Seventeen schedules. That’s what was in Bill 97, the Plan to Protect Ontario Act, when the Ford government brought it to a vote at 11 p.m. on a Wednesday night in April 2026. Inside those 17 schedules: a merger of 35 conservation authorities into eight, the repeal of a 24-year-old bus parking law near the Rogers Centre, a cap on ticket resale prices, an HST rebate for new homes, changes to workplace safety insurance, and, buried in there like a nail in a sandwich, a retroactive rewrite of Ontario’s freedom of information laws.
One bill. One vote. No committee hearings.
I’ve been tracking legislation at Queen’s Park for a while now and the pattern is hard to miss. The Ford government doesn’t just use omnibus bills, it has turned them into the default method of governing. And I think most people don’t realize how much gets decided inside these packages because, honestly, who’s going to read a 200-page bill that amends 15 different acts at once? That’s sort of the point.
What an Omnibus Bill Actually Is
Context: An omnibus bill amends multiple unrelated statutes in a single piece of legislation. Governments at both the federal and provincial level have used them for decades, most commonly for budget implementation. The term comes from Latin, meaning “for everything,” which tells you pretty much all you need to know.
The concept isn’t new and it isn’t unique to any one party. Budget implementation bills have always been catch-all vehicles, you pass the budget speech, then you need legislation to actually enact the tax changes and spending measures. Fine. That makes sense.
What’s changed is scale. And ambition.
Ontario’s omnibus bills used to be mostly fiscal housekeeping. Adjust a tax rate here, create a new fund there, maybe tweak a benefits formula. The stuff which keeps the machinery of government running but doesn’t fundamentally alter policy in 12 different areas simultaneously. That’s not what we’re looking at anymore.
The Recent Record
Let me walk through what the Ford government has bundled into omnibus legislation over the past few years, because the sheer range of it is something else.
Bill 23, More Homes Built Faster Act (2022): Amended nine separate acts across multiple schedules. Cut development charges, overrode municipal zoning near transit stations, stripped conservation authorities of their planning role, weakened heritage protections. The housing crisis was the framing. The fine print rewired the relationship between the province and every municipality in Ontario.
Bill 212, Reducing Gridlock, Saving You Time Act (2024): The name says traffic. The bill gave the province power to order removal of bike lanes on Bloor Street, University Avenue, and Yonge Street, authorized 24-hour construction on designated highway projects, and accelerated property acquisition for Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass. Passed on strict party lines. I remember reading the title and thinking it sounded like a traffic study, not a fundamental shift in municipal transportation planning.
Bill 5, Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act (2025): 10 schedules. Changed the Mining Act, gutted the Endangered Species Act (and replaced it with a weaker Species Conservation Act), expanded ministerial override powers on heritage sites, and gave the energy minister new authority over the electricity grid. The stated rationale was trade tariff response. First Nations leaders gathered at Queen’s Park to oppose it, arguing it threatens Treaty obligations. Royal Assent came June 5, 2025.
Bill 97, Plan to Protect Ontario Act (2026): The big one so far. 17 schedules amending everything from conservation authority governance to pension benefits to the City of Toronto Act. The FOI changes, which retroactively shield the premier’s office from information requests, got the headlines. But most of the other 16 schedules barely got a mention. That’s the thing about omnibus bills, the controversial schedule absorbs all the oxygen and everything else sails through.
Schedules per Omnibus Bill
The Mechanics: How You Move a 200-Page Bill in 30 Days
Here’s where it gets interesting, or depressing, depending on your view of how legislatures should work.
The Ford government’s fall 2025 session ran 30 sitting days. In that window they passed a flurry of omnibus legislation. The tool that makes this possible is time allocation, a motion that caps how long MPPs can debate a bill before it goes to a vote. The government used time allocation on nearly 10 bills in that session alone.
For Bill 97, they went further. House Leader Steve Clark proposed bypassing committee entirely. No public hearings. No expert testimony. No clause-by-clause review where opposition MPPs could ask why, exactly, bus parking near the Rogers Centre and freedom of information reform belong in the same piece of legislation.
The bill passed 57 to 33 on April 23, 2026.
Context: Committee hearings are the stage where members of the public, advocacy groups, legal experts, and affected stakeholders can testify about a bill’s potential impact. Skipping this stage means the only people who get to weigh in on the legislation are the MPPs in the chamber.
Ontario Liberal MPP Tyler Watt called it “a dark day for democracy in Ontario.” The Canadian Civil Liberties Association said the government was “dodging legislative scrutiny.” The Green Party said the late-night debate was scheduled “to ram the bill through while nobody was watching.”
The government’s response, essentially, was that the legislature has other business to attend to. Which, sure. But I’d argue if you can’t break a bill into pieces small enough for proper debate, maybe don’t bundle 17 unrelated policy changes together in the first place.
Why Governments Do This
I’ll give the strategy some credit for a second, it is effective. There’s a logic to omnibus bills that goes beyond simple convenience.
Bundle a popular measure (ticket price caps, HST rebate) with an unpopular one (FOI restrictions, conservation authority mergers) and you force the opposition into a bad vote either way. Vote yes and you’ve endorsed the unpopular provision. Vote no and you opposed the popular one. Both positions get used in attack ads.
It also reduces the number of individual votes the government needs to whip, less chance for backbench dissent on any single issue. When you’re voting on a package, nobody has to go on record as the PC member who voted against ticket scalping reform just because they had concerns about FOI.
And omnibus bills compress the media cycle. There’s only so much bandwidth. If Bill 97 has 17 schedules and the FOI story is consuming all the coverage, the conservation authority merger happens without most people even knowing it was in there. 35 conservation authorities reduced to eight. That’s a structural change to environmental governance in Ontario that would normally get weeks of debate and public attention. It got a paragraph in the budget reporting.
What Gets Lost
My read on this is pretty simple. Omnibus bills trade democratic scrutiny for speed, and the Ford government has decided that’s a trade worth making on basically everything.
The cost isn’t abstract. When Bill 5 replaced the Endangered Species Act with the weaker Species Conservation Act, the new regime lets developers register projects online and proceed without a permit. That’s a real change to how Ontario protects at-risk species. It deserved its own bill, its own hearings, its own debate. Instead it was Schedule 10 of a tariff-response bill.
When Bill 97 merged 35 conservation authorities into eight, landowners, municipalities, and environmental groups had no formal venue to raise concerns. Not one public hearing.
The opposition can complain. They do. But with a majority government, time allocation passes, committee bypasses pass, and the bills pass. The mechanism only breaks if voters decide they care about process, and if the last three elections are any indication, process is a hard sell when the alternative is “we’ll build the highway faster.”
Bill 97 passed at 11 p.m. on a Wednesday. Most of Ontario was asleep. The 17 schedules became law the next morning.
Sources and verification: Bill numbers, schedule counts, and vote totals verified against the Ontario Legislative Assembly records at ola.org. The 57-33 vote on Bill 97 was reported by CBC News (April 24, 2026). Details on Bill 5’s 10 schedules and Bill 23’s nine amended acts confirmed via Norton Rose Fulbright and McCarthy Tetrault legal analyses. The 30-day fall 2025 session length and time allocation usage reported by CBC News. Quotes from MPP Tyler Watt (CBC), CCLA (ccla.org), and the Green Party (various outlets). Bill 97’s skipping of committee hearings reported by the Globe and Mail and Global News.
Track how your MPP votes on omnibus bills and everything else at Ontario Pulse.