Ontario Bill 98 Moves to Strip Municipal Green Building Standards — Homeowners Warned of Higher Energy Bills and Retrofit Costs

Enhanced Development Standards Become Voluntary

For more than a decade, Ontario municipalities have used enhanced development standards to push new construction beyond the provincial minimum. Toronto launched its Green Standard in 2010. More than a dozen municipalities followed. Brampton and Markham built points-based versions, where developers earn credits for hitting thresholds on energy efficiency, EV-readiness, tree canopy, waste management and other sustainability measures. These standards worked because they were enforceable conditions of site plan approval — a developer who wanted the permit had to meet the bar.

Bill 98 changes that posture. Enhanced development standards would remain on the books, but as suggestions. Municipalities would lose the ability to use site plan control to make them conditional on approval. They would also be blocked from using green standards to mandate building design or to apply them to external site features like landscaping and parking. A second, quieter provision removes the requirement that municipal official plans include goals and actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions or provide for climate change adaptation — effectively taking the climate lens out of long-range land-use planning across the province. The full bill text is available through the Ontario Legislative Assembly.

Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Rob Flack has framed the package as an effort to standardize building requirements, improve project viability and "get shovels in the ground" — the same language the province has used across several rounds of housing legislation since 2022. The stated goal is to move homes to market faster and at lower upfront cost. Like earlier rounds of Ontario development charge reform, the bill aims its lever at the upfront cost curve.

Which Standards Are on the Table

Toronto's Green Standard is the most developed example of what is at stake. It requires new developments to provide EV-ready parking stalls and bicycle parking in mid- and high-rise buildings, mandates native landscaping and bird-safe windows, and pushes higher tree canopy coverage and high-albedo pavement to reduce urban heat-island effects. Energy performance is handled in stepwise tiers that tighten over time, aimed at a 2040 decarbonization target for all new buildings in the city. These are the types of features that would become voluntary under Bill 98 — not just in Toronto, but in every Ontario municipality whose standard relied on being enforceable to work.

The province's case rests on upfront construction costs. The homeowner case rests on lifecycle costs. Both numbers come from the record — they simply sit on different pages of it.

A 2017 Toronto city staff report, cited in recent reporting on the bill, estimated that meeting the city's green standards added roughly 2.1% to 3.5% to the construction cost of a new residential or commercial office building compared with building to the provincial code minimum, according to Canadian Mortgage Trends. On a $700,000 suburban townhouse, that range translates to roughly $15,000 to $25,000 of upfront cost — most of it absorbed into the purchase price and amortized across a 25- or 30-year mortgage.

The Canada Green Building Council's 2019 national analysis puts the upper bound higher. It estimates that constructing an average Canadian net-zero building could cost approximately 8% more upfront than a conventional one, but that the premium is offset over the life of the building through lower energy use and reduced exposure to fossil-fuel price volatility. The council's broader retrofit economy research walks through the same trade-off from the renovation side. The gap between an upfront premium on one side and decades of operating savings on the other is the core trade-off Bill 98 is asking Ontario to make.

There is a second framing that rarely shows up in press releases. Buildings account for roughly one-quarter of Ontario's greenhouse gas emissions and more than half of Toronto's, largely because of gas-fired electricity generation and gas-fired space and water heating. That is the denominator any decarbonization trajectory has to move. Anything built to a lower performance standard today has to be pulled up to the line later — and "later" is almost always more expensive than "at construction."

This is the part of the story that rarely makes it into the coverage. The link between a new subdivision you will never live in and the delivery line on your existing Enbridge bill runs through how Ontario regulates natural gas rates.

Natural gas rates in Ontario are set through the Ontario Energy Board. Utilities like Enbridge Gas recover both the commodity cost of gas and the cost of building, maintaining and operating the distribution system — pipes, metering, compressors, crews — through the delivery charge on every customer's bill, as explained by the Ontario Energy Board. When new customers are added to the system, the infrastructure required to serve them is capitalized and recovered from the full customer base over time. In some cases, the cost of extending service is high enough that Enbridge Gas applies an additional charge directly to customers in new expansion areas. Its policy explicitly describes a natural gas expansion surcharge layered on top of standard delivery charges where connecting new communities is not economically feasible at normal rates — the terms are set out on Enbridge Gas's new customer surcharge page. The general shape is the same across the system: new gas load means new infrastructure, and new infrastructure eventually shows up somewhere on a bill. This is the backdrop behind the recent OEB rate decisions that homeowners watch closely each quarter.

