Criticism
On October 7, 2008, City of Toronto councillors representing the former city of North York had voted to name a lane "OMB Folly" in the area where the OMB, against the City's wishes, approved development of a condominium/townhouse complex near a low-density residential area immediately west of North York Centre. However, Council reversed this decision on August 26, 2010.
After a controversial 2009 decision approved a community of up to 1400 homes in Manotick, Ontario, Minister of Municipal Affairs Jim Watson was quoted in the local press as stating: "Has the OMB been perfect? No. Can it improve? Yes, I think it can and I am quite prepared to work with the attorney general to try and ensure that the OMB is more reflective of community values I've had a couple of discussions with the attorney general going back a month and we both agree we are going to take a thorough look at the OMB and see how we can further improve it based on changes we made a couple of years ago. We want to see if they've done what we hoped they'd do to bring greater balance to OMB decision-making."
On February 6, 2012 Toronto City Council asked the province to free the city from the Ontario Municipal Board’s jurisdiction. Council endorsed the proposal in a 34-5 vote. Spearheaded by Cllr. Josh Matlow, along with Cllr. Kristyn Wong-Tam. Matlow is quoted in the Toronto Star newspaper: “We’ve heard time and time again from our residents that there’s an inequitable playing field...Developers simply have a better chance at the OMB because they have the financial resources, the ability to get planners and lawyers, anything they need to be able to argue their case,” This proposal should open the door for discussion of the efficiency and justice of the unelected board that controls the majority of Ontario developments.
Read more about this topic: Ontario Municipal Board
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)