The Pharmacy Avenue Playbook
What a closed file on Pharmacy Avenue tells us about how “minor” decisions get made
On May 12, 2026, the City of Toronto’s Committee of Adjustment mailed out a routine notice. File A0231/25SC, 910 Pharmacy Avenue, approved on condition. Two variances granted, unanimous vote, five signatures. No on-site parking for a 30-unit building. A setback more than half the legally required distance, waved through as “minor.”
The appeal window closed two weeks later. Nobody appealed. The file is now stamped, in the City’s own language, Final and Binding.
By every formal measure, this story is over. Decision made, process followed, record closed.
But “Final and Binding” doesn’t mean the public has nothing left to say about how we got here — and a close read of this one file says a great deal about how “minor” decisions get made along one of Scarborough’s major corridors.
The parking that doesn’t count
The applicant’s planner was upfront about it, in writing, in the official planning rationale: the building would have zero on-site parking spaces for visitors. In their place, a single “lay-by” space was proposed on the public boulevard — and the rationale itself acknowledges that this space “cannot be counted toward zoning compliance because it is located within the public right-of-way.”
Read that again. The mitigation offered for the missing parking requirement is, by the applicant’s own admission, not a legal substitute for the parking requirement. It was offered anyway. It was accepted anyway.
This is what a “minor” variance looks like in practice: a requirement is waived, a token gesture is offered in its place, and the gesture is conceded up front to not actually meet the standard it’s substituting for.
The objection that didn’t move the needle
This wasn’t an uncontested file. Ward 21 Councillor Michael Thompson wrote to the Committee twice — first in January, and again on May 6, 2026, the day of the hearing itself.
His second letter didn’t hedge. He laid out, point by point, why the lay-by space couldn’t address real parking demand from a 30-unit building, why the nearest transit option was too far to substitute for a car for seniors, families, and anyone carrying groceries in a Toronto winter, and why the cumulative effect of approvals like this one falls on streets that were never designed for it. He closed with a direct, unambiguous ask: refuse the variances.
The Committee approved both variances that same day, unanimously, with no indication in the decision that any of this was weighed. To be fair, this is standard practice — Committee of Adjustment decisions are boilerplate by design and don’t typically respond to individual correspondence point by point. But that standard practice has a cost: when a sitting councillor’s detailed, on-the-record objection produces no visible effect and no visible response, residents are left to wonder whether engaging with the process changes anything at all.
The legacy framework that’s outdated — until it isn’t
Here’s where the file gets genuinely interesting, and where “The Pharmacy Avenue Playbook” earns its title.
The variance to Chapter 900 Exception RD 289(E) — the provision setting a 7.5-metre building setback from Pharmacy Avenue — was reduced to 3.0 metres. Less than half. The planner’s justification, in their own words: this Chapter 900 exception “predates the City’s Major Streets policies and reflects a historical zoning framework,” and the reduced setback “reconciles a legacy site-specific zoning provision with the City’s contemporary planning framework” under By-law 608-2024.
In plain terms: the old rule is outdated, the new framework should govern, and the Committee should treat the 7.5-metre requirement as a relic to be set aside.
The Committee agreed. Unanimously.
Now consider this: the same planning firm, on a different application currently before the Toronto Local Appeal Body for a property on the same street, leans on a different Chapter 900 exception — and in that filing, the Chapter 900 framework isn’t a historical relic to be reconciled away. It’s a live, operative entitlement, cited in the same breath as the same contemporary By-law 608-2024, to justify more relief than the contemporary standard would otherwise permit.
Same chapter of the zoning by-law. Same street. Same firm. Within months of each other. And the legal status of the framework — outdated here, binding there — depends entirely on which answer gets the application approved.
We’re not arguing either file should have gone differently. We’re pointing out that a Committee approving variances based on “the old rule doesn’t really apply anymore” should probably know that the same applicant is, on a concurrent file, arguing the opposite when it suits them. Right now, nothing in the process surfaces that connection. The Committee that approved 910 had no way of knowing what was being argued, at the same time, about 397.
One file, a bigger pattern
910 Pharmacy Avenue is closed. We’re not asking anyone to reopen it, and we’re not accusing anyone of bad faith — planners advocate for their clients, that’s the job, and Committees approve what’s in front of them under the rules as written.
What this file documents is something more structural: a pattern of individually “minor” approvals — a parking space that doesn’t count, a setback cut by more than half, a framework that’s flexible exactly as far as it needs to be — each one weighed in isolation, none of them weighed against each other, and a public record that, once the ink is dry, gives residents no further say.
The Chapter 900 question raised here isn’t academic. A separate application on Pharmacy Avenue, where the same Chapter 900 framework is central to the planning argument, is currently before the Toronto Local Appeal Body. How that question gets resolved there may say something about whether “the old rule doesn’t apply anymore, except when it does” is a sustainable way to evaluate development along this corridor — or any corridor.
We’ll be watching.
The Old Guardian tracks civic accountability across Scarborough and Queen’s Park. File documents referenced in this piece are matters of public record, available through the City of Toronto’s Application Information Centre under file number A0231/25SC.