06/28/2026
🚨🚨📰📰HORNEPAYNE IN THE NEWS! 📰📰🚨🚨
Congratulations to the Township of Hornepayne and CAO Manuela Batovanja for turning a local housing barrier into a provincial conversation — and for putting forward a practical, made-in-the-North solution.
Article reads:
“A new amendment being proposed for Ontario's Assessment Act is aimed at encouraging more new housing builds in small municipalities.
The proposed changes would apply to municipalities with populations of less than 5,000 people, and essentially allow them to reduce the residential property tax rate on new housing builds for a period of 30 years.
"I approached my mayor last year with the idea," said Manuela Batovanja, CAO of Hornepayne. "We brought it to (Ontario Minister of Finance Peter) Bethlenfalvy. And I've been speaking to different municipalities throughout the northwest since then. So I have gotten support from quite a few municipalities and also from local businesses."
The problem, Batovanja said, is it's difficult to build new homes in the north because of high property tax rates.
"You would have a higher assessment, which would generate a tax bill that's just not affordable, along with a mortgage," she said. "Our current system discourages construction in the north, and we would like to see construction happen in the north and people move here rather than migrating back and forth every two weeks to and from their jobs here and living in the south."
"So 95 per cent of Ontario's population is in and around the GTA, the other five per cent is in northwestern Ontario," she said. "We obviously ... have the larger land mass but not the population, so it would be nice to migrate some of that population on a permanent basis."
Currently, community improvement plans (CIPs), which fall under the Ontario Planning Act, do allow for municipalities to reduce municipal tax rates for 10 or 15 years, Batovanja said.
Other issues with CIPs include the fact that most small municipalities don't have the capacity to create and implement them, a report to Hornepayne council states.
The new proposal would see that timeline increased to 30 years, so the owners of newly-built homes can pay off their mortgage, and then begin paying a higher tax rate, Batovanja said.
More housing would also allow those smaller communities to develop vacant residential land that has built up over the years following the closure or shutdowns of large industrial operations.
"If you think back to the 80s throughout northwestern Ontario and northeastern Ontario, all of northern Ontario, many businesses, industries, mines closed and people just moved away because there wasn't the work here to sustain them," Batovanja said. "These properties are derelict now, sitting empty, but they still have services."
Support from Atikokan
"They still have water. The snow plow goes by there. The garbage pickup goes right past those properties," she said. "So they're already receiving services, but they're not supporting those services through revenues. So what it's doing is taking these properties, ... and turning them into revenue generating properties."
"If enough of it happens, it will either help lower the tax rate a little bit for everyone else, or at least maintain it."
Batovanja presented the proposal to Atikokan council earlier this week.
"We need to do something to help our housing situation," Atikokan Mayor Rob Ferguson said. "There's such a disparity between existing housing stock and new builds that it is really cost-prohibitive for somebody to really look at building a new house."
"We're pushing this idea to try to find a solution," he said. "Maybe it's not the perfect solution, maybe there's tweaks that need to be made to it, but you know, small municipalities under 5,000 people, we need to do something to encourage more housing stock."
Ferguson said Atikokan council did pass a resolution supporting the proposed amendment.
"We're looking at economic opportunities in Atikokan," he said. "We're going to need more housing, and we can't really look to the province for the housing because they're not going to do that for us."
"We have to come up with ideas on our own, and we've got to give some kind of incentive for people to take that plunge and build something new."”
