Building Complete Communities Requires More Than Housing

Energy Infrastructure, Employment Lands, and the Future of Toronto's Port Lands

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⚡️ THREE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ENERGY IN WARD 14

1️⃣ Growth requires power. The Port Lands alone are planned to add thousands of new homes, businesses, transit connections, and community facilities. Housing doesn't work without the energy infrastructure to support it.

2️⃣ Once strategic lands are gone, they're gone. Toronto continues to convert industrial and employment lands to residential uses. Before we do, we need to ask where future energy, employment, and infrastructure needs will be located.

3️⃣ Planning matters, ask better questions. Energy, housing, jobs, transit, healthcare, and schools are connected. Good city-building means planning them together. Not one project at a time.

The question isn't whether Toronto should grow.

The question is whether we're planning for the city we're building.

The Hearn Generating Station is being rezoned to Mixed-Use Residential.

Over the past several months, I have repeatedly used the Port Lands as an example in discussions about growth, infrastructure, employment, transportation, healthcare, and energy planning. This is not because the Port Lands are the only development project in Ward 14, although it is one of the largest projects in Canadian waterfront development. Rather, they represent one of the clearest examples of a broader challenge facing Toronto.

The decisions being made in the Port Lands bring together many of the questions that will define the city's future: how we accommodate population growth, where employment will be located, how infrastructure will be funded, how communities will access services, and how we will meet rapidly increasing energy demands. The scale of the project makes these challenges easier to see, but the underlying issues extend well beyond the waterfront.

For that reason, the Port Lands are not simply a discussion about one neighbourhood. They are a discussion about how Toronto plans for growth.

The recently approved and rezoned Ookwemin Minising framework will accommodate approximately 21,000 residents and 12,000 homes while supporting approximately 2,900 jobs, a significant decrease from the previous public consultation-approved zoning. The scale of this transformation will shape Toronto's waterfront, transportation network, economic development patterns, and infrastructure requirements for generations. The concern is not simply the scale of development itself, but whether the systems required to support that growth are being planned with equal attention.

The public conversation surrounding the Port Lands has largely focused on housing. Given Toronto's housing shortage, that focus is understandable. However, housing is only one component of a successful urban system. Communities require employment opportunities, transportation infrastructure, healthcare services, schools, childcare, utilities, public spaces, and reliable energy systems. When one element grows without the others, the consequences are often felt years later as congestion, service shortages, rising costs, and infrastructure deficits.

Ontario's Independent Electricity System Operator projects that provincial electricity demand could increase by approximately 75 percent by 2050. This projection is frequently misunderstood. It does not suggest electricity rates will increase by 75 percent. Rather, it reflects growing demand associated with population growth, electric vehicles, transit electrification, advanced manufacturing, building electrification, data centres, and emerging artificial intelligence technologies.

This projected increase represents one of the most significant infrastructure challenges facing Ontario over the coming decades.

Meeting that demand will require substantial investments in electricity generation, transmission, storage, and distribution infrastructure. Ontario's future electricity system will likely depend upon a combination of nuclear generation, hydroelectric power, battery storage, conservation measures, transmission expansion, and emerging technologies that may not yet be fully developed or commercially viable. These systems require decades of planning, environmental approvals, land-use protection, capital investment, and coordination between municipalities, utilities, and provincial agencies.

This is where the Port Lands become particularly relevant;

Historically, the Port Lands served as one of Toronto's primary industrial districts. The land's location on the waterfront, access to transportation corridors, proximity to utility infrastructure, and availability of large contiguous parcels made it uniquely valuable for industrial and infrastructure-related uses. While the nature of industry evolves over time, the strategic importance of these characteristics has not disappeared.

Across North America and Europe, cities are increasingly recognizing that industrial and employment lands are not simply vacant land awaiting redevelopment. They are economic infrastructure. They provide space for advanced manufacturing, logistics, clean technology industries, district energy systems, utility infrastructure, research facilities, and emerging sectors that require significant amounts of land, energy, and access to transportation.

Once these lands are converted to residential neighbourhoods, they are rarely recovered for future industrial or infrastructure purposes.

