Ottawa to seek Supreme Court appeal of golf course ruling

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The City of Ottawa is going to take another, final swing at thwarting redevelopment of the Kanata Golf and Country Club.

A memo to the mayor and councillors from interim city solicitor Stuart Huxley on Wednesday said an application to seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada would be filed by mid-March.

“It is expected that a decision on the city’s leave application could be made during 2025,” Huxley’s memo said. “If the court grants the city leave to appeal, an appeal process would then be triggered. If leave to appeal were to be denied, that would end this litigation and the (Ontario) Court of Appeal’s recent decision declaring the contract provisions void would stand.

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“I will update members of council as to the outcome of the city’s application for leave to appeal.”

In a decision on Jan. 21, the Court of Appeal for Ontario upheld a lower-court ruling that declared invalid those provisions in a contract between the original owners of the golf course and the former City of Kanata — which became part of Ottawa in 2001 amalgamation — requiring preservation of 40 per cent of the golf course lands as open space.

“Municipalities must be able to make long-term decisions through agreements with confidence that they will be binding to allow for long term policy and planning objectives to endure. Allowing the current ruling to stand could have far reaching consequences for municipal governance, contract enforcement, and public trust in these decision-making and implementation processes,” Huxley wrote.

ClubLink, owner of the Kanata Golf and Country Club since 1996, announced plans to redevelop in 2018, contending that golf clubs were struggling to stay competitive due to the high number of courses in the National Capital Region.

Its development plan calls for 1,480 housing units, including townhouses, apartments, detached and semi-detached homes, setting aside 32 per cent of the site for parks, woods and open spaces.

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Legal action began after the city’s planning committee rejected the development proposal in 2020.

A decision in the city’s favour was overturned by the Court of Appeal for Ontario, and the Supreme Court of Canada rejected the municipality’s application for leave to appeal again, sending the matter back to Superior Court. Three days of hearings in September 2022 led to an October 2023 ruling that ClubLink shouldn’t be “saddled with a perpetual obligation” to operate a golf facility.

The Ontario appeal court judges panel said its decision on Jan. 21, 2025, was in keeping with a 2022 ruling by the Ontario Land Tribunal suggesting the ClubLink proposal represented good neighbourhood planning.

Opponents of the project argue the site can’t withstand so much concentrated development. Their chief concerns involve stormwater management and fears that water will end up in basements. Currently, excessive rain drains onto the golf course.

Only a small percentage of applications for leave to appeal are approved by the Supreme Court of Canada. In 2023, the most recent year for which statistics are posted on the court’s website, only 49 of 523 applications were approved, and the total has been 10 per cent or less for every year since 2014.

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