Oakville passed three interim official plan amendments in October 2024 to keep its employment lands protected

What Council decided

On Tuesday, October 15, 2024, Oakville's Planning and Development Council held a statutory public meeting on three Town-initiated official plan amendments and adopted them the same night. By-law 2024-143 adopted Official Plan Amendment 68 to the Livable Oakville Plan, By-law 2024-144 adopted OPA 332 to the North Oakville East Secondary Plan, and By-law 2024-145 adopted OPA 333 to the North Oakville West Secondary Plan. The Town's file number is 52.57.03.

The Town called them interim. Its notice said their purpose was to preserve Oakville's protected employment areas until an employment area review decided how the Town would apply new provincial rules.

Why the date mattered

Ontario's Bill 97, the Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act, received Royal Assent on June 8, 2023. It added a narrower definition of “area of employment” to the Planning Act, centred on uses such as manufacturing and warehousing and leaving out institutional and commercial uses, including offices and retail. On August 20, 2024 the Province announced that the definition would take effect on October 20, 2024, the same day as the Provincial Planning Statement, 2024.

Land inside a protected employment area is hard to convert: a request to redesignate it has to meet provincial tests, and Council's decision on a private request cannot be appealed to the Ontario Land Tribunal. The Act's transition rule let a municipality keep that protection on parcels already occupied by offices, shops or institutions, but only if its official plan barred new uses of that kind after the change and the existing ones were lawfully established before it. The amending by-laws record that many parcels in Oakville's employment areas held such uses, which earlier provincial policy had encouraged. Without the amendments, the Town's notice said, its employment areas could be reduced through individual, piecemeal processes.

What the amendments do

• Stop new institutional and commercial uses, including retail and office uses, from being permitted in the Town's employment areas from October 20, 2024.
• Let parcels already used that way keep operating, and keep counting as protected employment land, where the use was lawfully established before that date.
• Keep the provincial conversion tests in force for requests to move land out of an employment area.
• Keep Council's decisions on applicant-initiated conversion requests final, with no appeal to the Ontario Land Tribunal.

The Town's notice describes the affected lands as swaths south of Highway 407, west and east of Highway 403, north and south of the Queen Elizabeth Way and north and south of Royal Windsor Drive.

The Loyalist Trail exception

One property was carved out on the night. The only oral submission came from a consultant for Tafia Development Corporation. After a closed session for legal advice, Council passed OPA 332 with an added policy stating that 65, 71, 77, 83 and 89 Loyalist Trail, existing employment buildings on the north side of Loyalist Trail east of Loyalist Woods Park, is not considered to be within an area of employment. Tafia had an application before the Town to allow commercial fitness uses such as children's indoor playgrounds, gymnastics clubs and indoor sports courts in those buildings. Council passed By-law 2025-080 for that application on March 17, 2025; it permits a commercial fitness centre and caps all commercial uses at 49 per cent of the floor area.

The Town reissued its notice of passing on October 30, 2024 to correct a mistyped address in that exception. The revised notice prints the second by-law number as 2024-244; the minutes and the by-law itself show 2024-144.

The appeals

Each by-law says its amendment takes effect only once the appeal period has passed or every appeal has been withdrawn or decided. That has not happened. A decision of the Ontario Land Tribunal issued on July 22, 2025, after a first case management conference, describes 13 appeals filed against the three amendments in their entirety. The appellants it lists are mainly landowners and developers, among them bcIMC Realty Corporation, Vrancor Master GP Inc., Mel (Wyecroft) Inc., Melrose Investment Inc., Guglietti Brothers Investment Limited, Rowhedge Construction Limited, Star Oak Developments Limited and Sixth Oak Inc. The decision records the Town's lawyer telling the Tribunal that changes to the amendments were likely, and that Council might modify or replace them at a meeting in December 2025, which could make the appeals moot.

Where it stands now

Checked on November 9, 2026: the Tribunal's case status page lists the lead case, OLT-24-001248, at the pre-merit hearing stage, with case management conferences set for February 9, April 14 and August 25, 2026 all marked adjourned. No decision on the appeals was found. The Town's Employment Areas Review page says OPA 68, 332 and 333 have been appealed.

The review the interim amendments were waiting for has produced draft replacements but no decision. Draft amendments went to a public meeting on December 8, 2025. On June 15, 2026, after ten speakers, most of them asking for a deferral on behalf of landowners or builders, Council referred the recommended Official Plan Amendments 76 and 339 back to staff to refine the proposed Core Employment and Diversified Employment designations and report back at an appropriate time. The Town's review page still showed that June meeting as the latest step on November 9, 2026.