This is the mechanism Evan Wiseman of The Atmospheric Fund was pointing at when he warned that the rollback would improve developer margins while "rates will likely go up" without meaningfully changing how buildings are constructed in Ontario. If every new home in a subdivision installs a gas furnace and a gas water tank instead of stepping toward electrification and tighter envelopes, Ontario's gas system keeps expanding, and the cost of expanding it gets socialized across everyone already connected to it. It is a slow, diffuse effect. It will not show up on next month's bill. But it is the reason a new-build standard is a homeowner issue, not just a developer one.

The second mechanism is thermal. Toronto's Green Standard — and the points-based systems in Brampton and Markham — included provisions on tree canopy, native landscaping, high-albedo pavement, and green and cool roofs specifically because these features cool the neighbourhood around a new development. That cooling is not decorative, and it is not abstract. Toronto's own urban forest analysis has valued the canopy's contribution in the millions of dollars per year, with one estimate pointing to roughly $8.3 million annually in reduced heating and cooling loads alongside broader ecosystem services, documented in the City of Toronto's Every Tree Counts report.

Those savings are distributed across the homes near the canopy — including older houses in established neighbourhoods that sit next to new subdivisions. When a new development goes in without mandatory canopy, landscaping or reflective-surface requirements, the heat-island effect in the surrounding area grows. That raises summer cooling loads in nearby homes, pushes up peak electricity demand on the hottest days, and stacks with the climate risk signal insurers have already been pricing into Canadian home insurance premiums. Heat and extreme-weather losses are one of the fastest-moving lines in the Canadian home insurance industry's recent experience, and urban design choices are one of the few levers local governments have to dampen neighbourhood-scale exposure.

Former Toronto mayor David Miller, who helped bring in the city's original green standards, called the rollback an "own goal against helping to secure our communities' future," arguing that cutting corners on new construction locks in higher energy bills, greater heat and flood risk, and more expensive retrofits later. Whatever you think of the politics, the mechanical claim is the one to pay attention to: the thermal performance of a neighbourhood is largely set when it gets built. Everything after that is more expensive.

The third mechanism is the one federal policy is currently trying to unwind. For several years, Natural Resources Canada's Canada Greener Homes Grant has been subsidizing homeowners to retrofit the homes they already live in — offering grants from $125 to $5,000 for eligible upgrades plus up to $600 toward an EnerGuide evaluation. Tens of thousands of insulation and heat pump upgrades have flowed through the program, with average grants landing around $4,474 per household, according to Natural Resources Canada's Greener Homes Grant documentation. The federal government has signalled its intent to restart and expand the program as part of its broader retrofit agenda.

Ottawa's direction of travel is clear: pay to pull existing housing stock up to higher performance over the next decade. Ontario's Bill 98 cuts against that trajectory by letting new housing stock come in under the line municipalities were pushing toward. Every new home built to code-minimum rather than to stepped performance benchmarks is, effectively, a future retrofit candidate — a house that will eventually need its envelope tightened, its gas appliances replaced, and its electrical service upgraded to handle a heat pump.

That matters because the retrofit pipeline is already constrained. The Canada Green Building Council's retrofit economy work projects that scaling Canada's building retrofits could support roughly 75,000 jobs annually, while also flagging near-term shortages of skilled trades — HVAC technicians, carpenters, insulators, mechanical contractors — even before retrofit activity hits its next gear. When demand for those trades climbs, prices climb with it. The homeowner trying to use a Greener Homes-style incentive to upgrade a 1970s bungalow ends up competing for the same contractors that would otherwise have been working on homes built right the first time.

The cleanest summary is the blunt one. Building to a lower standard today is a decision to spend more later. Whether "later" means a 2030 heat pump retrofit or a 2040 envelope upgrade, the bill lands on homeowners, not developers.

Bill 98 is still a bill, not law. It has been tabled and reported on, and debate is only beginning. Between now and whatever form it takes at third reading, the homeowner-relevant questions are narrower than the broader housing debate, and they are worth tracking specifically.

For existing homeowners, there is no immediate action item here. This is not a story with a checklist. It is a story about where the upfront-versus-lifecycle line gets drawn on every new home built in Ontario over the next five to ten years — and who ends up on which side of that line. Watch the bill's progression through the legislature. Watch the gas rate applications that come out of the OEB. Watch what happens to the federal retrofit programs that currently sit on the other side of the policy balance.

The developer cost is a single line on a spreadsheet. The homeowner cost is several.