By Staff

May 26th, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

The Ontario government is taking action to protect communities and build a stronger and more resilient province by reintroducing the Emergency Management Modernization Act, 2025. The proposed legislation will enhance public safety and disaster response measures, including making Ontario Corps a key function of emergency responses in the province.

Jill Dunlop, Minister of Emergency Preparedness and Response.

“Extreme weather events like the ice storm this spring are unfortunately becoming more frequent. Our legislation reflects the need to be more prepared in the event of an emergency,” said Jill Dunlop, Minister of Emergency Preparedness and Response. “That’s why our government is recognizing the critical need for Ontario Corps, so they can be deployed at a moment’s notice to help protect families and build a stronger, safer and more resilient Ontario.”

Ontario Corps brings together experienced non-governmental partners and skilled volunteers to enhance on-the-ground emergency response that can be deployed quickly to support communities across the province. During the spring ice storm, Ontario Corps partners volunteered over 6,000 hours, delivering generators, providing 3,725 meals and food hampers, conducting over 4,100 wellness checks, providing tree-clearing services and supporting evacuation reception centres.

Following the establishment of the Ministry of Emergency Preparedness and Response as a standalone ministry with a dedicated minister in March, this legislation, if passed, would enable a more effective, coordinated and comprehensive approach to provincial and community emergency management. The changes would prioritize community-led approaches that help municipalities design emergency management programs that reflect their unique needs and capacities.

Enhancing Ontario’s emergency management capacity is part of the government’s plan to build a stronger and more resilient province with the necessary tools in place to ensure the safety and wellbeing of people across the province.

Registration for Ontario Corps

Quick Facts

• The proposed Emergency Management Modernization Act, 2025 is the first comprehensive update to Ontario’s emergency management legislation in more than 15 years.
• The legislation is informed by valuable feedback from partners, best practices in emergency management and lessons learned from past emergencies. The province engaged with more than 550 partners, including municipalities, First Nations communities and emergency management organizations. The ministry also received 91 written submissions on a publicly posted discussion guide.
• The legislation builds on the government’s Provincial Emergency Management Strategy and Action Plan that outlines key actions the province is taking to ensure communities are safe, practiced and prepared before, during and after emergencies.
• Ontario is building a new Emergency Preparedness and Response Headquarters. The new state-of-the-art complex will be designed to support the province’s work to prepare for and respond to all types of disasters that will operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year. It will include dedicated training rooms and warehousing and aviation infrastructure and will be built to withstand all types of disasters including earthquakes, tornadoes and floods.

By Staff

May 26th, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

Current OPP location in Burlington

There will eventually be a new Ontario Police detachment in Burlington.

Where it will be located, who will actually build it and when will building start – unanswered questions at this point.

In addition to building a new regional headquarters in Thunder Bay, the government is building 12 other new detachments one of which will be in  Burlington.

The provincial government explains that: “This project demonstrates a shared commitment with our government to ensure the OPP is as effective as possible at keeping communities safe,” said OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique. “Providing our officers, civilian and volunteer members with these modern new facilities will better position the OPP to evolve as we strive to be our very best at delivering on our public safety mandate.”

Burlington OPP location 24/7

In partnership with Infrastructure Ontario, the province is launching a competitive process to find qualified teams to help design, build, and finance the new detachments.

By Staff

May 25^th, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

Housing experts are pushing back against a federal cabinet minister’s recent claim that home prices don’t need to go down in order to restore housing affordability.

Gregor Robertson – Minister of Housing – Asked if “home prices need to fall” Answered “No, I think that we need to deliver more supply”.

Gregor Robertson, the former mayor of Vancouver who was elected to the House of Commons in April, sparked the debate after he was sworn in as housing minister earlier this, when a reporter asked him whether he thinks home prices need to fall.

“No, I think that we need to deliver more supply, make sure the market is stable. It’s a huge part of our economy,” he said.

Robertson added that Canada lacks affordable housing and championed Ottawa’s efforts to build out the supply of homes priced below market rates.

Mike Moffatt, founding director of the Missing Middle Institute, had a different answer when asked whether housing can be made more affordable for the average Canadian without a drop in market values.

Mike Moffatt: “…it would take 18 years to return to more affordable home price-to-income ratios…”

“The short answer is no. It’s simply not possible to restore broad-based affordability to the middle class without prices going down,” he said.

Moffatt crunched the numbers last month on how long it would take for housing to return to 2005 levels of affordability if the average home price holds steady while wages grow at a nominal pace of three per cent annually.

