Good morning. Let us pray.

Prières.

Mr. Calandra moved second reading of the following bill:

Bill 185, An Act to amend various Acts / Projet de loi 185, Loi modifiant diverses lois.

It’s a very good question. It’s twofold.

We’ve been removing obstacles so that we can get more purpose-built rental housing built in the province of Ontario. We have done some excellent work on that. We have the highest level of purpose-built rentals.

The definition of affordable housing, which is something that we all agreed upon in this House—implementation of that. As of June 1, we’ll remove development charges across all of that sector. That is also good work.

We are also in the process of, hopefully, being able to conclude an agreement with the federal government with respect to the National Housing Strategy. As the member knows, Ontario has done some really, really good work on that. We remain committed to funding Ontario’s portion of the National Housing Strategy, which identifies homes for victims of intimate partner violence. We will continue funding that program.

Ultimately, we’re trying to remove the obstacles that will get more types of homes built across all sectors, because the number one challenge is that not enough homes are being built. High interest rates are a challenge on that as well. This bill is targeted to get more shovels in the ground.

This has been a growing problem across Ontario and, frankly, across Canada. As I mentioned in my speech, the federal government made some unilateral cuts to post-secondary education which facilitated the need to build more homes, student dormitories, very, very quickly in all parts of the country.

We are one of the first provinces to move to as-of-right student dormitories, student housing on our university campuses—I would say long overdue. We have instances where universities have been waiting—in the University of Toronto’s instance—10 years to build a student dorm. That’s too long. Every dorm that we build is another home that is available in the community. Our campuses across Ontario will benefit from this. Frankly, if I’m being honest, I hope that across Canada, all provinces will do the same thing. I suspect we will be leaders nationally on this, as well.

I suspect the member is more specifically talking about the right of appeal to a tribunal with respect to boundary expansion, where a municipal partner is either unwilling to respond or responds in a fashion that the proponent doesn’t agree with. We thought it the best approach to remove it exclusively from the hands of a municipality and from the minister’s office and to put it to an impartial third-party adjudicative body, as was done in the province of Ontario up until 2003. As I said, I believe this is the fairest way of doing it; it’s a more open way of doing it. All the parties will be able to provide evidence on this, and a third-party adjudicator will make that decision, removing it from the exclusive domain of the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing.