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Mr. Lintern has sizable shoes to fill. He succeeds Jennifer Keesmaat, a skilled communicator who became Toronto’s most outspoken staff member and one of the best-known people at city hall.
He surely will be less visible. But Mr. Lintern, a 25-year veteran of municipal planning, says the department won’t change dramatically under his leadership. “We’re running with it,” he said recently over breakfast. “We have a good, strong work program and good ideas.”
Mr. Lintern cited equity as an overarching theme: He is concerned about the growing inequality in Toronto, and how wealth and new development “are landing on the ground.” This is a disturbing trend, in which the city’s planning regulations are playing a significant role. He also pledges to pay attention to the city’s postwar suburbs with an eye to creating successful growth. “We spend a lot of time thinking about downtown, but increasingly growth will be going outside the downtown,” he said. “We have to pay more attention to how that growth can manifest itself, and how that can provide opportunity for more people.”
To make that happen, “the linchpin issue is transit access,” he said. Transit “brings access to opportunity” in the central city. “My goal is to see that that formula is reproduced across the city, bringing that to greater numbers of people.”
Raised in Etobicoke, Mr. Lintern is a veteran of local planning. He was head of community planning for Etobicoke York from 2005 to 2011, then for Toronto East York from 2011 until last year, overseeing development in the city’s busiest area and including high-profile planning efforts such as Mirvish Village. He was acting chief planner before Ms. Keesmaat’s tenure, and has filled that role again since she left in September.
The big-picture document, the Official Plan, calls for growth in certain areas, but the Zoning By-Law, which addresses the details for particular sites, is mostly years if not decades out of date. Most developments, however innocuous, require haggling over what, where and how tall. The development industry complains about the time, risk and cost associated with this sort of process; certainly this lack of clarity provides a disincentive for smaller projects.
Mr. Lintern hopes to reform the city’s zoning bylaw – to create clarity, which he argues would be “good for communities and developers.” Development “should be more of a plug-and-play exercise,” he argues. And, in general, he’s keen to do more detailed planning of neighbourhoods. “Proactive planning – that’s the goal.”
In order to accomplish that, he’ll need to convince city council to make the right decisions. Ms. Keesmaat did not always succeed at this. Arguably the highlights of her tenure were her advocacy on two transportation files: to build LRT in Scarborough instead of a subway extension, and then to bring down, rather than rebuild, the Gardiner Expressway East. Both times, she was right. And both times, her ideas lost out.
Mr. Lintern was at council a few weeks ago when councillors deferred planners’ Transform Yonge scheme to rebuild Yonge Street in North York, a classic example of car-driven politics interfering with good city planning. But rather than argue, he took their questions calmly and firmly. He is adamant that being chief planner “is not a political job.” “I’m a realist around all the mountains you have to climb,” he said. “It’s not a straight line to some of these solutions. It never has been.”
