In a very civil tone, the mayor of Windsor, Ont., is asking the fresh faces in the Mark Carney-led Liberal government to butt out of city planning. Mayor Drew Dilkens especially wants to see an end to Trudeau-era affordable housing mandates from Ottawa that don’t serve his community.
“They were just hell-bent on putting forward this really left-principled version of what housing should be,” Drew says of the conditions imposed on cities under the $4-billion housing accelerator fund launched in 2023 by then federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser.
Unlike most other big cities in Canada, Windsor chose not to apply for the housing accelerator dollars — turning down the possibility of a $30-million cash infusion into the city’s densification strategies.
City council didn’t dare to accept the funds and later renege on the feds’ conditions, Drew says: “We basically walked away from $30 million because we refused to succumb, or be co-opted into something we felt was bad for the community.”
Then-Liberal MP for Windsor-Tecumseh-Lakeshore, Irek Kusmierczyk (who lost the 2025 election by just four votes to Conservative MP Kathy Borrelli), implored Windsor’s city council to reconsider, insisting the feds were only asking for “gentle density.”
It’s not so gentle, Drew counters, if you find yourself living next door to a new four-plex and you bought your house based on the community’s single-family residential character.
“We did it in our way,” Drew explains in a recent conversation, “because there’s no one who knows their community better, no level of government that knows their community better,” than the local council. The 53-year-old lawyer-cum-mayor grew up in Windsor, and has served on the city’s council for nearly two decades, 11 as mayor.
And when you look at Canada’s Constitution, Drew points out, these issues are “under the bailiwick of the provincial government … who delegate it to the municipalities.”
The city’s locally generated housing strategies — intense densification along transit routes; blanket rezoning in new neighbourhoods to allow for greater density; repurposing several municipally owned properties for housing — were rejected by the fund’s managers as “not ambitious enough.”
“Ambition” was their favourite word, Drew grumbles: “We weren’t ambitious enough and they wanted to work with municipalities who had greater ambition.”
One of the biggest sticking points for Drew? The minimum ticket to entry for this fund was city-wide rezoning to allow four-plexes to be built on any residential lot, as a right — removing the public hearing process and the possibility for appeals. In the suburban Calgary neighbourhood where I live, blanket rezoning means neighbours hold their breath when a lot comes up for sale.
The province of Ontario already mandates three buildings on a residential lot, the bureaucrats told Drew, so what’s the big deal about adding four? His rebuttal: “Then what’s the big deal about adding five? I mean, where does it stop? And when do you get to say enough’s enough; that we have processes in place that allow us to look at sewer capacity, that allow us to deal with parking, that allow us to deal with garbage control?
“We hope to work with the federal government — who wants to truly be a partner in helping build more housing — without jamming down our throats something residents don’t want,” pleads the veteran mayor.
To that end, after Carney took power, the mayor sent a letter — as yet, unanswered — to the government, asking for a re-evaluation of this rigid approach to the housing accelerator fund.
Drew has previously worked with Gregor Robertson, former mayor of Vancouver and now Carney’s point man on housing and infrastructure. He’s optimistic Robertson will bring practical insights about the correlation between affordable housing and density to the federal table. I noted that if increased density brought affordability, Vancouver would be cheap by now.
“I think the benefit of having a fresh government,” Drew offers, “is they can come in and say, ‘Listen, we looked at the program … while we appreciate the intention the past government was trying to employ here, we think there’s a better way of working with municipalities, allowing them the flexibility to determine how to accomplish the goal. We’ll set the goals and then we’ll hold them to account.’”
Drew’s suggestion echoes what I heard Pierre Poilievre say in the last election campaign. But, we agree, there’s nothing wrong with the Liberals stealing good ideas from the Conservatives.
While the housing accelerator initiative is the focus of Windsor council’s attention, Drew’s not happy these blanket zoning mandates are being applied to other programs — including federal public transit and housing infrastructure funding available to municipalities.
“And it gets even better,” Drew continues, his tone increasingly agitated. “Guess who doesn’t have to do this? The entire province of Quebec. They have an exemption. They carved out a different pathway … four units as of right was not a requirement in the province of Quebec.” Indeed, Premier Francois Legault trumpeted his $900-million deal with Ottawa as being “free of conditions.”
The economy of Windsor has taken a sharp downturn in the past 18 months. Before Donald Trump’s re-election, the Conference Board of Canada predicted Windsor would be the fastest-growing city by GDP of the 24 big cities they studied. “We had the battery factory well under construction,” Drew reports, “and we’ve got the Gordie Howe bridge that is winding up construction and should open officially the first week of December this year.
“But the reality is, there’s a lot of fear here,” he shares. “Our unemployment rate was almost 11 per cent and people are in rainy day mode. People are pinching their pennies … The housing market is very slow and everyone’s just in a wait-and-see mode.”
Property developers are on standby, he says, waiting to see if the Carney Liberals will cut development charges by 50 per cent at the municipal level (as promised during the election campaign), and whether the feds will offer low-interest loans for multi-storey residential units.
“Things have just kind of ground to a halt here,” Drew says with a sigh.
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