Back to the Premier: Today, my constituent Lindsay is receiving an N13, a demoviction notice. She tells me, “As a tenant who is now dealing with finding a home on top of dealing with the immediate aftermath of experiencing domestic violence, I’m at a complete loss. All of the homes being built are not made for people like me and my two young children. I’ve started looking for housing options so I can continue to live and work in Toronto once demovicted, but there is nowhere safe that I can afford to raise my family.”

Speaker, there is no affordable rental housing in Ontario because of the rent control loopholes that have been introduced by the Conservative government.

Will this government admit that they have the power to help Lindsay and her two young children by introducing real rent control today?

Interjections.

My question is to the Minister of Housing. A new report shows that Ontario rents have risen three times higher than guidelines due to rent control loopholes, with an average increase of 54.5% over the last decade.

Thousands of tenants in Parkdale–High Park and across Ontario are experiencing massive increases to the cost of housing, and there is no end in sight.

My question is, will you close rent control loopholes so Ontarians can find and maintain housing?

My question is to the Premier. The owner of property in Innisfil has been charging people facing housing insecurity $500 to set up a tent on their property. The ad for the property notes that they will have access to a communal washroom and kitchen. Shockingly, instead of working to resolve this province’s homelessness crisis, the member for Innisfil has started referring people to this for-profit encampment.

My question to the Premier is this: Is he going to start counting tents as part of their affordable housing numbers?

Unfortunately—and this is shocking but not surprising—this for-profit encampment is targeted toward people who are on OW or ODSP because the programs don’t even cover the cost of rent.

This Conservative government has fuelled a housing and affordability crisis, and now they seem to be endorsing its exploitation.

Speaker, will the Premier tell Ontarians whether for-profit encampments are part of his affordable housing strategy?

I’m very proud of the number of purpose-built rentals that we have increased. As the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing mentioned just moments ago, we have historic records of purpose-built buildings, and that is something that is important to the people of the province of Ontario who need a place to live.

We are working non-stop at achieving our goal of 1.5 million housing units, and we will get there with or without the help of the opposition, who would vote against every single initiative that we do when we achieve these records.

Mr. Speaker, I’ll have more to say in the supplementary.

When this government came to power, we recognized the crisis for what it is, and we made a public commitment. The Premier made a commitment. The municipal affairs and housing minister made a commitment. We will build 1.5 million spaces, and we’ll do it, notwithstanding that we’re starting from behind. We’re starting from behind because no investments were made; no money was put forward; the red tape was building up. But we will persevere. We will get the job done.

We are getting the job done, and we will not apologize for that.

I’m pleased to be rising here today to speak about Bill 185, the government’s latest housing bill, called Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act, 2024; I always love your titles.

This bill was also introduced at the same time as the government introduced an updated provincial policy statement for comment. These are pretty significant developments when it comes to the housing file, and I’m going to spend a bunch of my time today talking about what’s in the bill, as well as a little bit about what’s in the provincial policy statement, and then read some of the comments that have come in from stakeholders and also express some of what I like, what I have some concerns about and what I think is really not so great.

To summarize, this government has given us a bill that I would call a grab bag of half measures that reverse some of the really terrible housing mistakes that you’ve made in previous bills; notable is Bill 23. Some of the measures that you’ve introduced will also spur construction of new homes. I can see that. We do have a red flag that some of the homes that will be built will be single-family homes on farmland—sprawl. Sprawl is very expensive, and we have some concerns that this bill will really double down on that very expensive housing type.

Every time this government introduces a new bill, I really like to go through it and see what’s in it, and every time there is a new bill, I always see some flip-flopping. The government has attempted to cut back on development fees, and now we see that a lot of the development fee charges are back again. This bill also has flip-flopping as well.

What does this bill actually mean for people in Ontario who are struggling to find and keep their home? In the near term, it’s not going to help people find a home they can afford. It’s not going lower the rent. It’s not going to address the homelessness crisis. It’s not going to make it cheaper for people to buy their first home. That, I think, is a shame, because that is what housing affordability and the housing crisis is about: It’s about making homes affordable. When I look at this bill, there really isn’t a lot in the bill that’s going to address that critical issue of affordability. This government is cheap, and it’s people that suffer as a result of it.

I want to talk a little bit about the state of the housing crisis today. You just have to open up the newspaper, go to CBC, and every week, there are new, scary statistics and evidence and stories showing how bad it is out there—especially if you are lower-income or middle-income, you are really struggling to find a home to keep.

I’ll give you some examples. When it comes to the homelessness crisis—these are people who just can’t afford to find a home—we know that encampments in the city of Toronto have doubled; they’re at pandemic levels. We know that there are encampments in towns and cities all across Ontario, and that is new. It didn’t exist in the same way six years ago.

We know that the Auditor General, over five years ago now, said to this government, “You need to have a plan to address homelessness, because currently you don’t have one.” And six years later, this government still doesn’t have an effective plan to address homelessness. You would think, in a housing bill, that there would be a chunk of that bill that’s geared to addressing homelessness, but there isn’t. There’s nothing in this bill on that.

Then, I think about renters. There are 1.7 million renters in Ontario today; it used to be 1.4 million, but it’s going up because people can’t afford to buy a home. And when I look at the renter crisis and whether this bill addresses people who rent, I don’t see anything in there.

Your offices and our offices regularly get calls from people who are being illegally evicted, who cannot find a home, who are struggling with an above-guideline rent increase, who are being demovicted because their building is being converted into a condo. These people are worried. They’re scared. They don’t know if they’re going to be able to afford to live in Ontario anymore. What they want to see and what we want to see are strong measures to protect renters. We want to see strong rent control, including vacancy control, so there’s a cap on how much the rent can be raised between tenancies.

We want to see an effective Rental Housing Enforcement Unit. If a renter has an issue, like their washroom is not working, or they have mould that’s exacerbating their allergies or their asthma, and their landlord isn’t doing anything about it, they should have a number to call; they should be able to speak to a bylaw officer. There should be enough staff in that unit to respond, and the bylaw officer should have the enforcement tools and the capacity to take action, which means they should call up the landlord or the property manager and say, “This is the standard. Your renter is concerned. There’s evidence to show that you’re not doing your part as a landlord. If you don’t fix it, there will be consequences to that.” That’s what renters want. They want a level playing field. They want their home to be properly maintained. There’s nothing in this bill that’s going to help those renters—and this isn’t a one-off thing. When I canvass, I’ll go into building after building after building and I’ll speak to renter after renter who will say to me, “This place isn’t properly maintained.” It’s standard operating procedure, and that needs to change. We need to lift the floor to ensure renters can live in good homes.

And then the final piece, where I really see the housing crisis getting out of control—homelessness, renters—is for the first-time homebuyers who want to get their first home. If you are a first-time homebuyer in Ontario today, you are in a very tough situation because it has never been more expensive to buy a home and to pay off the mortgage of that home, with rising interest rates or high interest rates and the high cost of a home.

