weeks earlier. It was logged, filed, and ignored.
Everything that led to that vote — the provincial legislation, the two-year planning process, the community motions, the unanswered questions — is what this piece is about.
What Bill 98 Actually Does
Bill 98 — the Building Homes and Improving Transportation Infrastructure Act, 2026 — received Royal Assent on June 2, 2026. It is nine schedules of amendments to Ontario’s Planning Act, City of Toronto Act, Building Code Act, Municipal Act, and Development Charges Act, passed as a single omnibus bill in under three months from introduction to law.
For Toronto, the direct legislative hits are documented in the bill itself:
• Removal of “sustainable design” as a basis for site plan control — effectively ending the Toronto Green Standard as an enforceable planning tool.
• Prohibition on the City requiring EV charging equipment in connection with parking facilities.
• Municipalities can no longer address climate change or greenhouse gas reduction in their official plans.
• The province will impose a standardized official plan template — replacing locally-developed plans built through years of public process with a prescribed 12-designation structure.
Toronto’s official plan was built through public process over decades. Bill 98 requires it to be replaced by a provincial template. The ERO consultation window closed May 14th. Royal Assent came June 2nd.
These are specific, enumerated legal changes — now in force — that reduce the scope of what Toronto’s planners are legally permitted to do, regardless of what city councillors vote for.
Environmental Defence described Bill 98 as stripping municipalities of the power to use site plan control to promote sustainable design. The Canadian Environmental Law Association noted it would fundamentally undermine Ontario’s ability to address the impacts of climate change. The Pembina Institute called it the latest attempt to curtail the authority of municipalities to set requirements for new developments that reflect the needs of the community.
None of these organizations are fringe. All three submitted formal public comments during the ERO consultation window. Their concerns did not change the outcome.
Toronto’s own planning staff confirmed the damage in their June 11 report to PHC on Bill 98’s implications. The scale and pace of the reforms, staff wrote, “have created a degree of uncertainty regarding how the various stages of planning review and approvals function as an integrated system in practice.” That is staff language for: we no longer know the full scope of what we can do. Several Toronto Green Standard requirements — including GHG emissions limits, building energy performance, green roofs, and EV charging infrastructure — were shifted from mandatory to voluntary as a direct result.
Scarborough Is the Test Case
Scarborough’s councillors saw the parking problem coming. On April 30th, Scarborough Community Council unanimously adopted motion SC31.19. City Council adopted it on May 20-21, 2026, passing 19 to 3. Ron Parkinson and SUN submitted a support letter on the record. Marina Tadenc and the CSVSWRA did the same.
The motion asked three things: review the feasibility of pausing the elimination of minimum parking requirements for new developments in Scarborough until transit infrastructure is in place; review a bylaw framework to prohibit new condo and multiplex developments from petitioning for on-street residential parking permits in Scarborough; and review options to restore and expand public parking at Scarborough TTC stations.
Scarborough councillors passed a motion asking city staff to study whether parking minimums could be paused. Then Queen’s Park passed a law that constrains what city staff can legally recommend. The study is now being written inside constraints that didn’t exist when the motion passed.
But PH31.3 — the Scarborough zoning item that moved through PHC on June 11 and City Council on June 24-25 — tells the longer story. The January 2024 preliminary staff report that launched this process stated explicitly that bringing these lands into the city-wide by-law would “ensure the consistent and equitable application of important city-building initiatives such as recent housing regulations for missing middle housing and the removal of parking minimums.” That language is in the summary. Page one. The parking minimum removal was a stated purpose from the beginning, not an incidental outcome of administrative housekeeping.
City staff reviewed approximately 379 properties in the Scarborough district. The final report recommended incorporating 201 of them into Zoning By-law 569-2013. The affected addresses span Asterfield Drive, Birchmount Road, Dale Avenue, Jeremiah Lane, Kingston Road, Pidgeon Street, Pin Lane, Scarborough Golf Club Road, Sheppard Avenue East, and more than a dozen other streets across all six Scarborough wards. Scarborough was the last of four city districts to go through this process — staged behind Toronto East York, North York, and Etobicoke York, with the parking minimum removal framework already locked in from the earlier phases before Scarborough residents had their turn.
