Burlington Mayor Marianne Meed Ward is firing back at Ontario’s Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing after the city was notified it is not eligible to receive funding from the province’s Building Faster Fund.

The fund was set up last August and serves to provide significant new funding by awarding money to municipalities that meet their annual housing targets. 

Meed Ward said, “what we do, is we issue permits and approvals, but the metric that they are using to judge us and award money, is foundations poured.”

The province measures a municipalities’ housing targets through what it calls “housing starts.”

A stage of building, defined by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Council as when the concrete has been poured for the footing of the structure.

But Meed Ward takes issue with this definition saying that this is out of the city’s hands. 

“We don’t pour foundations, it’s not appropriate to judge us on something that is out of our control,” said Meed Ward.

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The city’s target for 2023 was 2,127 housing starts, but the province says the city only had 300 making them ineligible for the fund. 

Meed Ward said the province should look to the number of permits the city has approved instead as a measure of how many projects there are. 

“We have 41,000 units in our permit pipeline, we have over four-thousand units approved waiting for builders to build, we have been in a situation of in-fill, high density, multi-tower, complex developments, that take time,” explained Meed Ward.  

However, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing of Ontario, Paul Calandra, says permits are not enough.

“We said right from the beginning is we want shovels in the ground and foundations. We said it a number of times, a permit doesn’t equate to someone moving into a home” said Minister Calandra. 

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Premier Ford announced last month that any money left over in the Building Faster Fund would be available for municipalities that didn’t meet their housing targets, like Burlington. They just have to apply for it. But Meed Ward says there’s no money left. 

“It has been handed out to those municipalities that probably had applications in the works years before the fund was ever created and they are just coming online right now,” said Meed Ward.

Meanwhile, Calandra affirmed any money leftover is going toward infrastructure that supports housing. 

“Look, I’ll continue to work with her, we’ve got an aggressive target, we’re going to meet it and we’re going to make sure we bring Burlington with us.” Said Calandra, “if they need a little bit more help to do that, to look at some of the cost, there must be some other reasons why in and around Burlington they’re able to meet their targets, and in that community, they’re not.”

Around Burlington, the province says Oakville, Milton, Hamilton, and Welland exceeded their 2023 housing target, while St. Catharines is on track. However, the municipality of Niagara Falls did not meet last year’s target. 

Sources tell CHCH News Premier Ford will be coming to Hamilton next month to present a cheque from the “Building Faster Fund”, though it is unclear exactly how much.