The National Bank of Canada’s recent statistics tell us that we are in the worst housing crisis for first-time homebuyers that we have seen in 41 years. That’s this government’s legacy. You’ve priced people out of the dream of home ownership. You’ve had six years to fix it. And under the six years this government has been in power, it has gone from bad to worse. That’s why people are saying, “I’m taking my skills and my talents with me, and I’m moving to Alberta.” Not good.

So the state of housing in Ontario today is really not great on all levels.

There’s so much that’s not in this bill that should be in there. There is no commitment to affordability. There is no fourplexes as of right. There is no commitment to increase density near transit stations or along transit corridors. There is no commitment to inclusionary zoning to require developments to do their fair share and build some affordable homes in big new developments. It makes sense. A lot of cities have done it. New York has done it—lots of cities. But we can’t. Why not? I don’t know.

There’s no rent control or vacancy control to stabilize rents and keep renters housed. There’s no improvement to the Landlord and Tenant Board, even though there are over 53,000 people waiting for a hearing at the Landlord and Tenant Board to get their disputes resolved in a fast, fair and efficient way—not happening here in Ontario.

There are no measures in this bill to stop illegal eviction, to curb AGI abuse and to stop bad-actor landlords who fail to properly maintain their homes. You would expect to see that in a housing bill, but it’s not there.

There is no plan in the bill to curb speculation to help first-time homebuyers buy their first home, even though we see CMHC data telling us very clearly that investors are buying three, four, eight, twelve homes and they’re pricing out first-time homebuyers.

There is no plan to increase investment to end or seriously address homelessness. There is no serious plan to build affordable homes or supportive housing. There’s none of it.

This government has chosen to put all their eggs into the basket of building more homes, especially homes on farmland, and I’ve got a lot of concerns about that. Nor does this government take any serious effort to address the question of who are we building homes for and how much are they going to cost—a lot missing.

When I look at what this government is doing, I often look at what the BC NDP government is doing and I like to do a compare and contrast. This government likes to say, “Well, we’re going to just build our way out of the housing crisis. We’re going to build so many homes, you won’t believe it. We’re going to build 1.5 million homes and it’s going to make everything affordable.” But, even going by your own benchmark of building more homes and ignoring everything else, you’re falling short. In Ontario, housing starts are going down month over month. You can see the CMHC data. It is very clear: Housing starts are going down.

The Conservatives like to say, “Well, it’s all the federal government’s fault. It’s all the Bank of Canada’s fault. It’s everybody’s fault but ours.” The reality is that other provinces have found a way to build in this tougher housing environment, and it is the BC NDP government where housing starts are going up. They went up 11%. What are they doing right and what is the Conservative government doing wrong, and why aren’t some of the things the BC NDP government are doing right in this bill? I don’t get it.

I’m going to give a little bit of a summary of what the BC NDP government is doing, and hopefully, for the MPPs opposite, you’ll introduce these as amendments in committee.

The government in BC is legalizing more affordable housing options, including semis, townhomes, multiplex apartments in all neighbourhoods, and they’re increasing density along transit corridors. That makes a lot of sense to me. I would like to see an amendment in committee that would allow that.

The BC NDP government is allowing taller apartments and condos near transit stations. That also makes a lot of sense. It’s smart, sustainable urban planning. This government has had two years—two years—to approve increased density near transit stations in Toronto. You’ve had over 104 requests from the city of Toronto to do that and you can’t bring yourself to do it. I don’t get it. It makes a lot if sense.

The BC NDP government is also bringing in what I really like to see, which is that they’re investing money into building and buying housing. What that looks like is, they’ve established a fund, $500 million, and they’re giving it to non-profits, land trusts and developers to buy and build non-market housing. It makes a whole lot of sense. It’s much quicker, it’s cheaper, and it makes a whole lot of sense. It keeps people housed. I would like to see this government move ahead on an initiative like that.

They’ve set up a renter protection fund and they’re also looking at taking very practical measures to address speculation. I’m not exactly surprised that this government doesn’t like to touch investor-led speculation, given who your donors are, but I think it’s pretty important that you do so because it is a very effective way to stabilize housing prices, help first-time home buyers and renters.

The BC NDP government, for instance, has brought in measures to restrict Airbnbs in investment properties. We can convert Airbnbs to long-term rentals and increase long-term rental stock so our health care workers and our construction workers, our supermarket workers can afford to find a home and keep a home that’s a rental. They can save up and buy their own home. It makes a lot of sense.

They’ve brought in a vacant home tax. If you are an investor who doesn’t pay your fair share of taxes in BC, or you leave your home vacant for more than six months of the year, then you’re required to put a chunk of money—give it to the government so they can build affordable housing. You can either rent out that property, sell it or contribute your fair share to affordable housing. It’s a vacant home and speculation tax. It’s incredibly popular. It has raised over $80 million for affordable housing and it has motivated people who have a vacant home to rent it out or sell it. It’s win-win-win.

This government—I hear them every year say they’re going to look into bringing forward a vacant home tax. Fall economic statement, latest budget—they always say it, but the details never arrive. The legislation never arrives. The regulation is never posted. You talk about it, but you don’t act on it. I think it’s really important that we act on it.

The BC NDP government is also bringing in real estate transparency, beneficial ownership. No longer can an individual set up a numbered corporation or a real estate investment trust and buy properties anonymously, often for the purposes of tax evasion or fraud. It’s a huge issue in BC. We know it’s a huge issue in Ontario. We know it’s driving up housing prices. OREA supports it; stakeholders support it; we support it. The federal government is looking into it. It’s very practical.

I would like this government to move forward on a practical measure like that. It’s the kind of measure that I would like to see in a housing bill. It’s not there yet. Maybe it will be in the next one. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised, and it will be introduced in committee.

So that’s what the BC NDP government is doing right.

There are some things in this bill that aren’t bad. Then, there are some things in this bill that really are terrible. Then, there are a whole lot of things that should be in this bill that aren’t. I’m going to spend a bit of time going into the bill itself. I’m going to go step-by-step, for those who are listening.

The first measure that I’m going to look at is a schedule where the province can compel the city of Toronto to provide assistance directly or indirectly to a specified manufacturing business or other industrial or commercial enterprise. Currently, municipalities are banned from offering special discounts and incentives to one industry over another. It’s to stop a Hunger Games mentality where municipalities compete with each other. So this would give the city of Toronto the power to do that, and it will enable the province to compel the city of Toronto to do that, too. I’m curious to know if the city of Toronto asked for this power, or if they’re wanting it. I’m curious to know what specific industry will be getting that special incentive, tax break etc. I have those questions.

The second piece of the schedule that is a little concerning is this government is going to ban third-party appeals to the land tribunal, which will mean that residents will not be able to go to the land tribunal to contest a development, be it a condo or a quarry. The government brought this change in with Bill 23, where they banned third-party appeals. But then, there was all this backlash and concern, so they backtracked a bit. Now, it seems that you want to reintroduce it again.

When we are thinking about the land tribunal, it’s very clear the land tribunal does need to be reformed. There are some frivolous applications to the land tribunal that are stopping very worthy projects, such as a hospital expansion or an affordable housing development. What comes to mind is the affordable housing development in the member for Willowdale’s riding. It’s 59 modular homes that will be built near a transit station to house people who need supportive housing. That project—city of Toronto was fair, and they put supportive or affordable housing projects in every riding in the city of Toronto. But Willowdale just couldn’t bring themselves to say yes, the member for Willowdale couldn’t bring themselves to say yes, and two years later, that affordable housing project is stalled. Those modular homes are sitting in a warehouse somewhere—we think it’s Parry Sound—wrapped in shrink wrap. The city is spending upwards of $50,000 a month in rent for these modular homes to sit empty when they should be in Willowdale, housing people.

When I think about people who hold up useful, needed developments, I always think of the member for Willowdale and his decision to hold up affordable housing in his own riding.

It makes a lot of sense to bring in land tribunal reform so that projects that are of the public good and have affordable housing requirements are not needlessly held up in the land tribunal. But to say that nobody can bring an application to the land tribunal I think is bit much. Municipalities and residents deserve to have a say over what happens in their community. It makes sense for the provincial government to work with municipalities to ensure that they can meet their housing targets and to develop official plans that enable them to do so and that the land tribunal becomes a tribunal not of first resort but of last resort because projects are being approved and built, following an official plan that says yes to density. I believe that would be a better way.

This bill is looking at making changes to the building code to allow 18-storey mass-timber buildings. We are hearing from stakeholders that this is a good thing. We agree. It makes sense to build using timber. We know that it is structurally sound, and it is good to see that this change is in this bill.

What we would also like to see in this bill, given that we’re talking about the building code, is a commitment to mandate electric-vehicle charging stations in new developments so that we can do the sustainable thing and transition, be a leader in moving to an electric-vehicle-led province, where we not just build electric vehicles in Ontario but we make it easy for people to buy a vehicle and use a vehicle and get from A to B in an electric vehicle. But that’s only going to happen if it’s easy for people to charge the electric vehicle, because if you can’t charge it, you can’t drive it and you’re not going to buy it. I’ve had residents approach me and say, “I would love to buy an electric vehicle, but I have nowhere to charge it, because I don’t have my own driveway.” It’s stopping them from making that choice, which we know more people should be encouraged to make. So it would be good to see that change in the building code.

We’ve also heard from stakeholders, given that we’re opening up the building code, that the building code needs to be enforced, which means that when new construction is happening there are competent and qualified building inspectors that go to that site to ensure that the builder is doing everything they need to do to meet code—because what we don’t want is an individual moving into a home, spending a million dollars buying that home and then finding out that that home is defective, that there’s mould after 18 months, that they have flooding, that the heating and cooling system doesn’t work very well even though the building is new. We are getting these calls from residents who have moved into new condos, spent upwards of a million dollars on that new condo, and they’re finding that the building is defective. It makes a lot of sense that we make sure that the building code is enforced.

We’re also hearing from stakeholders about the building code and the need to lift the building code floor so we are building energy-efficient, resilient and well-made homes. We know the building code is being reviewed right now. There are conversations that are happening to align the building code provincially with the building code federally, and what we hear again and again and again is that the provincial government wants to keep the building code at the bare minimum when we know we need to lift the floor so when people buy a home they’re getting a well-maintained home, and that means improving the building code. We would like to see these changes in the bill.

The next change I’d like to discuss is the move by this government to no longer require parking in a development near transit. That is a move that we think makes sense. Stakeholders, environmental groups, planning authorities have said that it is time to do that.

There are a few caveats that I want to point out, however. The first caveat is that, if we are looking at building big buildings with less parking, then it’s essential that we make sure that the public transit that services that building is very good.

The second thing is that—we just did a briefing on this, this morning, and we had some residents say, “Well, what about accessibility? What do we do if I need a caregiver who is going to come in, they drive and then they care for me and then they leave?” Maybe it’s a personal support worker or it’s someone who has accessibility challenges who needs their car to get around. That’s a good point, and it gave me pause, and I think it’s upon us as a Legislature to think of useful ways to ensure that we can reduce parking minimums and eliminate parking minimums but also take steps to ensure that accessibility requirements are kept. So I would be curious and interested to know what measures and ideas you have, and I’m going to think of my own as well, because I’m sure it’s a challenge that other municipalities and provinces have addressed and solved.

The government is bringing in a use-it-or-lose-it law that gives municipalities more power to motivate a developer to build a development, once they’ve been given the approvals to do so. I would like to personally thank the member for Niagara Centre, who is sitting right here next to me. Let’s give him a round of applause. The reason why is because the member for Niagara Centre has been advocating for quite some time now for municipalities to have the power to bring in a use-it-or-lose-it policy. We are pleased to see a use-it-or-lose-it policy in this bill.

Essentially what this is: If a developer applies to build but then they don’t build, then they could lose the right to build. The reason why this is so important is because we have a housing crisis. We need to build more homes and we are not in a situation where we can allocate planning staff to approve permits, going through all that process, and then having developers sit on that land—maybe because they want to make more profit later on; maybe because they want to sell it, because once it’s rezoned, it’s worth more money, and for them, it’s really about a flipping opportunity and not a building opportunity. That’s not what we want. We want construction to take place. So this is a good move.

The government is giving municipalities the power to move forward on a use-it-or-lose-it policy by giving them a few new powers. One, they can reallocate sewage or water capacity from one development to another if this developer is not building in at timely manner, and they’re also giving municipalities the power to set expiry dates for site plan and subdivision approval. So if a site plan is approved and, in two years’ time, the developer hasn’t built it, then the site plan approval could be withdrawn. This all makes sense to us. If we hear something different from municipalities, we’ll let you know, but that actually makes sense to us.

This government is looking at putting more guardrails on the ministerial zoning orders—controversial ministerial zoning orders. These have been controversial for some time because the province essentially gave themselves the power to exempt a development from local planning and provincial rules, and also to impose their own rules on a development. We know that it created a two-tier planning approval process, where, if you were maybe giving money to the PC Party, were friends with a minister, then you can use the MZO process and get your development approved very quickly. That meant that everyone else, all the other developers, had to go to the back of the line and use the more traditional, mainstream planning process.

So it was really a two-tier system, and a lot of developers were very upset by that process, as well as residents who said, “What about us? We want to have a say,” and municipalities who said, “We want to have a say in how things get planned in our neighbourhoods and our cities.” So it was very controversial.

Once again, you’re looking at rewriting it. This rewrite means that an applicant—so the developer—has to explain why it’s necessary, maybe get local municipal appeal for the project, and the government has said that we will post it on the Environmental Registry if it’s non-urgent. So if it’s an urgent MZO, you don’t have to post it on the Environmental Registry, but if it’s a non-urgent MZO, you do. That’s our assessment of it right now. We’re a little concerned about what this means, but we do appreciate that there are some additional guardrails compared to what it was before.

