Bill 60 — Another Omnibus Bill in Ontario
Column published in the November 6, 2025 edition of Your Barrhaven Independent — Community Voice.
By: Tyler Watt, MPP
In Ontario politics lately, few things have become as predictable as this government’s reliance on omnibus bills to get its legislation passed. An omnibus bill is a piece of legislation that crams dozens of unrelated changes into one piece of legislation. The latest example of this is Bill 60, the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025.
At first glance, the bill’s catchy title sounds promising when it comes to progress in this province. Who doesn’t want fewer delays and faster progress? But when you look at it closer, this bill and its 16 schedules thread the needle from landlord-tenant issues to changes to the laws regulating tow truck operators in Ontario to changes to the requirements and criteria needed to renew any license, permit, or certificate under the Highway Traffic Act.
Bill 60 bundles all these schedules and amendments into a single piece of legislation, allowing the government to use its majority in the Legislative Assembly to push the bill through as quickly as possible. This approach limits the time Ontarians have to voice their concerns to their elected representative and restricts the ability of opposition MPPs to voice their constituents’ concerns and suggest amendments before the bill is passed. Ultimately, it avoids the scrutiny this type of legislation deserves.
For me, the most concerning part of this bill is Schedule 16, which amends the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006. In the name of reducing backlog at the Landlord Tenant Board, the government has proposed a series of troubling changes. One amendment would allow landlords to repossess a unit for personal or familial use with 120 days’ notice and no compensation or replacement unit, as opposed to the existing law mandating landlords provide 60 days’ notice plus one month’s rent as compensation and a replacement unit.
In this case, the bill sought to circumvent rent control for the remaining properties currently protected by it, which are units built and occupied on or before November 2018. But due to public outcry over this portion of the bill, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Rob Flack, announced that consultation would not proceed on it, emphasizing the importance of community consultation and the public being able to express their concerns to their elected officials.
Transparency and accountability suffer when this is the way laws are made. Opposition parties can only vote “yes” or “no” to the entire package when this bill comes on the floor of the legislature. That is the danger of omnibus legislation: it forces MPPs to either swallow the bad to get the good or reject the bill altogether.
Bill 60 may be called the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, but when democracy is the thing being rushed, Ontarians are the only ones being left behind.
