What stakeholders should expect from proposals in Bill 98

By Paul De Berardis

June 5, 2026

Proposals in Ontario's Bill 98 continue to generate intense discussion across the province’s planning, development and municipal sectors, as stakeholders digest all the proposals tied to the legislation.

The sweeping reforms signal a broader provincial effort to standardize development approvals, accelerate housing construction, and reduce municipal regulatory authority over site-level design requirements.

Introduced as the Building Homes and Improving Transportation Infrastructure Act, 2026, Bill 98, the legislation proposes extensive amendments affecting planning approvals, transit co-ordination, municipal infrastructure governance, and environmental standards.

RESCON has long been of the view that Ontario’s current development approvals system is siloed and slow-moving, further eroding over the last 15 years or so. The debate, however, centres on how far the province should go in centralizing authority and limiting municipal discretion. 

While many municipal officials feel Bill 98 oversteps local planning processes, most Ontario municipalities do not have much of a leg to stand on, as GTA municipalities consistently benchmark lower in jurisdictional comparisons with other similar municipalities across Canada due to protracted development approval timeframes.

Ontario municipal benchmarking studies regularly show an Official Plan Amendment (OPA)/Zoning By-law Amendment (ZBA) or Plan of Subdivision, which is regulated to 120 days, often take two to three years, followed by Site Plan Control, which requires a 60-day timeline, but realistically also drags on for another two to three years. There is a clear problem amongst Ontario municipalities, which is why the province has been working to address these systemic barriers and facilitate a more streamlined path to the construction of new housing.  

To tackle upstream challenges in the development approvals process, the province is looking to streamline and standardize official plans. These reforms are intended to accelerate homebuilding, reduce approval delays and create more consistency for developers and municipalities. Official plans across Ontario have become extremely complex, which has resulted in overly restrictive, inconsistent and slow approval processes.

There is also a lack of standardization across the province's 444 municipalities, which each use their own unique definitions, land-use designations and formatting. There is also a disconnect with provincial housing targets, whereby local plans historically emphasized preservation and timid, phased growth.

Another Bill 98 proposal has its sights set on the Planning Act to limit the information and materials municipalities and other planning authorities can require as part of a “complete application” for development approvals. The proposal is intended to create more consistency and predictability across Ontario’s planning system while helping accelerate housing development by reducing application delays and administrative requirements.

Under the proposed framework, municipalities would only be permitted to request materials specifically authorized by provincial regulation. Under this approach, municipalities could only require a shortlist of “core studies,” including Environmental Impact Statements, Environmental Site Assessments, Functional Servicing Reports, Geotechnical Reports, Hydrogeological Reports, Planning Justification Reports and Transportation Impact Studies, whereas any additional studies would be viewed as “contingent studies” and only needed if required to assess certain specific objectives.

Other aspects of Bill 98 target one of municipalities’ most restrictive planning tools; site plan control. The proposal would remove or narrow several conditions municipalities can currently impose through the site plan approval process. On its own, this might appear procedural. In practice, however, many planners and municipal officials see site plan control as one of the last remaining tools local governments have to influence urban design, environmental performance, accessibility, landscaping, stormwater integration, and climate resilience at the development stage.

Site plan control is an optional land use planning tool under section 41 of the Planning Act which was intended to address health and safety as well as functional aspects of a proposed development, prior to the issuance of a building permit. However, it has morphed into a catch-all whereby municipalities have incorporated every social policy objective imaginable into this process. 

As Bill 98 continues through the legislative process, one thing is increasingly clear: this is not simply a housing bill. It is a structural overhaul of Ontario’s planning and infrastructure governance framework. 

Bill 98 has the potential to represent a critical piece of that transformation because it seeks to reverse years of scope creep that municipalities have burdened onto the development approvals process.

Something must give if industry is to have a chance to deliver more housing that consumers can afford, and Bill 98 is taking the view that sometimes less is more when it comes to municipal planning bureaucracy.