The government is looking at changing development fees again. You remember Bill 23. Bill 23 was an absolute disaster when it came to development charges. The government made the decision to radically change how development fees were collected. Municipalities were no longer able to be collect development fees for affordable housing, and that remains true, as well as for parkland charges, and that the development fees had to be phased in. It was a lot of changes.

A lot of municipalities came to us, including AMO, and said, “Because of this, we are going to be losing $1 billion a year in infrastructure revenue, because you’re hampering our ability to collect developer fees from developers to just partially pay for infrastructure”—it just partially covers the cost of infrastructure. And this government, at the time, chose to ignore those calls.

Time went on, and what we found is that a lot of municipalities had to dramatically raise property taxes to cover the cost of the infrastructure: 5%, 8%, 10%—that’s on you. I want to call that a Ford tax. What we also found is that municipalities no longer had the money that they needed to pay for the infrastructure to allow development to happen. And in some regions, municipalities were saying, “We actually can’t even approve that development because we don’t have the money to pay for the infrastructure to connect those new homes to the sewage and the roads and the water that they need.” It actually hampered housing construction. It also threw planning departments into chaos.

I am pleasantly pleased to see that with Bill 185, there is some rollback on that. There is an acknowledgement from this government that municipalities matter, that their development fees matter and that funding for infrastructure matters. So that’s a partial step in the right direction. I don’t know why we had to waste two years or more for the government to realize what everybody else knows, but we did. Meanwhile, the housing crisis continues.

This is what concerns me. I’ve read through what some of our stakeholders are saying, and I’m going to spend a little time reading what AMO has said, because they did take a deep dive into the development charges piece. AMO said, “AMO will continue to highlight the need to reinstate both housing services and the cost of land as eligible DC costs.” So you’ve partially returned some powers, but municipalities are still out some money. And they give an estimate. They say, “Together, these changes are costing municipalities around $4 billion over a 10-year period and will have a material impact on municipalities’ ability to invest in community housing.”

So what AMO is telling you there is that even though there have been some modest rollbacks of the development charges framework, municipalities are still not able to collect developer fees for affordable housing. They’re still not able to do it. In the middle of a housing crisis, they still cannot collect development fees for affordable housing and shelter. I think that is a shame and I think that does need to be changed because every municipality I talk to is telling me they have a homelessness crisis. They have a wait-list for people who want to get into community housing or supportive housing. They can’t meet the need. So that is a problem.

There have also been some changes around how development fees are collected and whatnot. Municipalities are no longer required to refund application fees if they don’t get a development approved within a strict time frame—good. The government brought this change in with Bill 109. We kept hearing from planning departments that it actually slowed the process down, because municipalities will say, “We don’t have the capacity to get this approved within the 90-day time frame that you want it approved by, that we’re required to get it approved by, so we’re going to make you do all this pre-work in advance, before you can even submit an application.” They couldn’t get it done within the time frame.

We also see here in this bill that the government is looking at banning municipalities from telling developers to do work before they’ve officially submitted a development application. That’s one way of trying to solve the problem. The challenge with that is, we’re already hearing from cities that are telling us, “That’s a concern because we are not able to get an application approved where there is even just some kind of public consultation”—we’re talking about one meeting—“with the time frames that we have.”

This bill is also looking at taking away the right for some regional municipalities to be the leaders in planning responsibility. It looks like Halton, York and Peel regions will be losing their ability to plan, and that Waterloo, Durham, Niagara and Simcoe—their ability to plan will also be restricted in some way in the future, on proclamation. What we worry about here is that downloading the right to plan to local municipalities could create very chaotic and haphazard planning, because it affects a region’s ability to plan well and to plan efficiently. It could create a very piecemeal planning process. So we’ve got some concerns about that. We are talking to municipalities to see how it affects each municipality in particular, because it seems like some municipalities have different perspectives on it.

A Waterloo resident is pretty concerned about how this decision to eliminate planning responsibility from the region and download it to local municipalities could affect the Waterloo area. He says it could affect our water supply, which is a huge concern. He’s worried that if the Conservatives continue down this watch, we could have another Walkerton, which is also very concerning. He’s also very concerned about how this decision to remove planning authority from the region could affect environmental protections and farmland in the area, including greenbelt land. So there are some concerns there that I urge this government to look into.

This bill is also going to be exempting student housing from the Planning Act, which would give universities and colleges more latitude to build more student housing, and it would enable them to build student housing more quickly.

Let’s be very clear: Building student housing is absolutely essential. Some of the worst housing shortages and housing affordability crises we have in Ontario are in towns that have a big student population—we’re talking Ottawa, Kingston, Waterloo, Kitchener, Toronto, London, Hamilton. It is a problem.

In my riding, I have the University of Toronto. We regularly work with students who cannot afford to pay the rent or who are living three, four people to a bedroom—or having people sleep in a lounge room because they can’t afford to have a home to their own or to share a home with one person.

When you look at the price of student housing—honestly, I was flabbergasted. To rent a dorm—so you’re sharing a room—at the University of Toronto can cost you a minimum of $2,300 a month, and it could go up to $3,000 a month. That’s a lot. That’s more than any student I know would want to spend, and it’s more than most parents I know would want to spend.

When we’re thinking about building more student housing, it’s a good thing. But what I would urge this government to do is to also address the issue of affordability. Are we building student housing so that universities can drain even more revenue from people, because they’re not being funded properly by the provincial government? Or are we building student housing that’s affordable for students? I fear that this government is going to be moving down a path where we’re building student housing that’s not affordable for students.

It is also concerning to me that student housing is exempt from the Residential Tenancies Act. If you are a student, you don’t have protection from illegal eviction. You’re not protected by rent control. You’re not protected by price gouging if your university wants to charge you an excessive amount of money for a food plan. There’s not much you can do if you have an issue with maintenance. You can’t go to the Landlord and Tenant Board. It’s difficult for you.

I think it makes a lot of sense to have a conversation, do some consultation to think about we can integrate student into the Residential Tenancies Act so that student housing is tied to enrolment at the university but students also have protections that they deserve to have, especially rent control. I think we can do both, and I urge this government—I’ve raised this issue with the Minister of Colleges and Universities, and I think it’s something that this government should be doing as we’re looking at building more student housing.

This bill is also looking at moving ahead with providing standardized pre-approved home designs. I like the proposal. This makes a lot of sense, and we like this proposal because it will enable us to build more homes more quickly. It will enable us to do modular housing so we build housing off-site in a unionized factory and then move those homes to where they will actually be located. It’s a sensible idea, and I hope that this government would be interested in working with us and stakeholders and unions to ensure we can get good unionized jobs out of this process so we can build the economy here and solve our housing crisis at the same time. Let’s turn this good idea into a great one. I’d like to see that.