What the Ward Councillor Said — and What Happened Next
On June 10, 2026 — the day before the PHC hearing — Councillor Michael Thompson submitted a letter to the Planning and Housing Committee requesting deferral of PH31.3.
The letter is worth reading in full. Thompson wrote that the proposal “moves too quickly without adequately considering the unique circumstances of Scarborough’s residential neighbourhoods, particularly those within Ward 21.” He raised transportation, noting that many low-rise communities in Scarborough “do not have the same level of transit service available in other parts of Toronto” and that residents “often depend on personal vehicles to access employment, education, healthcare, recreation, and shopping.” He raised infrastructure capacity, noting that “Ward 21 is already experiencing substantial development activity” and that residents deserve confidence that infrastructure planning is keeping pace. He raised neighbourhood character. And he raised the one-size-fits-all critique directly: “planning policies should be responsive to local context rather than applying a one-size-fits-all framework across communities with very different needs and challenges.”
Growth should be accompanied by infrastructure improvements, not implemented in anticipation of improvements that have yet to materialize. — Councillor Michael Thompson, June 10, 2026
Thompson asked PHC to defer approval and direct staff to undertake further review of transportation impacts, parking implications, infrastructure capacity, neighbourhood compatibility, and Ward 21-specific considerations.
PHC adopted PH31.3 without amendments on June 11. City Council adopted it without amendments on June 24-25. By-law 650-2026 is now in force. The deferral request was not granted. No additional review was directed.
The arguments in Thompson’s letter are substantively identical to the arguments in SC31.19 — the motion Thompson voted against at City Council in May. That vote is on the public record. So is this letter. Residents of Ward 21 are entitled to weigh both.
The Question Still Waiting for an Answer
The SC31.19 feasibility report — directed by a 19-3 City Council vote — has not been delivered. The Chief Planner was asked to review the feasibility of pausing parking minimum elimination in Scarborough and report back. That report is being written inside a Bill 98 legislative framework that did not exist when the motion passed.
Does Bill 98, as now enacted, prevent the City of Toronto from acting on the parking pause requested in SC31.19? And if so, which specific provisions prevent it?
That question has not been answered publicly. When the SC31.19 feasibility report arrives, it will either confirm that the pause is legally viable, confirm that Bill 98 has foreclosed it, or dodge the question entirely. Each of those outcomes tells Scarborough residents something important about where the real fight has to happen.
Residents who showed up to speak at PHC on June 11 — or who intended to — deserved to know whether the decision-making body in front of them had the legal authority to give them what they were asking for. That answer was not provided. By-law 650-2026 passed anyway.
What Comes Next
Part 2 of this piece will be published when the SC31.19 feasibility report lands. It will assess what staff say about the parking pause’s legal viability under Bill 98, what Scarborough’s councillors do with that answer, and what residents and community organizations can actually do next — including the provincial track.
The Etobicoke parking parallel is already on the record — Councillor Holyday moved a mirror motion for his district at consecutive council meetings. The suburban coalition is wider than Scarborough. That matters heading into October.
The honest answer to “what can we do?” may require looking past City Hall entirely. That’s not defeat. That’s map-reading.
The Old Guardian applies a structured evidentiary standard to all claims. The legislative provisions cited are drawn from Bill 98 (Chapter 8, Statutes of Ontario 2026). The PH31.3 record, SC31.19 adoption, By-law 650-2026, the June 3 PH31.12 staff report, and the Thompson letter (June 10, 2026) are all public documents on the Toronto City Clerk’s record. The tension between SC31.19’s parking pause request and Bill 98’s planning constraints remains at Evidence level pending the SC31.19 feasibility report. The contradiction between Thompson’s May vote against SC31.19 and his June letter opposing PH31.3 is documented at Evidence level pending any explanation on the public record. No claim in this piece has been advanced beyond its verified source.
Chris Allen is a Ward 21 Scarborough resident and investigative journalist. The Old Guardian covers civic accountability in Scarborough and at Queen’s Park.