Toronto has suffered under the climate emergency, to the tune of billions of dollars in damages. Now, with the Ford government’s recent decision to repeal Toronto’s Green Roof By-law as well as potentially more dramatic cuts to other similar programs under Bill 60, Ontario has handcuffed the city, preventing it from actually mitigating further damage and potentially dooming it to even greater costs down the road. Costs that are likely to be placed on city residents.
The Green Roof By-law, first enacted in 2008 and applied to new developments over a certain size, requires buildings to include living, vegetated surfaces on rooftops. These roofs serve multiple purposes: they capture and slowly release stormwater, mitigating the risk of floods; they reduce urban heat islands, lowering ambient temperatures in a densely built city; and they improve energy efficiency, cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Not to mention, they have also, according to one developer, become a popular amenity space for condo residents. Over the past 15 years, the program has created more than 1,200 green rooftops and supported a $50-million local industry in Toronto alone.
Yet for all of its proven benefits, the Ford government has chosen to eliminate this regulatory requirement without, it seems, much meaningful consultation with city officials, developers, or the public. The lack of dialogue has left Toronto officials blindsided.
“We were utterly surprised by the province doing this. There’s a portion of the City of Toronto Act that says that the province should consult in good faith with us before making changes, and they just didn’t follow that agreement. They just blindsided us completely,” said Deputy Mayor Gord Perks. “That’s infuriating.”
Perks, a long-time advocate for environmental initiatives in Toronto, highlighted that developers themselves have largely embraced green roofs over the past decade and a half.
“I have never, I have never in that 15 years, heard a single complaint from a developer about this. It’s just a normal part of business,” he says. “It’s just one of the things they do automatically, like figuring out how they’re going to get delivery trucks in and out of the building, or, you know, how they’re going to meet the building code and fire code. It’s routine business.”
He also warned that eliminating the bylaw could have catastrophic consequences for Toronto’s infrastructure and finances.
“If we can’t manage wet weather, snow, and rain on site, the amount of water running into our storm system, our storm sewers will just overload their capacity, and we will have catastrophic events,” Perks explained. “I’ve had two of them in my ward already, where the sewer system just blows and a big part of Sunnyside Beach gets washed out. If they take away our ability to manage the water on site, we’re into billions and billions of dollars suddenly necessary infrastructure to deal with the water downstream. Like this is the most cost-effective thing you can do — it’s pennies compared to billions.”
Individual homeowners will also face real consequences as a result of this decision. Basement flooding is a frequent and costly problem in Toronto, affecting thousands of residents.
“Taxpayers, but also property owners,” Perks said. “We have a very big problem with basement flooding, and that’s private property. The City of Toronto is basically on a hill that runs down into Lake Ontario, and we’ve got an awful lot of hard surface for all the roads and structures already. If we can’t manage stormwater up front, that’s billions to the taxpayer, but also huge insurance payouts to private property owners.”
The City of Toronto’s office of the mayor, led by Olivia Chow, echoed Perks’s concerns in a formal statement. “The Mayor is disappointed with the Province’s decision to repeal the City’s authority for a Green Roof By-law. For more than 15 years, Toronto’s Green Roof Bylaw has supported a $50 million local industry, created over 1,200 green rooftops, and delivered measurable environmental benefits, from diverting hundreds of millions of litres of stormwater each year to reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Green roofs also reduce pressure on property taxes by easing the load on the City’s stormwater system, cutting infrastructure costs, and helping prevent flooding.”
The statement highlighted that while the Green Standard remains intact, the repeal of the bylaw undermines Toronto’s broader climate strategy.
“The City is moving forward with major climate actions, including transitioning the TTC fleet to fully zero-emission buses and retrofitting 80 per cent of City buildings. Further, through Toronto Hydro, the City is making a $300 million investment in electrifying the grid. This is a generational investment and means that our growing City will be supported by clean energy. Together, these efforts cut emissions, save energy costs, and show how Toronto can meet its TransformTO goals through cleaner transit and greener public infrastructure.”
Although surely the Ford government must have heard from some in the development community, in an interview, a senior executive at Minto, one of Toronto’s largest development companies, confirmed the company was not consulted and, like city officials, was taken by surprise.
“That was very much a surprise. I was not expecting that move by the province,” Joanna Jackson, Minto’s Vice President,
Minto has been incorporating green roofs into Toronto projects since the bylaw’s introduction.
