Ontario & Toronto: Bill 23 (province) + Toronto Multiplex (EHON)

By 2022, Ontario faced the same problem as much of Canada: not enough homes for a fast-growing population, and prices and rents that had climbed far past what ordinary households could pay. The provincial government's answer was a single, sweeping piece of legislation built around one number. It set a goal of 1.5 million new homes by 2031, and Bill 23 was the law meant to clear the path to reach it (Osler).

Bill 23, formally the More Homes Built Faster Act, 2022, moved through the legislature at unusual speed. It had its first reading on October 25, 2022 and received royal assent just over a month later, on November 28, 2022, becoming Statutes of Ontario 2022, chapter 21 (Legislative Assembly of Ontario). The pace itself became part of the story. Between first reading and royal assent, the government made significant changes during the committee stage, including removing third parties' right to appeal consents and minor variances at the Ontario Land Tribunal (Gowling WLG). The bill touched many statutes at once, including the Planning Act, the Development Charges Act, and the City of Toronto Act, which is why its effects reached so far so quickly.

The part of Bill 23 that matters most for ordinary homeowners is a change to the Planning Act that legalizes gentle density across the province by right. On most residential lots in Ontario, an owner can now have up to three residential units as of right, without applying for a rezoning. The standard configuration is two units in the main building plus one in an accessory building, with no minimum unit sizes imposed (Osler). "As of right" is the key phrase: it means the city must permit the units if they meet the written rules, with no public hearing and no chance for neighbours to lobby a council to block the project.

Two further rules make these units much cheaper and easier to build. First, a municipality can require no more than one parking space for the additional units, which removes one of the most common and most expensive obstacles to adding homes on a small lot (Osler). Second, the new units are exempt from development charges, community benefit charges, and parkland dedication requirements (Osler). Development charges are the fees a city collects from a builder to help pay for the roads, pipes, parks, and transit that new residents will use. Waiving them on a second and third unit can save a homeowner tens of thousands of dollars per project. These provisions came into force on the day the bill received royal assent, November 28, 2022 (Osler).

It is worth being precise about the ceiling. Bill 23's province-wide right stops at three units. Going beyond that, to a fourplex or larger, still depends on what each individual city decides to allow in its own zoning by-law. That distinction is what makes Toronto's separate reform so important.

Toronto did not wait for the province to set the ceiling for it. As part of a multi-year program called Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods, the city council adopted Official Plan and zoning by-law amendments on May 10, 2023 that permit up to four units, a fourplex, as of right citywide on residential lots (City of Toronto). This went a step beyond Bill 23's province-wide floor of three units. An owner in Toronto could now convert a single house into a duplex, triplex, or fourplex, or build a new multiplex from the ground up, with no rezoning and no public meeting.

The intent was to bring back the kind of small, multi-unit housing that builders used to put up routinely before single-family-only zoning spread across the city's neighbourhoods. These are the so-called missing middle homes: bigger than a condo unit, smaller than an apartment tower, and well suited to families. On paper, Toronto had done exactly what housing reformers across North America had been asking for. The harder question, the one that decides whether a zoning change matters, is how many homes it actually produced.

This is the heart of the Ontario story, and it is a sobering one. From the time Toronto adopted the fourplex by-law in May 2023 through November 2024, roughly 750 builders applied to build multiplexes, about 452 permits were issued, and only about 108 projects were actually finished (City of Toronto). The gap between applications and finished buildings shows how long it takes for a paper permission to turn into a place someone can live in.

The more important number is what kind of housing those permits produced. The 452 permits accounted for roughly 1,228 units in total, but only about 726 were genuinely new homes (City of Toronto). As aggregated and reported by the municipal-politics newsletter City Hall Watcher, that means roughly three-quarters of the activity was conversions rather than net new construction: existing space inside houses being formally divided into separate units, rather than new floor area being added to the housing supply. A conversion is not worthless; it can create a legal rental where an informal basement suite used to be. But it adds far fewer new homes than a from-scratch build, and the headline permit count overstates how much the policy moved the needle. For a city chasing a large housing target, the lesson is that legalizing the fourplex is necessary but not sufficient. The economics of small-scale building, land costs, construction costs, and financing, still determine whether anyone actually breaks new ground.

The most revealing twist came when Toronto tried to go one step further and largely backed off. City staff recommended permitting sixplexes citywide, partly because doing so was tied to a federal funding agreement. Instead, on June 25, 2025, council voted to permit sixplexes in only nine wards, leaving the rest of the city, mostly the suburban wards, to opt in later if their local councillors chose to. The vote was 18 to 6 in favour of the narrowed approach (CBC News). The nine wards that got citywide sixplex permission were largely the older, central, transit-served parts of the city, including Parkdale-High Park, Davenport, Spadina-Fort York, University-Rosedale, Toronto-St. Paul's, Toronto Centre, Toronto-Danforth, and Beaches-East York, alongside Scarborough North, where a sixplex pilot was already running (CBC News).

What makes this notable is that council narrowed the policy even though federal money was on the line. Toronto's agreement under the federal Housing Accelerator Fund is worth about $471 million in total, paid in instalments (CBC News). Permitting more low-rise, multi-unit housing as of right was one of the conditions of that deal. After the vote, the federal government warned that if Toronto did not fully deliver on its commitments, it would cut funding equivalent to 25 per cent of an annual payment (CP24). With the agreement structured as roughly equal annual instalments, 25 per cent of one year's payment works out to roughly $30 million. In other words, a council majority chose to limit where sixplexes are allowed even at the risk of leaving tens of millions of federal dollars on the table, a clear sign of how strong neighbourhood-level resistance to density can be, even where senior governments are paying cities to allow it.

Running underneath the housing debate is a quieter argument about money. When Bill 23 waived development charges and parkland fees on additional units, it removed a major source of the cash that cities use to build the infrastructure new residents need. Someone still has to pay for the parks, water mains, and transit, and the worry from the municipal side is that the bill simply shifts onto existing property taxpayers.

The Association of Municipalities of Ontario, the body that represents the province's cities and towns, estimated that Bill 23 would cost municipalities at least $5.1 billion by 2031 in lost development fees (The Globe and Mail). That figure became the rallying point for municipal objections. The concern was straightforward: with growth-related costs removed from builders, property taxpayers would have to cover more of the bill for the infrastructure that new housing requires (The Globe and Mail). The province argued that lower fees were necessary to make homes cheaper to build and therefore cheaper to buy or rent, and that the housing target justified the trade-off. Both points can be true at once, which is what makes the fight durable. The disagreement is not really about whether the fees should fall; it is about who absorbs the gap when they do, and that question has not been settled.

Ontario and British Columbia tackled the same problem in the same period, and the comparison is instructive because BC went noticeably further. BC's Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, 2023, known as Bill 44, received royal assent on November 30, 2023, two days short of the one-year anniversary of Ontario's Bill 23 (MLT Aikins).

Where Ontario's province-wide right stops at three units, BC's scales up. Bill 44 requires most municipalities to allow three to four units on lots that previously permitted only a single house or duplex, and as many as six units on larger lots near frequent transit (MLT Aikins). BC also tied its density to transit in a way Ontario's provincial floor did not, allowing the higher six-unit count specifically near frequent transit service and barring parking minimums in those areas (MLT Aikins). And BC went after process directly: Bill 44 phases out the one-off, site-by-site public hearings for rezonings that are consistent with an official community plan, removing a step where projects often stalled or died (MLT Aikins). In short, BC set a higher province-wide ceiling, linked density to transit, and stripped out hearings; Ontario set its province-wide floor at three units and left the decision on going higher to each city, which is exactly where Toronto's fourplex-then-partial-sixplex saga played out.

For a BC owner or builder weighing a small multi-unit project, the Ontario experience offers a few grounded lessons rather than hype. The first is that a higher legal ceiling does not guarantee more homes. Toronto legalized the fourplex citywide, yet roughly three-quarters of the early activity was conversions of existing space rather than genuinely new construction (City of Toronto). BC's Bill 44 permits more units per lot than Ontario's province-wide rule, but the same gap between what is allowed and what gets built applies. The deciding factor is project economics, not the zoning headline.

The second lesson is that political resistance does not disappear once a province acts. Toronto's council narrowed sixplexes to nine wards on an 18-to-6 vote even with federal funding at stake (CBC News). BC's design tries to head off that problem by removing site-by-site hearings, so individual projects are less exposed to neighbourhood opposition (MLT Aikins). That is a meaningful structural advantage for a BC builder: the path from permission to permit is less likely to be derailed by a single contentious meeting. The third lesson is to watch the money. Ontario's fee waivers triggered a multi-billion-dollar fight over who pays for infrastructure (The Globe and Mail), and how a province handles development charges shapes both the cost of a small project and how welcoming a city is to it. For BC, the practical takeaway is that the legal right to build is the starting line, not the finish: the projects that actually get completed will be the ones where the transit-scaled unit count, the removal of hearings, and the local fee structure all line up in the builder's favour.