Across Canada, he said, it would take 18 years to return to more affordable home price-to-income ratios — while in Ontario and British Columbia it would take roughly 25 years.

In B.C. and Ontario, Moffatt said, wages and home prices have become so detached from one another that it’s not “realistic” to rely on wage growth to catch up to housing costs.

While Moffatt said he welcomes policies that encourage more housing for vulnerable Canadians and those experiencing homelessness, efforts to build more below-market housing units won’t address the “middle-class housing crisis.”

Days after Robertson weighed in, Prime Minister Mark Carney was asked the same question. Rather than offering a yes-or-no answer, he asserted instead that he wants “home prices to be more affordable for Canadians.”

There is a lot of personal equity in these homes: should the prices fall – there will be a lot of unhappy property owners. If the prices do not fall there will be millions of young people who will never be able to afford a home – which is the challenge Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberal government face.

He cited Liberal election campaign pledges to drop the GST on new homes and offer incentives to municipalities to cut development charges in half.

The Liberals are looking to lower the cost of homebuilding with the aim of doubling the pace of housing starts in Canada. The government wants to scale up the use of prefabricated parts and other technological advances to streamline housing development.

Carney said that this boost in supply would “make home prices much lower than they otherwise would be.”

Moffatt said he agrees that lowering the cost of homebuilding would help to make homes more affordable.

In fact, he said, if the cost of building doesn’t go down and if home prices stagnate or decline, development will immediately cease to be profitable for builders, causing housing starts to dry up.

“I think that should be the primary focus of all three orders of government … figuring out how we can reduce the cost of home construction in order to create affordability and to lower prices,” he said.

Moshe Lander agrees: “…home prices must come down if the government hopes to see broad affordability restored to the market over the next generation.”

Concordia University economist Moshe Lander agrees with Moffatt that home prices must come down if the government hopes to see broad affordability restored to the market over the next generation.

But he also questions whether the federal government should be the arbiter of housing affordability in the first place, given that so many of the political decisions are out of its control.

Lifting regulatory barriers to boosting supply is largely a matter for provincial and municipal governments, as are efforts to encourage more students to develop skills in the trades.

“And so for the federal government to say, ‘We’re going to try and incentivize this,’ I think they’re going miss the mark in whatever they’re trying to do because really, at the end of the day, it’s not their issue,” Lander said.

Lander said he also understands why politicians of all stripes are reluctant to come out in favour of lowering home prices.

Any explicit government effort to bring down housing prices down would be seen as an attack on homeowners’ equity — an asset many use to fund retirements or other long-term savings as they pay off their mortgages.

“Homeowners will not accept it,” Lander said. “And you risk alienating a very sizable and influential voting bloc.”

At the local level, he said, politicians tend to seek the support of homeowners because — unlike renters — they tend to stay put in a riding or district.

Lander said that most efforts to win renters’ votes tend to be “tepid” at best and “counterproductive” at worst. Policies that target the demand-side of the equation — helping Canadians become homeowners — tend to put upward pressure on home prices at the same time, he said.

Lander said part of the path to affordable housing has to be a shift away from the narrative that Canadians have been fed for generations — that home ownership is a lofty goal to aspire to and renters are “second-class citizens.”

“I don’t think that we’re being clear with society that this is what that might look like,” he said.

Starting on July 1, buyers are encouraged to notify Tarion, the province’s new home warranty provider, of their purchase of a new or preconstruction home within 45 days.

As of 2026, if they fail to do so, they’ll be insured for less of their deposit, should anything go wrong with the project.

“It’s a step to notify us that you’ve entered into an agreement,” said Tarion CEO Peter Balasubramanian. “And then that helps us keep track of what’s happening.”

The purchase of a new or preconstruction home is covered by Tarion policies.

An independent non-profit established in 1976, Tarion has a mandate to protect buyers of new homes in the province. For example, if a builder goes bankrupt and runs off with a buyer’s deposit, the consumer can make a claim to them.

The new step only applies to buyers of new freehold homes, not condos.

Tarion has developed a new online portal where buyers can register their purchases, and enter information such as the home’s address, their deposit amount and the builder. This helps Tarion identify whether the builder is legal, and if they’re not they will stop consumers from giving them any more money, Balasubramanian said.

Under new provincial legislation, as of Jan. 1, 2026, if you don’t register within 45 days you’ll be put into a pool with other buyers who also didn’t register, which is capped at $10 million per year, Balasubramanian said.

As for how much your deposit is insured for, it depends how many other buyers there are who are looking for their deposits back.

