Bill 5: Ontario’s Trojan Horse

Welcome to the Special Economic Zone—where oversight goes to die.

My daughter asked me to dig into this. We’d both heard about Bill 5, and what we were hearing wasn’t good—but a few days ago she knocked on my office door and said, “You have got to write about this. I can’t believe what they’ve included in this bill.”

So the research began.

Here’s a truth: if you want to know about land and what it needs, talk to a farmer. You want to understand the forest? Talk to an elder. These aren’t romantic ideas. They’re practical ones. People who touch the soil. People who have relied on it’s abundance and understand that they are temporary stewards of the land for the generations that follow, understand how to work with it, not on it. Their vision is for 50-100 years from now, not tomorrow. They’re the ones who plant the trees that they’ll never enjoy the shade from. Their intent is sustainability not a quick profit.

If you’ve never read The Tragedy of the Commons, now would be a good time. In just a few pages, ecologist Garrett Hardin captures the flaw in how we manage shared resources. He describes a pasture where each herder adds more animals to boost their own return, even though overgrazing will destroy the land for everyone. The damage is collective; the payoff is personal. No one sets out to ruin the commons. But without shared restraint, that’s exactly what happens.

This is how deregulation works. This is how Bill 5 works. It takes land held in careful stewardship—land managed for generations by Indigenous communities—and hands it to those who have no long-term upside in preserving it. It removes the legal fences, the environmental standards, the duty to consult, and invites bad actors to extract what they can before the land is ruined. These aren’t commons. These are homelands. And Bill 5 opens the door to turn them into sacrifice zones. In any decent society, checks and balances are how we stop this. They're how we say: enough. But in today’s economy, modern capitalism—late-stage or otherwise—the ones doing the damage are often the ones wealthy and connected enough to rewrite the rules. Which is why those checks and balances must be impartial. Non-partisan. Enforceable.

Bill 5 isn’t just a removal of oversight. It’s a permission slip for bad actors to behave badly—and a map of how to keep getting away with it.

Canada stands on the brink of opportunity. Mark Carney's One Canadian Economy platform, combined with the various existential threats posed by the Trump Administration, have inspired a sense of purpose and patriotism that I have never felt before. For the most part, we're seeing cooperation between provinces that hasn't been seen in generations—it's purposeful, and it seems to be in earnest. It's a time of great optimism and camaraderie.

But bad actors see opportunity too. Doug Ford and Stephen Lecce, under the guise of economic unity, have introduced Bill 5—a Trojan horse built for power. It arrives amid goodwill and promise, but hides within it the tools of unchecked authority, buried in the language of growth and recovery.

And it hasn’t softened with revision—it’s hardened. The updated version doesn’t just preserve the original’s sweeping deregulation; it strengthens it. Procurement restrictions are now explicitly nationalist. Legal immunities have been expanded. Discretionary ministerial powers are clarified and fortified. Even jurisdictional lines around environmental protection are redrawn to sideline federal oversight. What began as a Trojan horse now rolls forward with armor plating—and no cavalry in sight.

One of the preferred tools of bad actors—something that should strike fear in the hearts of voters on all sides of the aisle—is the omnibus bill. It begins with a clear, even noble, intent. But as it travels through the ports of critique and approval, it collects layers of opportunism that weigh it down and quietly shift its course. With enough scrutiny, one can trace the fingerprints: policy inserts, exemptions, contradictions—each one a signal of buried intent. Bill 5 is an omnibus bill that should terrify Ontarians and Canadians.

Bill 5 is not a bill. It’s a map. A map of what Ontario becomes when power is rewritten to serve a few, and process is paved over with the language of growth. On paper, it promises prosperity: Special Economic Zones, streamlined projects, critical mineral development, energy expansion. But in practice, it offers something else entirely: the permanent suspension of dissent.

Brought forward by Stephen Lecce—the same minister who previously invoked the notwithstanding clause to crush education worker bargaining rights—Bill 5 is a giant notwithstanding clause in spirit, if not in name. It creates new legal zones, new enforcement powers, and a new logic: that belief, not law, determines what is permitted. In doing so, it replicates the clause’s effect—disabling rights protections, bypassing judicial scrutiny, and neutralizing public opposition—without ever needing to invoke it.

This isn’t development. It’s libertarian deregulation by design. Oversight becomes optional. Consultation becomes decorative. Legal remedies are extinguished before harm is even done.

This multipart series examines the true structure and intent of Bill 5. It exposes the mechanisms embedded in its 170+ sections and multiple schedules. And it traces the authoritarian arc of the Ford government’s governing strategy—one that mirrors Trump’s own omnibus power grabs.

The bill is purposefully convoluted and interwoven in an attempt to obscure—combining environmental law rollbacks, enforcement powers, and zoning exemptions across multiple schedules that appear unrelated at first glance. This is not a bill about what we build. It’s a bill about what we are willing to dismantle.

Series Navigation:

1. Jobs, Growth, and No Rules: The Rhetoric of Bill 5
   How economic language cloaks legislative overreach

2. From Teachers to Tunnels: Lecce’s Legislative Footprint
   Why the sponsor matters—and what he’s done before

3. What They Did to COSSARO
   Science is now optional. So is species recovery.

4. When Officers Get to Decide What’s Legal
   Bill 5 doesn’t just override your rights. It extinguishes your ability to fight back.

5. Special Economic Zones: The Infrastructure of Impunity
   Cabinet overrides, trusted proponents, and shadow jurisdictions

6. Extraction Without Consent
   The Ring of Fire, Indigenous sovereignty, and the map Ford doesn’t want you to see

7. Expropriation Without Compensation
   Legal immunity, procurement gatekeeping, and the erasure of recourse

8. Ontario Place and the Great Exemption Machine
   How Ford’s redevelopment deal became a prototype for regulatory disappearance

9. Why Bill 5 Isn’t a Policy—It’s a Pattern
   MZOs, the Greenbelt, Bill 28, and the Ford government’s broader authoritarian toolkit

Read each section. Ask what it allows. Ask who it shields. Ask who it silences.

Then ask if that’s the Ontario you want.