Lawyers ‘failed to comply’ with Ontario’s lobbying law while seeking MZO: oversight office

Integrity commissioner found two lawyers contravened the lobbying law by not registering for a client in 2023

This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park. The officer who monitors lobbying of Ontario government officials has found that a pair of lawyers “failed to comply” with provincial law by lobbying for a minister’s zoning order without registering as they’re supposed to. The office of Ontario’s integrity commissioner, Cathryn Motherwell, published notices on its website this week about how the work of two lawyers, Isaac Tang and Pitman Patterson, in 2023 was in “non-compliance” with the Lobbyists Registration Act (LRA).

Both notices were only a few sentences long. The summaries said that Tang and Patterson each “failed to comply with the (LRA) by failing to file one registration on behalf of one client with respect to his undertaking to lobby public office holders for a minister’s zoning order.” The posts do not contain any more information about Tang’s and Patterson’s lobbying activities, including about whether their “non-compliance” was on behalf of the same client or while lobbying for the same minister’s zoning order (MZO).

Tang and Patterson are both partners with Borden Ladner Gervais, specializing in land-use planning and municipal law. A spokesperson for the commissioner’s office said in an email that it publicizes “only the information necessary for the enforcement of a penalty as outlined in (the LRA) or to meet the requirements of the office’s annual report.” Neither Tang nor Patterson responded to The Trillium’s attempts to reach them by phone and email before this story’s publication, either.

Ontario’s lobbying law lends the integrity commissioner only a couple of options for penalizing lobbyists who break it. Naming and shaming has been the preferred penalty of successive commissioners, rather than suspending rule-breaking lobbyists. The commissioner’s posts about Tang’s and Patterson’s “non-compliance” added that their “failure to register undermines the Act’s purpose of transparency.”

Patterson has never registered to lobby provincial officials on behalf of any clients. Tang has registered once: for Crestwood Park Holdings, a development business, in May of this year. Tang’s registry filing said he aims to help the company redevelop an agricultural property at 99 Mount St. Louis Road in Oro-Medonte, just north of Barrie, into a “rest stop and community facility uses.”

The lobbying targets he listed in his registration include officials in Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Rob Flack’s office, MPPs and Ontario’s Provincial Land and Development Facilitator, an agency the provincial government assigns to mediate planning disputes between businesses and municipalities. Crestwood Park Holdings is owned by the Rennie family, who also own Webers, a popular Orillia burger joint. In 2020, representatives for Crestwood Park Holdings asked Oro-Medonte’s council to pass a resolution supporting an MZO for their 99 Mount St. Louis Rd. proposal, which included building two restaurants, a gas station, a pond, and baseball and soccer fields, just south of the Mount St. Louis Moonstone ski resort.

The provincial government can issue minister’s zoning orders to overrule local planning rules and decisions. They were seldom used before the Ford government, which has issued more than 125 since 2018, often intending to fast-track development projects. Documents presented at a meeting by Oro-Medonte’s council on July 15, 2020, said the Ford government had indicated “preliminary support for the use of a ... (MZO) to assist in expediting this important project.”

The package Crestwood Park presented to the council also included a supportive letter from Simcoe North’s PC MPP Jill Dunlop, which was addressed to Ontario’s minister of municipal affairs and housing at the time. In her letter, Dunlop told then-minister Steve Clark that she supported “the acceleration of a (minister’s) zoning order from your ministry, which will assist in facilitating this tourism development project in Simcoe North.” Minutes of Oro-Medonte’s meeting on July 15, 2020, show Oro-Medonte’s council didn’t ultimately support Crestwood Park Holdings’ MZO request, instead referring the matter to the municipality’s legal staff.

In 2022, Oro-Medonte’s council “respectfully declined” to support the MZO request, saying it couldn’t be considered until “appropriate” Indigenous and community consultations took place. The Ford government does not appear to have issued an MZO for the property to date. The notices about the two lawyers’ non-compliance with Ontario’s lobbying law are the first the commissioner has posted in over a year.

The last ones Motherwell’s office published were in the spring of 2025, when it revealed that it found several people who were involved in the Greenbelt scandal, or were their affiliates, broke the province’s lobbying law.