“I’ve been with Minto for eight years now, and we’ve been, obviously, all of our projects within Toronto have had green roofs because of the bylaw that was introduced in 2008,” Jackson said. “So as long as I’ve been with Minto, we’ve been putting green roofs on our new developments within Toronto. Actually yesterday, I was at one of our sites where we’re just wrapping up an infill project. It’s at Martin Grove and Eglinton, and we have green roofs on that building.”
While the company recognizes that the repeal could lower costs that could be passed on to consumers in the form of more affordable housing, there is also a recognition that green roofs provide significant community benefits beyond individual projects.
“We definitely welcome any opportunities that are going to lower costs, to make housing more affordable,” Jackson said. “But obviously there are some benefits, not just to the individual building, but also to the wider community with green roofs, and also with some of the other features that come with the Toronto Green Standard. I mean the biggest ones being in terms of benefits for the community, being that it reduces the heat island effect and it also reduces the peak load on the municipal storm water system.”
Jackson also suggested that a more balanced approach could achieve both affordability and environmental goals. “It feels like there should be a Goldilocks solution, like we’ve flown from one end of the pendulum to the other,” she says. “We would like to see a system where maybe some of those benefits that affect the wider community more than the individual buildings, some of those costs could be shared between the building owner, the municipality, the province, so that they could still be included but not have such a direct impact on the cost of developing the building itself.”
Green roofs are also a valued amenity for residents. “The green roofs are definitely something that our residents enjoy, and so we would continue to use it, probably in a more reduced capacity, but definitely it adds a lot of value to rooftop amenity spaces. Residents enjoy seeing it,” Jacksons says. “We’ve got a rooftop terrace at our 39 Niagara property that has a green roof beside the resident barbecue and pool area, and it has some walking paths, and the residents definitely enjoy that.”
The potential economic consequences extend to the industry that has built up in the city, which has established itself as world-leading.
“Absolutely, there’s a risk of that part of the industry, which has grown because of the bylaw, now there being less demand and people losing their jobs because, yeah, there isn’t the same requirement as there was a week ago,” Jackson said.
Stormwater management, one of the most urgent concerns, would also be compromised.
“We already know that there have been times — I don’t think we had any this summer, but in summer of 2024, and definitely within the last 10 years — where during these high rainfall events, parts of the storm water system do exceed capacity, and it starts to back up and causes a lot of damage,” Jackson says. “So that would only get worse.”
Without green roofs, it could mean the city will be forced to do costly and very disruptive upgrades to infrastructure.
“It’s the city that would need to increase the infrastructure, which is digging up roads to get to these pipes, to increase their size,” Jackson says. “So it would be a lot more invasive and affect a lot more people.”
Toronto is facing mounting pressures from extreme weather events, such as the storm of 2024 which showed damages just under a billion dollars, and urban heat is intensifying across the city that has serious health implications for people, especially the most vulnerable such as seniors and kids.
The Green Roof By-law seemed to be a cost-effective, low-impact adaptation measure that mitigates these risks while also supporting local jobs and green technology. By removing it, the provincial government seems to not only be undermining the city government but also placing the costs — financial, environmental, and social — directly on the city’s residents and property owners.
Deputy Mayor Perks warns that the impacts will be far-reaching. “There’s so much in Bill 60 that is a problem. There are problems on pedestrian and cycling safety. There are problems for tenants. We’re still gathering our thinking on how we can fight back on Bill 60.”
Toronto’s TransformTO plan, which sets ambitious targets for emissions reductions and climate resilience, depends on a suite of municipal tools including green roofs, energy retrofits, and zero-emission transportation. Without mandatory green roofs, the city will face both environmental and financial challenges that could slow or even derail the plan. As storms grow more frequent and powerful, every green roof lost represents hundreds of thousands of litres of stormwater and a fraction of reduced urban heat that will no longer be captured, pushing the costs onto taxpayers and property owners alike.
The industry perspective confirms that green roofs are not merely an environmental add-on — they are a core part of the city’s stormwater management infrastructure. As the Minto executive explained, “Definitely within the last 10 years… during these high rainfall events, parts of the storm water system do exceed capacity, and it starts to back up and causes a lot of damages to buildings. So that would only get worse if we stop requiring buildings to have green roofs, and that peak surge will get higher and higher going into the storm water system.”
Perks and city officials argue that the Ford government’s actions reflect a broader pattern of undermining Toronto’s ability to govern in its own interests. “He keeps forgetting that the people of Toronto did not vote for him when he ran for mayor. Or maybe he remembers and he can’t get over it. I don’t know which it is, but there’s so much in Bill 60 that is a problem.”
