Questions Raised About the Developer Behind Oakville's Midtown Towers

The company picked to build 11 towers next to the Oakville GO Station has never built a highrise. A Toronto Star investigation published this week goes through the record of Distrikt Developments and its founder Emil Toma, and raises questions about whether the company has the experience and the financing for a project this size.

Over the past decade Distrikt has completed 682 housing units in townhouses and midrise buildings, according to Ontario's Home Construction Regulatory Authority. The tallest project it has finished is a 10-storey, 364-unit condo complex in Oakville. The midtown plan calls for more than 6,800 homes, roughly ten times everything the company has built in ten years.

The Star also reports that Toma and his partners defaulted on more than $10 million in loans tied to a lowrise apartment project near Bathurst Street and Eglinton Avenue in Toronto, which went into receivership without breaking ground. In May, lenders asked an Ontario court to issue a bankruptcy order against Toma, saying $6 million was still owed after the property sold, and those proceedings are ongoing. Distrikt told the Star that project has no relationship to the Oakville development, and Toma said the questions conflate unrelated companies and historical disputes.

Oakville council voted unanimously not to endorse the province's plan, calling it a dangerous precedent that prioritizes mega-density over balanced and sustainable development. The province used minister's zoning orders to approve it anyway, issuing four of them in April for buildings as tall as 56 storeys. Infrastructure Ontario told the Star it runs reputation and financial due diligence on its building partners before selecting them.

There is an airspace problem too. Distrikt did not notify Nav Canada about the tower heights until August 2025, two years after first bringing the highrise plans to the town and nine months after the province designated the land. In December, Nav Canada wrote back to say the proposal does not fit its height guidelines for the flight path over Oakville. In April the province said it would cap the towers at 38 storeys while keeping the same number of homes, and would not say how.