This bill is looking at bringing in enhanced regulatory authority to allow a second or third home on a property by removing barriers that can be thrown up by municipalities such as restricting the number of bedrooms that can be in a home or mandating that there need to be three parking spots for each unit. There are a lot of things municipalities can do to really throw up roadblocks. I think this is a good idea too. We like it.

In Bill 23, this government made the decision to allow three homes as of right on a residential lot, and now, in this bill, the government is removing some of the barriers that some municipalities throw up to stop that from happening. We think that’s a good idea. What I wish was in this bill was fourplexes. I know a lot of the Conservative MPPs like fourplexes, and I bet there is this internal conversation that’s happening within your party, when you’re looking at each other and going, “Oh, my God. We’re being called NIMBYs. I can’t believe it. How can they be calling us NIMBYs? They’re the NIMBYs. I don’t get it.” I would really like it, in this bill, if in committee all the Conservative MPPs that I know support this idea had their conversations with the Premier and you introduced an amendment to allow fourplexes as of right.

I’d like to thank the member from University–Rosedale for a very balanced presentation about the current housing crisis within our province. It seems this government could benefit from a little bit of balance, whether it’s balancing books or balancing ideas, for heaven’s sakes.

My question to the member, though: The member has pointed out that if a municipality approves sprawl, you can’t appeal, but if the municipality denies sprawl, you can appeal. What are some of the Pandora’s box of issues that that opens up?

The member for University–Rosedale speaks of the fact that she admits that there is a housing supply crisis, a housing affordability crisis, that we need to be on target for building 1.5 million homes. Yet, she sits among members who supported the previous Liberal government in the 40th Parliament.

Steve Del Duca, the current mayor of Vaughan, has admitted that that housing affordability crisis of which the member speaks began under the Liberal government. It began when the member for Waterloo arrived with the mayor for Vaughan. They arrived together in 2012, and in 2012, 2013 and 2014, the NDP and the Liberals were together politically. They had the political will to do something, and they did nothing.

Will the member opposite, the member for University–Rosedale—now having admitted the housing affordability crisis, knowing that this goes back to the NDP supporting the Liberals—support this bill and engage in forward thinking for the good of Ontario?

The member from University–Rosedale gave a very balanced, I felt, and fair critique of Bill 185. She touched on some of the many changes, the flip-flops, the concerning proposals which will likely create even more confusion and chaos and may even worsen the housing crisis, because this is a government that is lurching from bad policy decision to bad policy decision, removing planning authority from regional levels of government, creating even more chaos at the local municipal level, especially when it comes to infrastructure—because this government just woke up to the fact that you can’t build housing unless you have the infrastructure.

I just wanted to give you an opportunity to sort of drive home the point to this government that clarity of policy and consistency are what’s needed right now in Ontario, that actually puts Ontarians at the centre of that discussion, not developers.

To my colleague, I’ll just let you continue on with that thought process. AMO has estimated that the changes that were in Bill 23, together with some of the other changes, are going to cost “municipalities around $4 billion over a 10-year period and will have a material impact on municipalities’ ability to invest in community housing.”

So now we hear, it’s like all of a sudden, the government finally has understood that, guess what, we need water and waste water. Now, they’re creating a big foofaraw about issuing these big, giant Happy Gilmore cheques back to communities, but it’s their own money. Had they not been taking this away in the first place, do you believe we would be further ahead in building the housing that people need?

Thank you to the member opposite for their presentation. Our Minister of Housing often talks about the process, the driving forces of housing prices based on infrastructure and also—it’s a process. In my previous life as a municipal councillor, I’ve seen through my eyes that processes took so long to put the shovel in the ground.

I ask the member, I was with the municipal stakeholders at the Standing Committee on Heritage, Infrastructure and Cultural Policy. We heard from numerous local governments, including municipal councillors, that across the province a use-it-or-lose-it policy would help build homes in their communities. Does the member opposite agree with these locally elected officials?

It’s always a pleasure and an honour to rise in this august chamber to discuss the issues and the challenges that are facing Ontarians that they are struggling with the most. Many will know that I come from a clinical background. I’m an emergency doctor, but for many years, I’ve also had a number of leadership roles in homeless shelters here in the city of Toronto. And so, I’ve seen first-hand the critical importance of addressing housing affordability, making sure that we’ve got supportive housing environments and ensuring that we do everything possible to get housing right in this province, lest people end up having no choice but to turn to shelters.

Over the course of my remarks this afternoon, I’m going to touch a little bit on the scale of our crisis right now, what we really needed and were looking for in this legislation, what we actually got, my reaction to that and then where to go from there.

Currently, as I alluded, we have a housing and homelessness crisis. The scale of the suffering is difficult to describe. We have people sleeping in tents. We have fully employed personal support workers who cannot afford rent or a home to call their own, so they go to sleep in shelters. We have hospitals that have gone into the game of development because as they try to attract nurses, they don’t have anywhere for them to live. In our colleges and universities, we’ve got students living 25 people to a home because they can’t find anywhere else to live. And we have a massive out-migration from our province because young people cannot afford to live here after they finish their education.

Now, amidst that background, we have a government that purports to be ambitious. It says it will build 1.5 million homes by 2031. My first question is, is that even the right number? Mike Moffatt came out last week with a study saying we actually need 1.7 million homes. Regardless, even if we accept that “1.5 million homes” number as gospel, the government is failing even to keep up with that number. They’re falling thousands of homes behind on an annual basis, so much so that they’re forced to scramble to redefine what a house is in order to save face. We’ve got dorms and long-term-care beds now that are getting redefined as new housing construction—anything to distract from mismanagement and to pad the numbers.

Call it incompetence, call it self-interest, call it cowardice—call it what you want, but at the end of the day, housing starts have declined for the last three years in a row, missing provincial targets by 70,000 in 2022 alone. For six years now, we have had a government that has been driving in reverse. What we have needed is one that takes serious action. Instead, this is what we got.

Every few months, this government comes out with a new piece of housing legislation that usually walks back something that was in the last piece of legislation. Take it for the greenbelt, urban boundary expansion, development charges, and then, outside of housing, even looking at Bill 124 and Bill 28. Even if some of those ideas were good—and to be clear, there have been many bad ideas that have deserved to be walked back—within the context of housing, how are builders and municipalities supposed to have any confidence or ability to plan their construction whatsoever?

And so, with so much incompetence and inaction, you can imagine my excitement when a new housing minister was announced. Some of you may not know, but last time, the housing minister stepped down as a result of the greenbelt scandal.

The Premier tasked a single staffer, who quickly and quietly started removing lands from the greenbelt owned by his developer friends, and the housing minister—the last one—says he didn’t notice. So now he faces an RCMP criminal investigation, and that housing minister was forced to resign.

