Sara Nixon
Perhaps you read Nathan Ince’s 2024 Active History article about John Norton. You may be interested to know that his cabin is preserved at The Brown Homestead in Niagara, alongside the family home of John Brown. The Brown Homestead stands on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples, land later granted to Brown for serving with the Butler’s Rangers, on the side of the British, during the American Revolution and operating as a waystation for thirsty travellers during the era of the War of 1812. Now, a charitable foundation manages the site and its buildings to preserve this enduring remnant of rural Niagara history and to reimagine it as a vibrant community gathering place that nurtures a growing passion for connection, learning, and innovative thinking. As a public historian and the Community Engagement Manager at The Brown Homestead, I have built a career working to engage the public with why heritage matters. Local history, and the built heritage that helps define the character of a community – like The Brown Homestead – matters. Heritage gives texture to our shared sense of place, belonging, and local identity.
However, Ontario’s heritage industry faces a challenge. On January 1, 2027, the Province of Ontario will remove some 36,000 heritage properties listed on Municipal Heritage Registers in communities across the province if they have not been formally designated under the Ontario Heritage Act. It’s a startling move buried amongst sweeping changes first implemented by Ontario’s Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act, the omnibus housing legislation passed in the Fall of 2022. Taking a “Designate or Lose It” approach, the amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act introduced a two-year time limit for properties on the Municipal Heritage Register, wherein if they were not designated by the deadline they were to be removed from the registry altogether. Furthermore, they can not be re-added to the registry for a period of five years following their removal. Though proclaiming that these changes were to prevent non-designated properties from languishing indefinitely on heritage registers, the Province’s decision only exacerbated the issues facing Ontario’s heritage sector.

In the Aftermath of Bill 23
As part of the Ontario government’s Housing Supply Action Plan, the 2022 More Homes Built Faster Act is a combined piece of housing legislation meant to streamline several laws to enable the building of 1.5 million homes by 2031. The necessity of drastic change when it comes to the housing crisis is not lost on us here at The Brown Homestead. The majority of our staff is made up of young professionals in our 20s and 30s. We feel this crisis acutely as millennials simply trying to exist *~in this economy~*. But as heritage practitioners, we see that Bill 23’s amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act do more harm than good.
It’s worth noting that since the passing of the More Homes Built Faster Act, the Province has not been able to reach their home building targets year over year. In the province’s most recent Fall Economic Statement, the government lowered its forecasted 2024 housing starts from a target of 125,000 down to 81,300. And starts on new housing were down to 89,297 units in 2023, compared to 96,080 in 2022. Heritage protections are not the barrier here; rising construction costs, labour shortages, and high interest rates are. Watering down the Ontario Heritage Act will not solve the housing crisis. It’s an unfair target on an already stretched-thin industry. The most dramatic impact of Bill 23 on the heritage sector are the changes to the Municipal Heritage Register. The Register was initially created as a heritage inventory tool for municipalities to keep track of the properties of heritage value in the communities, as well as to offer baseline protections outside of full designation by way of limited, short-term (60 day) demolition controls. This tool was particularly useful for small and rural municipalities with too few resources to undergo the designation process for the heritage properties in their communities.
However, Bill 23 fundamentally changed the very identity of the Municipal Heritage Register. Now, there is a two-year time limit on those properties included in these municipal inventories. While the later passing of Bill 200, the Homeowners Protection Act, in 2024 gave some reprieve by allowing those properties listed before 2023 to remain on their registers until January 1, 2027 (rather than the original deadline of January 1, 2025), the core issues remain unresolved.
A two-year time limit moves at lightning-speed when municipalities do not have the resources or support to address why so many non-designated properties are listed on Municipal Heritage Registers in the first place. The process of heritage designation takes significant time and resources; reports should be prepared with extensive historical research and ongoing consultation with the property owners is critical. A deadline threatens this process. After the limit is up, if the property is not designated, it is removed from the Register and not to be added to the inventory or considered for designation again for five years, negating the purpose of the inventory in the first place. In those five years, the fates of those historically significant properties will linger in limbo. According to the Ministry of Citizenship and Multiculturalism, this amendment impacts some 36,000 listed heritage properties in over 100 municipalities across Ontario.
This means that 36,000 structures of heritage value are at risk of demolition — and their history, stories, and community meaning risk being lost as well. These are the buildings that contribute to a community’s character, and sense of identity and place for the people that live there. These are also the buildings that contribute to people wanting to visit these communities — to spend time in an area and spend money at shops and restaurants. We lose so much more than an old thing when we lose a heritage building.
Reaction in these municipalities has been swift, but scrambled. Already chronically under-resourced, heritage planners and professionals from across the field have had to quickly pivot their approach to their work. And the two-year time limit placed upon the Register has forced most in the field to react to these changes in a desperate attempt to protect what they can.
Responses from across Ontario’s heritage community suggest that we are not alone in disagreeing with the changes to the Municipal Heritage Register. In February 2024, The Architectural Conservancy of Ontario (ACO) released a Letter to Premier Ford on Listed Heritage Properties, requesting an extension of the deadline to designate listed properties from January 1, 2025 to January 1, 2030. The Letter was endorsed by Municipal Councils across the province, including here in St. Catharines. According to the ACO’s Letter, “automatically removing listed properties from the Registry… will encourage demolition of existing and affordable housing alternatives at a time when we need them the most” and that “property owners should not be forced to choose between designation and nothing at all to recognize the heritage significance of their property.” Time is of the essence for municipalities struggling to balance meeting their community’s housing needs and protecting their collective heritage.
Such blatant feedback led the Province to defer it’s initial 2025 deadline to 2027 under Bill 200. But the pressure has not been alleviated, just delayed. Most of our energies have been focused on keeping our heads above the paperwork piling before us as we race towards 2027. With few other tools available and time incessantly ticking, most municipalities have resorted to mass heritage designations – which also does not address the issue. Heritage designation shouldn’t be the only way to protect, preserve, and distinguish a community’s built heritage. But the current limits of the Ontario Heritage Act position designation as the only end goal.
Yet, there is opportunity here to be creative, and we must fight our way above the paperwork to consider another way forward. Next week, I will explore possible new directions in Ontario’s heritage industry.
Sara Nixon (M.A. Public History, Carleton University), is the Community Engagement Manager at The Brown Homestead. Sara has long been dedicated sharing Niagara’s rich history, and is actively involved in the local heritage community. She currently sits as Chair of the Grimsby Heritage Advisory Committee.
This essay is adapted from a post originally published on The Brown Homestead’s website in March 2024.
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