Land-use Planning is Energy Planning — Whether the Province Gets It or Not

Ontario is making it harder for municipal governments to participate in the low-carbon energy transition — a move that benefits the incumbent energy system, especially the use of fossil gas for heating.

A community can have a great community energy plan on paper and still miss its targets if planning decisions keep getting made without an energy lens. The plan doesn't fail on paper — it fails in a development approvals process that never references it.

The boundary between land-use and energy planning came down, then went back up

Prior to 2020, the boundary between land-use and energy planning was beginning to come down. Since then, the boundary has begun to go up again. An important planning policy to “maximize opportunities for the use of renewable energy systems and alternative energy systems” was removed from the 2020 Provincial Policy Statement (PPS). While further changes in 2024 revealed a shift away from measurable to more general language, it was a separate set of legislation that stripped away many of the legal tools municipalities — including Green Development Standards —used to enforce energy and climate requirements for new development.

But rules are not a worldview

Donella Meadows' well-known framework for where to intervene in a system to make change ranks levers by how deep they reach. Rules — the specific requirements, permissions, and prohibitions a policy sets — are important but sit a bit further down on the framework. A provincial policy statement is a rule. It can be added in by one government and removed by the next, which is exactly what happened here.

Paradigms though— the underlying belief that generates the rules in the first place — sit much higher. "Land-use planning is energy planning" is a paradigm, not a rule. A planner who holds it keeps asking the energy question with or without a clause in a provincial statement requiring it, because the belief doesn't depend on the rule to exist.

Proof this works under today's rules

Brampton and Caledon commissioned community energy plans for secondary planning.  Energy modelling is used to support the inclusion of energy policy directly into the planning framework for net-zero development. These policies encourage an informed dialogue with the development industry. No provincial mandate forced that — these municipalities chose to design it in from the start, using tools it already had.

And municipalities continue to use Green Development Standards (GDS). While changes to provincial legislation have affected GDS enforcement on new development applications, municipalities still promote climate and energy best practices in new development. The mechanism changed from requirement to negotiation. The underlying ask didn't disappear.

The bottom line: The province can remove a rule, and it can weaken planning tools but a planner who's internalized that land use is energy planning finds another way to keep the conversation alive. Just imagine if the rules and the worldview were aligned once again.