GUEST SUBMISSION: Some of the most effective regulations in North America were not born in committee rooms or policy papers. They emerged from catastrophe.

Canada learned that lesson with devastating clarity.

In 1907, the Quebec Bridge collapsed into the St. Lawrence River during construction, killing 75 workers. A Royal Commission later found underestimated loads, ignored warnings and unclear lines of authority. Then, astonishingly, in 1916, the replacement span collapsed as well, killing another 13 workers.

Two catastrophic failures, nearly a decade apart, on the same project.

The impact on Canadian engineering was profound: licensing standards were tightened; responsibility was clarified; professional review became standard practice.

Out of that reckoning emerged one of the country’s most enduring professional traditions: the Iron Ring ceremony, developed with the help of Rudyard Kipling. Engineers wear the ring not as decoration, but as a reminder that their work is a public trust and when it fails, people die.

That kind of reckoning has never come to urban growth policy.

Urban growth needs a reckoning

When engineering fails, structures collapse and reforms follow. When urban growth policy fails, the damage is quieter and far more enduring.

It unfolds over decades, shaping how people live, where they can afford to go and whether they can ever enter the housing market. The consequences accumulate slowly: families pushed farther from opportunity, cities that grow less livable, and a housing system that increasingly fails the people it is meant to serve.

The great folly of 20th-century urban policy, which still lingers today, was its faith in abstract design. Concepts like “towers in the park” promised healthy cities but delivered isolation, while places such as Kensington Market and Granville Island succeeded in the absence of policy.

In engineering, comparable misjudgments triggered investigation and reform. In urban growth policy, the response was simpler: move on to the next idea.

The crux of the problem

Today’s problem isn’t ideological; it’s technocratic. Urban growth policy has become a numbers game of density targets, unit counts, tidy spreadsheet abstractions that describe cities on paper but miss how people actually live.

Every project triggers studies, risk or no risk. Paperwork grows. Timelines stretch. Housing stalls.

In Ontario, frameworks like the former Places to Grow were meant to guide growth intelligently. Instead, they became systems for counting, measuring, modelling and tracking compliance while rarely asking whether the result matched what the economy or housing market actually needed. At the same time, urban growth policy took on a stylistic tone, built around attractive phrases like “intensification,” “live-work-play,” “15-minute cities,” and “complete communities.”

The language sounds precise and progressive, but it often replaces judgment with jargon, producing process instead of housing, and abstractions instead of places people can afford to live.

Take “live-work-play” communities, frequently cited as the future of urban living. While attractive on paper, they do not magically produce more housing. They require complex zoning changes, increase upfront costs, and still face the same approval timelines as conventional projects.

Similarly, a heavy focus on intensification and design language can distract from the reality that restrictive planning systems, through zoning overlays, setbacks, heritage controls and arbitrary design metrics often prevent the very housing supply these policies claim to encourage.

The urban policy balancing act

Urban growth policy is meant to balance economic growth, infrastructure capacity, environmental protection and community character. But when it becomes a stylistic exercise valuing rhetoric over affordability and supply, it distorts housing markets rather than improving them.

Policy that looks good in a plan document but does not align with market signals will not make housing appear. It will simply push it elsewhere.

If you want a useful analogy for how complex systems function, consider Manhattan. There is no central food planner deciding what groceries appear on each block, yet the island feeds itself every day through a highly coordinated private supply chain.

New York City is often described as having only a few days’ supply of food on hand at any time, a just-in-time system driven by constant movement and real-time demand. It works not because it is centrally planned, but because thousands of independent decisions respond to market signals.

That is the paradox of central planning: it can look rational on paper while failing in practice. Complex systems do not follow policy documents; they follow incentives, constraints and human behaviour.

Housing is not groceries, but the lesson holds. You cannot plan your way around supply and demand. You can only align with it or distort it.

A desire for ground-oriented housing

The signal from the housing market is clear.

Canadians, particularly families, want ground-oriented housing: townhouses, duplexes, single-family homes, and complete neighbourhoods where daily life is manageable. High-density housing has an important role in major urban centres, but it cannot be the only answer everywhere. When policy insists otherwise, families are priced out or pushed outward.

Housing does not appear by accident.

In Canada, the private sector builds the overwhelming majority of homes. Yet in provinces like Ontario and British Columbia, policy-driven delays have turned approvals into a multi-year gamble. When supply is constrained by process rather than risk, fewer homes get built regardless of demand.

Capital does not disappear; it shifts to jurisdictions or product types that better align with policy constraints.

The consequences are visible everywhere. Families are forced to “drive until they qualify,” leapfrogging greenbelts and farmland. Others are pushed into micro-units that technically satisfy policy metrics but fail basic tests of livability. A generation is kept out of the housing market while cities densify in ways that satisfy targets more than people.

A failure of policy

This is not a failure of builders or engineers. It is a failure of policy to remain grounded in purpose.

The most effective regulations in our history were simple: prevent catastrophic harm. Structural failure. Fire. Flood. Unsafe water.

They were grounded in measurable risk and backed by accountability. That is what the Quebec Bridge taught Canada.

Urban growth policy needs to rediscover that discipline and abandon the illusion that housing outcomes can be engineered by numerical targets and stylistic slogans alone. Requirements should exist only where real risks to life, safety, critical infrastructure, or irreversible harm are present. Built form should respond to markets, demographics and economic realit,y not just density models and fashionable language.

Canada does not need to deregulate. It needs to re-regulate with intention.

The Iron Ring reminds engineers their decisions echo long after the drawings are complete.

Urban growth policy could use the same reminder because decisions made today about where and how Canadians live will shape our cities and housing outcomes for generations.

A century after the Quebec Bridge collapsed, the lesson still holds: regulate the risks that matter, stop planning by numbers and start building the homes Canadians actually need.