Now, thankfully, with this greenbelt giveaway, the people of Ontario were able to stop that. They looked at the evidence. The evidence showed they could build the homes that were needed without threatening our greenbelt, and here we are. So, a greenbelt flip-flop—with so many other flip-flops and failures, we have been left billions of dollars in the hole and years behind.

Anyway, thankfully, we have a new housing minister, and I am genuinely very excited. This was an opportunity to right some wrongs, to get things right. But regrettably, we have been let down. This bill could have been a shining debut, a moment to introduce landmark legislation to leave an indelible mark on the future of our province. But instead of courage, we have cowardice; instead of ambition, we have apathy; and instead of foresight, we see failure.

This is the kind of bill that could have been forgiven if it was in year 1 of this government’s mandate, not year 6. For all the talk about housing supply actions plans, this is being touted as a red tape reduction bill, and that’s not surprising because this government has never been about action. Two years—two years—after their own Housing Affordability Task Force report came out, they’re still talking, essentially kicking the can down the road so that they can say they’re doing something without actually.

I’m going to take some time now to reflect on the bill within the broader context of many of the other housing announcements that have come at the same time. I want this government to be successful because my constituents in Don Valley East and Ontarians across the province need it to work.

This bill purports to cover four areas, euphemistically titled as follows: building homes at a lower cost; prioritizing infrastructure for-ready-to-go housing projects; improved consultation and greater certainty to get homes built faster; and building more types of homes for more people.

I’ll dive into each of those four pillars, if you will.

Let’s start with building homes at a lower cost. This section includes things that indicate just how out of touch the government actually is. For example, it purports to remove minimum parking restrictions around major station transit areas. But if you listen carefully to municipalities and the building and developer network, the question that they’re asking isn’t about minimum parking requirements. The question they’re asking is, how much density can go around an MTSA? There is no answer.

Now, I understand that the minister will say that he’s consulting and will refer me to the draft provincial planning statement. But why are we still looking at consulting two years after the Housing Affordability Task Force already answered the question of density around MTSAs? And to make things even more infuriating, the government has already been consulting on that recommendation for the last two years as well with municipalities. So yet again, we’re repeating an announcement, kicking the can down the road to create the impression of action when none has been taken and there is no intention of doing so.

But on this, on these repeated talks of announcements that have already been getting announced, already getting consulted upon, this is where life really begins to get even more bizarre.

In related announcements, the government has said they will allow mass-timber construction up to 18 stories. All right, it’s not a bad idea. It’s good for supporting our forestry sector in our province, allows for more housing options, great, but the development community isn’t asking for 18 storeys for timber construction on that kind of construction. Instead, they are clamouring for clarity around restrictions that make it difficult to build that, like guidance around angular planes. None of that is in this legislation.

Similarly, there’s a promise to consult fire safety stakeholders about single-exit stairs in small residential buildings, but this was something the last housing minister said he was consulting on two years ago, around the time of Bill 109. So yet again, we’re announcing more consultations on things that were deemed to be a priority literally years ago.

The second pillar of this housing ambition was around prioritizing infrastructure for ready-to-go housing projects, and this is where I really begin to feel bad for builders, developers and municipalities: The lack of foresight, planning, and courage of this government has led to an environment in which no one can plan and no one can build.

First, development charges were off the table, throwing municipalities province-wide into chaos, causing property taxes to skyrocket and resulting in developers adjusting their construction accordingly; now, an unexpected walk-back with no warning whatsoever.

This government is introducing a complete and utter lack of confidence through precisely the kind of circular thinking that leads the housing community to have zero confidence in this government. When hundreds of millions of dollars are on the table, and people don’t know what they can expect next month, they cannot get in the business of constructing.

The third pillar of this is improved consultation and greater certainty for more homes built faster. Where do I even start? As I’ve mentioned, we’ve already been consulting. The government has already been consulting for the past two years and seems caught up in it as a way of delaying, but they certainly don’t consult with these stakeholders when it counts, on things like development charges or whether they’re going to walk back on that.

One of the most worrisome elements of all of this is that the bill institutes a near-universal ban on third-party appeals. That is heavy-handed. Make no mistake about it. We do see abuse of the Ontario Land Tribunal. We do see that there are long wait times—of course, it’s infected by political appointments—but a blanket ban that ignores the root causes of the appeals process in the Ontario Land Tribunal? That is heavy-handed, and what we need is a nuanced and calculated approach, and the Housing Affordability Task Force gave us that approach. Whereas this government is taking a machete when a scalpel is needed, the Housing Affordability Task Force made some great recommendations to prevent abuse of the land tribunal, like waving appeals on affordable housing, like having to show merit in a case that is intended to be brought to the tribunal, and increasing filing fees.

I want to take a moment to explain why banning all third-party appeals is dangerous. Sometimes developers appeal other developers because one plan can actually stop them from building even more housing. So we need to be careful that appeals, which can absolutely be important—we need to make sure that they are allowed to function in a reasonable manner and, if done so, we can protect our environment and actually increase the number of houses that we have in our province.

And finally, the fourth pillar of this intended legislation and plan is to build more types of homes for more people. And here, one of the landmark elements of that is to exempt universities from the Planning Act to accelerate student housing and put them on a level playing field with publicly assisted colleges. But here’s the thing: Colleges are suffering too, and putting them on a level playing field doesn’t necessarily solve the problem for universities nor for colleges. What might actually help is funding them properly.

There is much more to be said, but with my time waning and only 90 seconds left, I will reflect briefly on what others have said.

John Michael McGrath points out that this legislation is “broad but shallow, covering many different areas but not pushing too hard in any one place. It does not enough of too much.”

Martin Regg Cohn from the Star points out this collection of anti-climactic legislative proposals made news only because it “codifies a series of climbdowns over screw-ups of the past.”

So how could it have been better? Because I believe firmly we must be, on our side, a group of proposition, not just opposition. Well, in keeping with the legislation I introduced weeks ago, this government could have allowed construction of at least four units and buildings on any residential lot—by-right, province-wide multiplexes, exactly as the Housing Affordability Task Force recommended; introduce minimum height and density requirements around MTSAs; invest in the Landlord and Tenant Board; and require home builders to include at least 20% long-term affordable units as a condition of sale of all provincial surplus lands for housing development, but none of these things.

It saddens me that we have a government so allergic to the concept of real action on housing and on gentle density that they are willing to forgo billions of dollars from the federal government because they are ideologically opposed to fourplexes. We are in a housing affordability crisis. The current situation demands strong leadership and courage, but this government is flying by the seat of its pants. We deserved a bill that would solve our crisis, and we didn’t get it.

I listened very intently to the member opposite. Of course, I know he will be reminded frequently by members on this side of the House that it was a former Liberal cabinet minister who agreed that the housing crisis actually started under the previous Liberal government and went before a committee. Of course, the provincial planning statement talks about building around major transit station areas. That is in there. Of course, he lives in a city that has four units as-of-right that has built next to nothing in that category.

