Blog

It's late April and the 2015 Ontario Heritage Conference is coming up fast. This year, it's Niagara-on-the-Lake's turn to host. I was asked to put together an article about it for the local paper, the Niagara Advance.

In writing about Architectural Conservancy Ontario (ACO), as it's now known, which with Community Heritage Ontario first started the Ontario Heritage Conference in 2004, I knew I had to mention Peter John Stokes, who had a very long and close association with both ACO and Niagara-on-the-Lake.

This is a bit tricky.

In 2007 the province came that close to designating the Lister Block in downtown Hamilton.

The case pitted then-Culture Minister Caroline Di Cocco against Hamilton Mayor Larry Di Ianni and his council who were determined to okay demolition of the building. The Lister Block was designated by the city but in a sorry state and it was proposed to replace it with a facsimile (and not a perfect one at that)!

As we saw last time, provincial designation was taken out of the draft legislation before it was introduced in 1974.

Thirty years later, in 2004, it was put back! In the drafting of Bill 60, it was added to Part IV as section 34.5 and became law with the passage of the bill in April 2005.

Provincial designation... whew, what a topic! We might have to take it in parts.

Regulation 10/06 is the companion to Regulation 9/06. Following a public consultation process, the two regulations were put in place in 2006 to set out the criteria for provincial and municipal designation.

HPTR has been around a long time now -- since 2001, when the then Ministry of Tourism and Culture worked with the Ministry of Finance to develop it.

The timing may seem odd to some -- it was still the Harris era, and in fact Tim Hudak was Minister of Tourism and Culture! After all the cuts to heritage (and other) programs you wouldn't think a new heritage incentive would be at the top of their list.

Or is it that hard heritage stats are good to find?

Good heritage policy starts with good information about what is really happening out there. Too much of what we see is anecdotal -- interesting, even useful, but not a sound basis for making policy choices.

Happy Heritage Week! To launch my new heritage blog, here is a version of an article I've written for the upcoming (Spring 2015) issue of ACORN, the journal of Architectural Conservancy Ontario (ACO): The Ontario Heritage Act (OHA) at 40 ... and how we, finally, got to Bill 60.