When I’ve heard the story of Wilmot told in this place, there are alarm bells that get raised, given the story I brought up about Watters Road. We have to save our farmland. We don’t have to trade off our farmland to make sure that we can build deeply affordable housing in Ontario. We absolutely don’t have to do that.

The other thing I would say, Speaker, is that developers again and again tell me—and I run into them all the time back home—they’re not in the business of building deeply affordable housing. That’s not what they’re in the business to do.

There was a time when the province of Ontario and the Canadian government worked together with municipalities and non-profit housers to do that work. We have to commit to do that work again. Thirty years of evidence has shown us that no one is going to do it for us; we have to do it ourselves.

So I think we do need to work towards the intensification of the downtown. As I said before, you have a willing partner in the people of Ottawa Centre. We want to make sure that happens.

But what I do know is there’s a whole lot of vacant provincial properties all over Ontario that could be repurposed. There’s a whole lot of LCBOs, for example, in strip malls upon which there are air rights where we could build housing, for which the province actually can make the decision. The last time I asked the Ministry of Infrastructure this question, my friend, it was 812—812 vacant properties in Ontario owned by the province. Why can’t we repurpose some of that for some usage, even if it’s transitional usage and it’s not fully outfitted homes? There is nothing stopping us from doing that. And I’m sure that where you live and where I live, there are partners willing to make that happen.

I remember the Prime Minister getting up at a conference in 2019 and saying, “Well, technically, housing isn’t my jurisdiction, but....” We have to stop talking like that. There is a federal Minister of Housing. There’s a provincial Minister of Housing. There are people responsible for housing at the municipal level. We can’t play a jurisdictional game anymore when it comes to housing.

And I will not accept the argument that there aren’t any resources available for us to get people housed right now, because the city of Ottawa, through its housing allowance to people who interact with our shelter system, has proven there’s a way we can keep people in their homes if we can get them money to make the rent.

So that’s what I would say. We can use the money the province has to keep people housed, and we don’t have to blame each other for what we’re not doing. We can do something.

There are a lot of things that could be put into this bill that you may see the members over here standing up to vote for.

I encourage both of us to pressure our respective groups so we get the best bill before the House.

The member has talked a lot about building deeply affordable units, building not-for-profit housing, and I think this bill seeks to help that happen. We’re looking at ways that we can streamline the planning process, looking at ways that we can help those builds go faster.

With the remaining time, I’d like to know whether or not the member is going to support this bill and whether or not he’s going to approve of the government’s position as to how we can actually help people he has referred to in his speech earlier today actually find a place to live.

I thank the member for his remarks. I wanted to focus a little bit on transit and its relationship to housing and housing intensification, as the member noted, and come back to the broad commitment this government has to transit: $70 billion over 10 years, biggest in the history of the province—massive. Certainly, I would think that that does two things that the leader of the Green Party, the member, may be interested in. Number one, it helps the environment—it gets people out of cars, which is good—but secondly, the intensification that’s going on in terms of housing around that transit, the transit-oriented communities initiative that has been going on for quite some time.

Doesn’t the member think that those initiatives are worthwhile and can be supported with this bill?

I just want to say, do people know that rent in Toronto is $3,300 for a one-bedroom? In Niagara, it’s over $2,000; 23,600 households in Niagara for core housing needs—what that means is 30% of their income goes towards rent. It would take somebody to work 81 hours at minimum wage to afford a two-bedroom home in Niagara. No rent controls are not working.

So, my question, which I think is fair, reasonable and certainly balanced: Do you believe that we need rent controls on new builds from 2019 forward so people can afford to rent homes in Toronto?