OHA+M is an award-winning blog about the Ontario Heritage Act, heritage policy in Ontario and related topics. New posts monthly. Comments on posts and suggestions for new posts are most welcome! All posts copyright © 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 Dan Schneider. To subscribe to OHA+M, on the menu to the left, click on "Subscribe to OHA+M" under "Blog".
In a surprise move legislation has been introduced in Parliament that would provide income tax incentives for restoring heritage buildings in Canada.
Ontario is in the final stages of the latest public review of the 110 year-old Ontario Municipal Board.
We’ve been looking at easements for heritage conservation purposes and how these evolved in Ontario.
Easements and their close cousin covenants — agreements conferring rights over another’s land or property for specific purposes — can be used by anyone for almost any (legal) end. But the only kind that beat the old common law limits and stick over the long haul are statutory easements — that is, agreements where the parties involved and the public policy objectives to be served are set out in statute.
By the early 1980s the Ontario Heritage Foundation’s easements program was well-established. But its scope, like the properties the Foundation owned and its other programs, was pretty much confined to cultural heritage. This was about to change.
One of the early heritage easements in Ontario protects Victoria Hall in Cobourg.
Portico of Victoria Hall, Cobourg
Writing about the Rockwood Academy a few posts back I mentioned my first job with the province — one with responsibility for the pioneering provincial heritage easements program.
Before that, in 1979, I spent a summer with the Stratford Local Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee (LACAC). At some point my boss, the redoubtable city/county archivist Jim Anderson, brought to my attention a bill to amend the Ontario Heritage Act.
Quick question (okay, two): Who is the biggest landowner in Ontario? Who is the second?
The provincial government owns by far the most land in Ontario. The province’s 36 conservation authorities are, collectively, the second largest owner.
To recap from last time: the owner of Rondeau Provincial Park, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, appealed the designation of part of the park to the Ontario Municipal Board. The basis for the appeal was that the Municipality of Chatham-Kent had exceeded its jurisdiction in designating the historic cottage community in the park as a heritage conservation district under Part V of the Ontario Heritage Act.[1]
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
It’s high summer and those of us who aren’t would probably like to be at a cottage.
How about one like this?
Rear of the gymnasium wing, Rockwood Academy
I hadn’t been there for decades. Yet, when greeting Andy Drenters at the door of the Rockwood Academy, I said: “This is one of my favourite places in the world.” On a beautiful day in May it was delightful to see how little things had changed
Rarely if ever in my life has there been a place like the Rockwood Academy that has brought together the personal and the professional.
I'm very excited to welcome the first guest on OHA+M: Michael McClelland.
Sticking with Stratford, our local Architectural Conservancy Ontario branch has just heard that the branch’s nomination of the city of Stratford for induction into the North America Railway Hall of Fame has been accepted. Hooray!
"What's past is prologue."[1]
Picking up from last time… if we can — and do — have automatic protection for archaeological sites in Ontario, why not for other kinds of cultural heritage?
Still with archaeology and how it is protected in Ontario, what about our marine heritage?
What if cultural heritage resources were automatically protected? No painstaking selection, no long designation process, no council decisions and political shenanigans, no drawn-out, unpredictable reviews or appeals. The law just decrees that all heritage resources are protected, end of story.
Pure preservationist fantasy, right?
Sure, but one that may not be as far-fetched as we think.
Last I checked Ontario was the only province to have a legislated listing mechanism — that is, a way of giving official recognition to heritage property separate from heritage designation.
How did this develop? And how did what started out as one kind of animal — a formal identification tool — mutate over time into something rather different.
2015 ended with an important OMB decision on the question of adjacency — the impact of proposed development on adjacent heritage property.
But first, some background. Ten years previous, a new cultural heritage policy was introduced in the 2005 Provincial Policy Statement. Policy 2.6.3, known as the “adjacent lands policy”, now reads:
I feel like this should come with an advisory:
***The following post is intended for mature, if geeky and/or masochistic, audiences. May contain passages that are pedantic, exasperating, or numbingly dull. Reader discretion is advised.***
Don’t say you weren’t warned!
Today we delve into definitions, their fortes and foibles, with the spotlight on “cultural heritage.”
Happy 2016!
Another year, another heritage policy anniversary. It was 10 years ago (already!) that Ontario got two new regulations on cultural heritage significance: Ontario Regulation 9/06 and Ontario Regulation 10/06, usually known as O. Reg. 9/06 and O. Reg. 10/06.
