Ontario’s Bill 98 strikes a final blow to Toronto’s green building policies
It’s not the sort of statistic you hear too often, but over the past 20 years, the City of Toronto’s pioneering sustainable building policies have spurred the creation of thousands of new green jobs. What’s more, the green roof bylaw and then the Toronto Green Standard encouraged developers and homebuilders to improve the energy efficiency of their projects and reduced the carbon footprint associated with built form.
The initiatives were part of a boom that has been impossible to ignore: until the international housing market collapse in the past two years, Toronto had more building activity than any other North American city.
Despite that record of achievement, Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government, led by Premier Doug Ford, has spent the past few years rolling back these policies. In early May, the province finally passed an omnibus piece of legislation called the Building Homes and Improving Transportation Infrastructure Act, 2026, or Bill 98.
The provisions removed requirements that builders provide charging for electric vehicles and eliminated all references to mandatory “sustainable design” from the province’s planning law — a move that effectively killed the Toronto Green Standard. Bill 98 built on the Ford government’s decision last year to repeal legislation that mandated green roofs on new buildings. According to the city, the bylaw between 2010 and 2025 had spawned a $50-million industry and created 1,200 buildings with green roofs across Toronto.
City officials say the Toronto Green Standard has removed almost one million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over the past 16 years and has saved homeowners and building operators an estimated $407.6 million in utility costs. “The city is not supportive of the proposed changes as they would limit Toronto’s ability to advance local climate objectives and to continue the significant progress made in achieving sustainable development that has been made possible through the Toronto Green Standard (TGS),” chief planner Jason Thorne says in a statement to Corporate Knights, adding that the city will cooperate with the province on implementing the new law.
Bill 98 eliminates future cost savings from building out the city’s green roofs, says How-Sen Chong, a climate campaigner for the Toronto Environmental Alliance. “Just the energy efficiency piece [of the TGS] has saved Torontonians millions and millions of dollars since its introduction 20 years ago.”
How it worked
Modelled on British Columbia’s innovative “energy step code,” Toronto’s green standard took a carrot-and-stick approach to incentivizing builders to improve the carbon performance and resilience of their projects. The standard laid out four “tiers,” each with increasingly stringent targets. Every proposed building above a certain size had to satisfy the lowest tier, and developers became eligible for certain incentives if they set out to meet the higher-tier standards. Public-sector projects had to conform to the highest tier. The Toronto Green Standard didn’t mandate the materials or systems used in new buildings but rather set out performance targets that projects had to meet. (This approach is similar to fuel efficiency benchmarks for vehicles: the rules don’t tell the manufacturer how to get there but instead specify the goal.)
At regular intervals, the city increases the targets, such that the new lowest mandatory tier is equivalent to the previous second tier, and so on — an approach that guarantees a steadily increasing baseline for building energy performance. One of its key attributes is the predictability it provided developers who have to manage long time horizons. It also encouraged green building designers and suppliers to invest in the Toronto market, knowing that developers and architects would need to source increasingly energy-efficient components.
The goal at the core of the Toronto Green Standard (and B.C.’s step code) was to forge a path between the minimum energy and emissions standards in many North American building codes and the far more ambitious versions found in the United Kingdom and northern Europe.
Government attacks
Bill 98, in a way, is about dealing with unfinished political business. The Ford government initially came for the green standard in 2022, with an earlier piece of legislation. But City of Toronto lawyers concluded that as part of the city’s climate plan, the Toronto Green Standard regulations could stand.
This latest effort has plenty of detractors. Peter Tabuns, the NDP’s environment and conservation critic, points out that the Ford government’s developer-friendly policies run counter to worrisome climate-related weather patterns, such as extreme heat, urban wildfires and flooding, as well as rising fossil fuel costs. As for the new EV charger policy, Tabuns says, “If you want to have an automotive industry, you need to go electric. Destroying the [charging] infrastructure is undermining the industry.”
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Bill 98 “arbitrarily scapegoats parking for zero-emissions vehicles selectively,” adds Phil Pothen, counsel at Environmental Defence, who says the provision runs counter to planning laws that have eliminated the mandatory minimum underground parking requirements for new projects, rules that go some distance in reducing all the carbon associated with concrete garages. “They would deprive municipalities of the power to require that at least some of the parking developers do choose to include is equipped to accommodate electric vehicles.”
Other ways forward
However, Pothen does point out that the goal of reducing urban carbon emissions is complex, and doesn’t just pivot on green building rules. Besides the elimination of parking minimums, he points to new planning rules that allow for more density by permitting missing-middle-type housing in areas once set aside for detached homes. “This is not, in a way, the absolute end of the world for Toronto’s sustainability efforts, because at least the current mayor and council have been willing to continue moving beyond just the Toronto Green Standard.”
In the aftermath of the passage of the law, Tabuns says municipalities may still be able to offer incentives for developers to voluntarily adopt green building targets, although he’s not confident that even such watered-down measures will survive the government’s campaign to purge climate policies aimed at the building industry. The Tories, as he puts is, “are not a particularly forward-looking bunch.”
John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist who writes about cities, climate and business.
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