"The Ontario Municipal Board attracted power to it from the time it was formed in 1906 as a railway overseer and thereafter until 1932 when it became the regulatory tribunal for municipal financing and urban and regional planning applications. By 2006, the same government of Ontario that had entrusted the OMB with pre-eminent authority as the provincial land use, expropriation, and development charge adjudicator with oversight power over elected municipal councils, decided to merge its administration and location with four other boards and cross-appoint OMB members to those boards. The roster of OMB members began to contract... it was now part of an undefined, vaguely delineated entity called a cluster, and the cluster was called the Environment and Land Tribunals Ontario - ELTO. Starting with its apex in influence and attention through years when it shaped the planning law of Ontario, this book takes you through a story of the rise, decline and reform of the most controversial board in Canada. For experts, it recasts the Hopedale and Baker doctrines for modern administrative law. For public administration, it suggests caution and boldness."--

Illuminates OMB practices of overturning municipal land-use planning decisions to impose its own policies, which are generally protective of private interests, and of applying provincial planning policies within the context of its own standards.

The Ontario Municipal Board is an independent provincial planning appeals body that has wielded major influence on Toronto’s urban development. In this book, Aaron A. Moore examines the effect that the OMB has had on the behavior and relationships of Toronto’s main political actors, including city planners, developers, neighbourhood associations, and local politicians. Moore’s findings draw on a quantitative analysis of all OMB decisions and settlements from 2000 through 2006, as well as eight in-depth case studies. The cases, which examine a variety of development proposals that resulted in OMB appeals, compare the decisions of Toronto’s political actors to those typified in American local political economy analyses. A much-needed contribution to the literature on the politics of urban development in Toronto since the 1970s, Planning Politics in Toronto challenges popular preconceptions of the OMB’s role in Toronto’s patterns of growth and change.