If you have tried to cut through the golf course on a walk this year, a sign at the cart path stopped you. Millcroft Golf Club's own website spells it out: no recreational walking, no dog walking, on the course or the cart paths, full stop. Stick to the public sidewalks and parks instead. For a neighborhood built around a course that loops through backyards on both nines, that is not a small change in etiquette. It is one visible piece of a much bigger stalemate playing out over the ground under those fairways, and the course itself is only the part you can see from the street.
The Course Got Smaller Before It Got Quiet
Millcroft Golf Club is only playing its back nine, holes 10 through 18, for the 2026 season. The clubhouse's inside dining room and banquet space are closed for the year too. In their place: a snack hut and a barbecue on the lower back patio. None of this is framed by the club as permanent. It is framed as a season-by-season accommodation while construction moves through the property at 2155 Country Club Drive.
That construction traces back to a fight that started when Burlington denied the project outright. The developer, Millcroft Greens Corporation, appealed that denial to the Ontario Land Tribunal, the provincial body that has final say over land use disputes when a municipality and a landowner disagree. The tribunal sided with the developer in 2024. A final order followed on February 19, 2025, with an amendment approved a month later. Construction on that first phase, several parcels along the fairways plus an apartment building nearby, has been underway since.
According to CBC News, the visible cost of that first phase showed up last year. In May 2025, contractors cut down 425 trees on the site to prepare it for what CHCH News reported at the time was a plan for roughly 90 new houses. The City of Burlington later charged the landowner, developer and contractor under its private tree bylaw, alleging the trees came down without the permits the bylaw requires. That case is separate from the zoning fight itself. It runs alongside the approved construction, not instead of it, which is part of why work on the site has continued even as the legal questions around it have not fully closed.
Two Requests to the Same Minister
The land the tribunal approved in 2024 is not the whole course. Roughly 100 acres of Millcroft Golf Club sit outside that decision, and this year both sides asked the province to settle their fate through the same tool: a Minister's Zoning Order, which lets the provincial government override local zoning directly.
Millcroft Greens filed first, asking the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing to zone the remaining acreage for residential use. Public comment on that request closed July 5, 2026. The company's own materials describe a plan for about 140 new detached homes and townhouses on roughly 25 acres of that land, with the remaining 75 acres dedicated to the city as open space at no cost, plus a possible seniors' living or long-term care facility along Dundas Street. None of that is confirmed. It is the developer's proposal, not a signed agreement, and The Trillium reported that Burlington's Commissioner of Development and Growth Management, Stephen Robichaud, told council in September there is nothing concrete indicating the company intends to hand any of that land back.
The city filed its own competing request the same spring, asking the province to lock the remaining acreage into its current designation as parkland and open space, the same designation council pointed to when it first turned the project down. Both requests now sit in front of the same minister, and as of the most recent update from the city, neither has been decided.
What Council Did on September 18
On September 18, 2026, Burlington council spent hours hearing from eight delegates before signaling its support for a staff recommendation to refuse Millcroft Greens' Phase 2 subdivision application outright. Ward 2 Councillor Lisa Kearns summed up the council's position at the end of the meeting: "We've used all the tools in our toolbox." The refusal had been set to go before a Regular Meeting of Council on September 29, but even a council vote against the subdivision would not resolve the two zoning orders still waiting on the province, and it would not by itself stop the developer from building if the Minister ultimately sides with the MZO request.
That distinction matters for anyone trying to read the news out of this and guess what happens next. A local government voting no is a position. Whether it becomes an outcome depends on a decision the city does not control.
What's Actually Changed on the Ground This Year
For residents living along the course, the practical differences right now come down to a short, specific list:
- The playable course is nine holes, not eighteen, for the 2026 season, with the front nine out of rotation.
- The clubhouse's dining room and banquet space are closed for the year, replaced by a snack hut and patio BBQ.
- Recreational and dog walking on the course and cart paths is explicitly prohibited, a change from how the property functioned before construction began.
- Construction fencing and tree clearing are visible on the parcels covered by the 2024 tribunal decision, where the roughly 90-home Phase 1 project is underway.
- The additional 100 acres beyond that footprint remains zoned as open space for now, but that designation is exactly what is being contested through the two pending Minister's Zoning Order requests.
One member of Millcroft Against Bad Development, the resident group that has organized against the project since it began, has described the course flooding after as little as half an hour of heavy rain, an observation tied to the group's broader argument that the course's open ground does double duty as stormwater absorption for the neighborhood around it. That claim is part of the public record of council debate, not an independent engineering finding, but it is the reasoning behind why the fight has stretched well past the original 90 homes and into a battle over the other 100 acres.
The Timeline That's Still Open
Nothing about the two pending zoning orders has a public deadline. The province has not indicated when the Minister will rule on either request, and the outcome of one does not automatically determine the other, since they ask for opposite things on the same land. What is settled is the physical footprint already under construction from the 2024 decision, the reduced golf season through 2026, and a council that has gone on record twice, once in its original denial and again this September, opposing further residential development on the remaining acreage.
For a neighborhood organized for decades around a course running through its backyards, the next real update will not come from a sign at the clubhouse. It will come from Queen's Park.
If you're trying to make sense of what any of this means for a specific street, lot, or backyard sightline in Millcroft, our team at Wang Team follows these filings as part of covering the neighborhood day to day, and we're glad to walk through what's public record and what's still speculation.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