Tarion CEO Peter Balasubramanian

“If there’s not enough to go around, you would end up getting less. And that’s a real risk,” said Balasubramanian

Independent consumer advocate Barbara Captijn called the new registration requirement confusing and unfair to buyers.ptijn said the amount that buyers who don’t register will be dinged for on their deposit protection is not clear.

“Through no fault of their own a lot of people will be penalized,” she added. It shouldn’t be the buyers or victims who are punished when buildings go bankrupt, she said, but the shady builders. The person who “took the deposit money and ran off with it to the Caribbean.”

Balasubramanian said Tarion is also pursuing bad builders through increasing the penalties on illegal building activity and devoting more investigative resources to finding them, in conjunction with the Home Construction Regulatory authority.

He admits that there is some “uncertainty” around the deposit insurance for buyers that don’t register. But a simpler system could have left homebuyers with even less.

By Tom Parkin

May 23rd, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

Since 2014, as neighbour British Columbia’s economy has grown over 31 per cent, Alberta’s GDP has increased just over seven per cent, hampered by three years of recession and many years of weakness. Alberta’s economy contracted in 2015, 2016 and 2020.

While all provinces fell into recession in 2020, Alberta’s economy entered the recession weaker, its decline was deeper and its rebound was smaller than among the other three largest provinces.

According to the GDP data released earlier this month, 2024 was a better year for Alberta, with GDP growth of 2.7 per cent, higher then Ontario (1.2%), BC (1.2%) or Quebec (1.3%). But the oil price cut caused by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war has set off a new wave of worry for 2025.

Political instability amid economic weakness

Amid the economic turmoil, the province has had six premiers over the past decade.

Alison Redford quit in spring 2014 after a caucus revolt, replaced by Dave Hancock until Jim Prentice was elected by PC members that fall.

In spring 2015, as the province began two years of recession driven by the dramatic drop in oil price from over $100 a barrel to under $30, Rachel Notley’s New Democrats were elected. During her term, the Progressive Conservatives and Wildrose parties merged to create the United Conservative Party, which then won the 2019 election, making Jason Kenney premier.

But less than three years into his term, in May 2022 Kenney quit after receiving 51 per cent support in a leadership review. Danielle Smith became premier in October 2022 and won the 2023 provincial vote.

With the emergence of a two party system, the UCP has become mainly a party of rural ridings, where landowners are more likely to directly derive income from oil or gas.

The coup against Kenney and Smith’s leadership win were led by the UCP’s far-right, which has now backed Smith into a corner with their support of separatism and, one presumes, their ultimate goal of merging with the United States of Donald Trump, who unabashedly speaks for increased oil and gas extraction.

The province’s economy, when the value of oil and gas extraction is removed, has barely gained any ground in 10 years, rising from $290 billion to just $296 billion, an increase of just two per cent. In the same period, the value of oil sands extraction has increased 63 per cent from $24 billion to $39 billion.

The value of non-oil sands extraction remained stagnant from 2014 to 2021, but in the past three years has moved up from $15 billion to $18 billion, a 28 per cent increase.

The dollar value of crop and animal food production has fallen, coming in lower in 2024 than a decade ago, leaving more farms dependant on alternative revenues, such as oil and gas wells. Alberta’s Energy Regulator reports there are 53,000 active oil and gas wells across the province.

The decline in Alberta’s economy, save and except oil and gas, easily explains the wave of political desperation to hang onto the one sector providing growing revenues. It’s not just a desperation for those whose household incomes are derived from oil and gas, but also the provincial government itself, which raises almost a quarter of its revenues from oil and gas royalties.

This was predicted to be a better year for the Alberta economy, but Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariff war has cut oil prices on the expectation of lower demand due to lower international trade and lower global economic activity.

The Alberta budget is premised on a barrel of West Texas Intermediate oil selling at $68, but this morning a WTI barrel was priced at about $61. The difference could double the provincial budget deficit to $12 billion in 2025.

By Staff

May 23rd, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

Applications to serve on the City of Burlington’s School Traffic Safety & Mobility Committee and the Council Remuneration Review Working Group are being accepted now, until May 30, 2025. 

Members of the now-defunct Waterfront Access and Protection Advisory Committee did make some positive recommendations that were adopted.

Members of the Council Remuneration Review Working Group review and make recommendations on the compensation, benefits, and all applicable expenses of elected officials. 

Serving on a committee offers the opportunity to expand your network, learn more about your local government, and build new skills. Individuals aged 18+ from all backgrounds are encouraged to apply. To learn more, visit burlington.ca.