The municipality brought a motion to dismiss an appeal of an Official Plan Amendment (OPA) on the basis that the appellant failed to make oral or written submissions prior to the OPA's adoption, as required by s. 17(36) of the Planning Act.
The appellant argued that a 1996 letter objecting to a substantially similar earlier OPA on the same property satisfied the requirement, as the statute does not explicitly impose a temporal deadline or require submissions to be directed at the specific OPA under appeal.
The Tribunal found the statutory language ambiguous and, applying principles of statutory interpretation, resolved the ambiguity in favour of preserving the appellant's right of appeal.
The municipality's motion to dismiss was denied.