But I wonder when the member became such a fierce advocate for density. Because when he was running for office, he was at a community meeting, and he said he would do everything in his power to stop density in his community around a transit station area. So I’m wondering when he converted to being a warrior for building housing in his community, housing that he vowed he would work to stop when he got elected.

Thank you to the member for his comments. I just wondered if the member could share with the House some of his opinions on the necessity for us to build a lot of non-market housing. It really seems it’s the only way we can get that deeply affordable housing stock back into the system. I know, in my city, there’s a study that comes from Carleton University—Steve Pomeroy is the author of it—that for every one deeply affordable housing unit we are building in our city we’re losing 15, because real estate investment trusts are swooping into our community, buying up aging apartment buildings, barely renovating them and kicking a lot of those tenants out who are paying reasonable rent.

So I’m wondering if the member could share with us some of your thoughts about how this House, this province, could prioritize building non-market housing to keep those people in homes.

Mr. Speaker, the member said he doesn’t remember saying anything of the sort when it comes to being against housing in his area. This is exactly what he said: “I am moving to use whatever levers we have to stop this incredibly outrageous proposal from going ahead as designed. I join my vocal opposition to this with community organizations. I will use whatever levers I can and relationships that I can here in the Legislature and in the chamber to try and advocate for the more modest proposal as well.” This is when the member was talking about building density around transit areas in his community. Those are the exact quotes that he said at a community meeting.

It’s just like the Liberals, right? Say one thing there, another thing here. We saw that for 15 years. What part of those quotes and those actions do you not agree with today?

I wanted to ask my colleague from Don Valley East about one part of his speech, and that is the potential exemptions to planning rules given to post-secondary institutions to build housing. The post-secondary institutions that I’m familiar with are not in the business of building a lot of housing. It’s not their key competency. They also don’t have a lot of capital to invest in starting such a business. I could see a post-secondary institution hiving this off to, perhaps, a private company to take advantage of all the exemptions that a post-secondary institution would get to building housing.

I wanted to ask my colleague if he thought this was a wise or even practical course of action.

Thank you very much for the question. Regrettably, we do not see anything that addressed the root causes of the housing crisis in our midst right now. We do not see anything that will increase affordability for our constituents across the province, nothing to increase supportive housing for people across the province.

While there is a pillar of this plan that purports to build more kinds of housing, the foundation for that simply isn’t there. It’s merely words and lacking in any sort of substance whatsoever.

We’ve already seen—as we face in our health care sector. We have a shortage of health care workers. We have hospitals that are now being forced to go into the business of development, and we have now a government that wants colleges and universities to go into that business as well. If they want and feel equipped for that, that’s one thing, but the reality is that we have an underfunded post-secondary sector right now that is barely keeping afloat, and making this an option for them when they can barely keep afloat is really not fair and will be a drop in the bucket for a major crisis.

Interjections.

Interjection.

In any case, I welcome the opportunity to work with the other members. Evidently, there’s a proposal that needs a bit more review, and I absolutely will advocate for my constituents. That being said, there are many reasonable recommendations coming out of the Housing Affordability Task Force report that I have zero qualms in defending in this chamber to my constituents, because I know that when build more housing we are building it for our friends, for our neighbours and for our families.

I’ve been very clear, as I mentioned in my remarks, that one of the really important things that we could be doing is, when provincial lands are sold off for development, that a commitment to 20% and 30% be set aside for affordable housing, once we have clarity on what that definition is. Only if we can do that, ensuring that we have that kind of affordable and supportive housing in place, can we ensure that we get to the root cause of the housing crisis here and help those amongst us who are the most vulnerable here in the province of Ontario.

I would implore the Minister of Housing to do something like that, but I suspect he’ll remain with his ideological blinders and all of Ontario will suffer as a result.

Yes, one word, and it’s infrastructure. We had the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing visit my riding recently, coming to St. Catharines and speaking with the mayor of St. Catharines through the Building Faster Fund, and also had the opportunity to meet with officials from the town of Lincoln, who have a remarkable project just shy of 100 acres where there will be 15,000 people able to live on just shy of 100 acres—a really remarkable mixed-use community of density, mixed-use and then also single-family homes. And they spoke about the need to get water infrastructure, waste water infrastructure and how so many of their housing targets have been held back by the need to make sure that those investments happen.

They spoke glowingly about the investments that this government is making in infrastructure, that we’re not just listening to our partners across the way in the NDP but really listening to municipal partners, who are actually working day in and day out to get those homes built, working with the partners in the building industry. They said that the game-changing investments that this government is making in our budget are going to supplement many of the actions we’ve taken and ensure that homes get built.

This is the legislation we have in front of the House, and this is legislation that is going to be bringing forward one of the pieces that I’ve heard about from my municipality partners, as well, which is the use-it-or-lose-it component. They want to be able to have some tools to push and prod some of those builders who maybe need a little bit of pushing and prodding in order to get going.

I think, in my riding of Niagara West, when I look at some of the projects that are under way in Smithville, where they’re going to be doubling their population over the next 10 to 15 years; in Grimsby on the Lake, where they are expanding a massive number of new projects, intensification around a major urban transit area, I see that these partners speak about the tools that are in this legislation, and I’ve had a lot of messages, texts and emails from elected officials and those who work with them saying, “This legislation is going to help get that job done and we thank you for it.”

Interjections.

He’s going to have to talk to his grandkids, he’s going to have to talk to his great grandkids about how their opportunities were throttled by that government when they were in office, and how it’s only under the PCs and Doug Ford that we’re able to ensure that opportunities, again, exist for this generation, here in the province of Ontario.

It’s a pleasure to rise today to talk to Bill 185. I’m just going to talk in my 20 minutes about the housing aspect of this bill, which is, I believe, the driving force behind this bill. This is one of the biggest issues I hear about at home, and let me begin—I’m going to zoom in and zoom out in these 20 minutes.

Let me begin by zooming into something very local that happened in my constituency office last Friday. I’m in meetings in the community, and I get a text from my colleague Erica who says, “Joel, there’s a guy in our office who needs a pair of shoes.” No joke, Speaker: There’s a guy in our office who needs a pair of size 12 shoes. He’s spending his nights couch surfing with different friends. He can’t find a home. He lives on social assistance. Our shelters, as I’m sure is the case with shelters everywhere in this province, are full. The average rent in our city is $2,000 a month. For someone on social assistance, on Ontario Works, in particular, making an income of less than $800 a month—brutal. There is a housing allowance that can maybe get you into a home if you time it correctly. This gentleman has worked with our offices, and a number of times, the timing just never works for him. But last Friday, he ended up in our office, asking for our help for a pair of shoes.

I was across town in a meeting with Professor Carolyn Whitzman—big room—with parliamentary assistant to the federal housing minister, Peter Fragiskatos. I may have mispronounced the parliamentary assistant’s last name. But it was a rich discussion about what we need to do for housing in the province, and my phone goes off from a colleague asking some advice about how we find someone a pair of shoes in the course of shuttling around the city, trying to find something other than the couch. So I think that’s the zoom-in picture, Speaker.