The challenge facing Toronto is not whether housing should be built. It should.

The challenge is whether sufficient consideration is being given to the long-term implications of converting strategic employment and infrastructure lands into predominantly residential communities.

This issue becomes even more important when viewed through the lens of emerging technologies. Artificial intelligence (AI) is often discussed as a software innovation, but its physical footprint is substantial. Data centres require electricity, cooling systems, transmission capacity, backup power systems, and supporting infrastructure. At the same time, governments are promoting electrification, battery manufacturing, clean technology development, and advanced industrial growth. These sectors all compete for energy resources and suitable employment lands.

Reasonable people will disagree about the future composition of Ontario's electricity system. Some advocate for expanded nuclear generation. Others support hydroelectric expansion, offshore wind development, large-scale battery storage, district energy systems, or a combination of these approaches. As technology evolves, new solutions will emerge.

The purpose of municipal planning is not to determine which technology will ultimately succeed.

The purpose of municipal planning is to ensure that future options remain available.

This requires protecting infrastructure corridors, preserving strategic employment lands, identifying locations for future utility infrastructure, and coordinating growth with long-term energy planning. The challenge is that energy infrastructure cannot be easily retrofitted once communities are built. Transmission corridors, substations, district energy systems, storage facilities, and utility rights-of-way require space and long planning horizons. Decisions regarding land use today will influence what options are available decades from now.

The Port Lands occupy a unique position within this discussion. As one of the last large-scale waterfront redevelopment areas in Toronto, this area will be shaped by decisions made today, influencing future opportunities for economic development, infrastructure investment, and energy resilience for decades to come. The discussion of future energy systems also raises questions about transmission infrastructure. Generating electricity is only one part of the challenge. Communities must also be connected to the grid through transmission and distribution networks capable of supporting future demand.

As population growth, electrification, and emerging technologies increase electricity consumption, transmission corridors become strategic infrastructure assets in their own right. While considerable attention has been paid to housing targets, transportation infrastructure, and flood protection within the Port Lands, less public attention has been devoted to how future electrical capacity will be delivered to the area.

Whether Ontario’s future energy system relies on nuclear generation, hydroelectric imports, offshore wind, battery storage, or a combination of technologies, those resources ultimately require transmission and distribution infrastructure to reach homes, businesses, and future employment districts.

Given the scale of the proposed growth, greater transparency in long-term electrical infrastructure planning would contribute to a more comprehensive public discussion of the future energy mix across Ward 14 and the newly rezoned high-density waterfront lands.

Historically, waterfront lands accommodated ports, industry, rail infrastructure, utilities, and power generation. Increasingly, cities are replacing those uses with residential development. Whether that transition is ultimately beneficial or not, it raises an important question: if strategic infrastructure uses are removed from some of the most valuable industrial lands in the city, where will future infrastructure be located?

Too often, planning discussions occur in silos. Housing is discussed separately from transportation. Transportation is discussed separately from energy. Energy is discussed separately from economic development. Yet in practice, these systems are deeply interconnected. A community of 21,000 residents requires more than homes. It requires places to work, transportation networks that function efficiently, public services that can meet demand, and an energy system capable of supporting future growth.

The success of the Port Lands will ultimately be measured by more than the number of residential units constructed. It will be measured by whether the district remains economically productive, adaptable, and resilient over the next fifty years.

Great cities are not built through housing policy alone. They are built through integrated planning that recognizes the relationship between land use, infrastructure, economic development, public services, and long-term community sustainability.

The Port Lands provide an extraordinary opportunity to demonstrate what integrated planning can achieve. The lessons learned will influence not only the future of Toronto's waterfront but also growth planning across the city.

As Toronto continues to grow, we must ensure that growth is supported by the infrastructure, employment opportunities, public services, and energy systems required to sustain it.

This requires leadership with the willingness and ability to look ahead, preserve future options, protect strategic assets, and plan for the generations that will inherit the decisions we make today.

Toronto deserves thoughtful, evidence-informed decision-making and leaders who are prepared to ask the questions others are not asking.

On October 26, I hope you will join me in choosing a thoughtful future.

Vote Susan Chapelle for Toronto-Danforth City Council.