Zoning Out Discrimination: Working Towards Housing Equality in Ontario

In Ontario, it is the role of local government to ensure that housing is accessible and to eliminate barriers to housing. This paper examines how the Ontario Human Rights Code can be employed to challenge municipal zoning bylaws regulating permitted land-uses, namely by establishing that certain bylaws adversely affect individuals protected under the Code by restricting where those individuals may live. While Ontario litigants have been relatively successful in using the Code to challenge direct and indirect discrimination in housing, the case of zoning bylaws reveals key limitations to achieving housing equality through human rights legislation. This paper compares the relative success of legal challenges to bylaws regulating group homes that house people with disabilities to bylaws regulating rooming houses that house people who cannot afford other housing. This comparison reveals the difficulty of challenging discrimination faced by a diffuse group of individuals falling within multiple prohibited grounds (residents of rooming houses), rather than a discrete group that falls under a single identifiable ground (residents of group homes). It also reveals the challenges of confronting discrimination when procedural inequalities are entrenched in municipal decision-making processes. It concludes that the larger challenge for housing and human rights advocates, in addition to eliminating discriminatory bylaws, is to confront systemic discrimination in housing policy and practice. In this task, litigation is a valuable tool but only part of the solution.