Finally, finally, finally, the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) will be reformed. It is hard to believe it will actually happen.

OMB reform is a clear unintended consequence of the provincial legislation about to be introduced to ban corporate donations to political parties in Ontario and to limit individual donations to a candidate and party to about $1,500. The details of the legislation are still not finalized, but there is no doubt of the direction the premier is heading.

The OMB is supposed to operate as a kind of court of appeal for planning decisions by municipalities. But the board arranges its own hearings from scratch and seems not bound by reason or precedent. Often its raison d’être seems to be to give the development industry whatever it wants, while challenging community groups to spend much time and energy trying to unsuccessfully defend the public interests.

The OMB is also used as a threat to municipal councils by the development industry: if you don’t give us what we want, pronto, we’ll take our case to the OMB, a tactic developers often follow through on. And the OMB is often used by local councils as a cover for bad decision making: councillors say they had no real choice since the board was going to do something bad anyway.

The situation at the OMB has become so convoluted in the last two decades that the provincial government has a staff person, called the provincial facilitator, whose job it is to work out settlements between the developer and the objectors so there is no necessity for a hearing. It is often used to facilitate sprawling suburban subdivisions.

Yet provincial politicians have shown no willingness to change the OMB in spite of many, many requests for change. Instead, those politicians have revelled in the dysfunction.

I believe that is because the provincial government — the current Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne or the past Conservative government of Mike Harris — has seen the OMB’s chief beneficiary, the development industry, as one of the richest sources of political contributions.

Who came to those $10,000-a-pop fundraisers the Ontario Liberal Party has held in recent years, publicity of which has embarrassed the government into action? — members of the development industry.

Once the new rules limiting political contributions are in place, there will be no reason to keep the OMB, since those companies will no longer be a gold mine for Queen’s Park. It can finally be transformed into a reasonable appeal body to ensure that municipal councils make decisions that adhere to the official plan (rather than constantly amending it), conform to provincial planning statements and follow a process that is fair.

That change will improve planning decisions immensely and also make it clear that municipal politicians cannot duck their responsibilities to plan well. Whew. What a brave new world this will be.

There is another unintended consequence of limiting campaign contributions and banning corporate donations: the public-private partnership (PPP) funding model, used to build new hospitals and other provincial structures, will be a thing of the past. The PPP model has large companies bid to design, build and run new facilities. So the province doesn’t have to start paying an agreed upon annual amount (for 35 or 40 years) until the building is fully built and operating, that is, seven or eight years down the road, well past the next election.

The cost of a PPP project is 18 per cent more than if the government simply built it under its own auspices, as it always did until a decade or two ago. I believe one of the reasons the PPP model is in much use in Ontario is not only the fact that government doesn’t have to pay until sometime in the future, but also because the companies that support PPPs are reliably big donors to political parties.

If corporations can’t make political contributions, there is no reason for the government to continue the very costly PPP model.

Once more, saved by the unintended consequence.