We have a situation in our community in Ottawa of 45,000 people, according to Professor Carolyn Whitzman, who are one or two paycheques away from homelessness, one or two paycheques away from eviction. And it depends upon the outreach worker from the city recording the data at night, but we have hundreds of people sleeping rough all year round in our city. Our shelters are full. That’s the zoom-in context of housing. So when members in this House say we need pieces of legislation to expedite the construction of deeply affordable housing, the answer from my community is, “Yes, yes, yes. What can we do? What can we do?”

I do know that in 2018, the government signed a contract with the federal government that committed the government to build 19,660 affordable housing units. Let’s be clear what we mean by affordable housing units, because the federal government has often slid around in its definition of what this means. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., according to housing experts like Professor Whitzman, Steve Pomeroy from Carleton University, Kaite Burkholder Harris from the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa, the definition that makes the most sense is 30% of income—30% of income. And it used to be 20% of income in the post-war period, when we built all those victory homes for veterans who were otherwise facing poverty and homelessness after serving our country, making the greatest sacrifice overseas. It was 20%, but it became 30%. But then that definition lapsed.

But that was what the government agreed to in 2018, to build 19,660 affordable housing units—units that cost 30% of income. But how many units have been built in six years in Ontario? It’s 1,180. That’s barely 6% of the target.

Now, I don’t want to hang all the blame on this government particularly. I think we have had a problem for generations because we’ve put faith in the wrong place. We have put faith in the fact that the housing market, on its own, is going to resolve the issue we have—that I felt in my office, personally, last Friday—of the need for deeply affordable housing. And the market, by any measure, has manifestly failed.

For me, for affluent folks, sure, there are opportunities. They’re getting harder and harder to come by in major urban centres. But for the people like the gentleman in my office last Friday, it has manifestly failed, because we put blind faith in the notion that governments should play no direct role in provision of housing. But it was not always so. It was not always so.

That’s why, when I hear the member from University–Rosedale hold forth in this place, it raises my heart, because she has said time and time again that it’s time for the public’s money to be invested in creating that deeply affordable housing because it is the only way it will ever be created. We have given the private market three decades to pull this off. And at this point in the housing and homelessness crisis, we have people sleeping in tent cities, we have people coming into MPP offices without shoes.

But there was a time, Speaker—and I want to say this for the record—the period of 1989 to 1995 that Professor Whitzman spoke about last Friday was a period in which over 14,000 co-operative homes were developed in the province of Ontario. I had occasion to talk to former Premier Rae about this. I had occasion to talk to former municipal housing affairs minister Evelyn Gigantes, who was the MPP who had this seat for my community. She told me, former Premier Rae told me, that under that government, in that period—there’s some overlap there, 1989 to 1990 to the previous government—over 14,000 co-operative homes were created in the province of Ontario.

They were created because there was a program at the federal level that funded, through financial terms, advantageous financing for co-ops to grow quickly. There was a willing partner to get the financing. Cities and provinces worked together. And what was the result? A significant amount of homes. But almost overnight—almost overnight—in 1995, Ontario stops funding the development of affordable housing, co-operative and social and community housing in a significant way.

In 1998, rent control is removed from vacant units. So you have that problem of people moving out of a unit, paying a vastly different rent to the person coming in. And then in 2018, as the member for University–Rosedale said, as other members have said, under the current government, you have a situation that, for any form of rental housing built since 2018—no rent control.

The cost of rent is $2,000 a month, on average, in my city. In this city in which we’re standing right now, that would be a bargain.

So the question is, if we’re going to reckon with the evidence—the evidence is telling us that the market has had three decades to solve it and can’t solve it. So how do we solve it?

Well, I look, frankly, to the very west of this country; I look to the province of British Columbia, not only because it’s an NDP government, but because they’re following the evidence. They’ve created a $500-million acquisition fund in the province of British Columbia. If older, private rental market housing—because it needs to be renovated; it needs to be repurposed; it needs to be reutilized—is coming up for resale, the province of British Columbia has an acquisition fund to make sure that housing stock can stay in the hands of its current rent providers, and it gets refurbished and renovated on a not-for-profit basis, and those people who are currently living there get to stay in their homes. What’s happening in too many places across this country, and certainly in Ontario, is that large real estate investment trusts are swooping in at that very moment to buy up old, affordable housing, lightly renovate it, kick the tenants out, charge whatever the market will bear.

I want to point to an example from Hamilton—we have some Hamilton members in this room: Kevin O’Toole, interviewed by CBC’s The Fifth Estate. Mr. O’Toole was talking about the fact that he spent his life working in the service industry as a waiter, and he was talking about the fact that his rent, almost overnight, after light renovations to his building—the building having been bought by a real estate investment trust—was going to double. The landlord was going for an above-guideline increase that was substantial, that would have driven him out of his home. The tenants fought back. They went to the Landlord and Tenant Board. They waited a long time to get there. They managed to cut the rent increase in half. But he is barely struggling, right now, to make ends meet.

Real estate investment trusts are returning dividends to their shareholders that are very handsome indeed. The research that I have available to me is that we’re looking at over $2 billion in profits, in the last six years, being returned to the Blackstones of this world, being returned to the large real estate investment trusts, whose one goal is to buy up these large apartment buildings in municipal areas in Canadian jurisdictions, lightly renovate them, ditch the tenants, jack the rent. Has there been a single law in Ontario to stop this? There has not.

The country of Denmark has literally passed a law to make sure that large real estate investment trusts can’t buy up large swaths of the rental stock and throw people out onto the street. There has been an active approach to create that balance between responsible ownership, taking a responsible margin in the rental housing business, but maintaining affordability in the downtown.

I find the lack of action in this place on the creation of non-market housing and the protection of renters to be astounding.

What I know now is that there are consequences if we fail to protect tenants and renters. People aren’t just statistics. If in one moment they are a tenant in an affordable unit that they can no longer pay for after their rent has been jacked by who knows how much, they could become homeless. The cost to that person, the loss of dignity to that person in losing their housing is one thing, but there are also the financial implications for the province of what happens when someone is homelessness.

In our city, we have something called a portable housing allowance benefit to try to keep people in their homes; we’re talking about an expenditure per person of about $6,000 a year. I remember, when this got proposed, there were more conservative-minded colleagues in my city saying, “This is too expensive. We can’t afford it.” But if you look at what we can’t afford, it’s the cost of homelessness. Steve Pomeroy from Carleton University has told us that the same per-person cost of somebody being homeless is not $6,000 a year; according to Professor Pomeroy, it is $53,000 a year—talk to any paramedic, talk to any police officer, talk to anybody working in an emergency room, and they will tell you exactly why. All of those interactions with those critical nodes of community safety in our system are unnecessary if we can find people an affordable home in which to live. They’re all unnecessary if we can find people an affordable home in which to live.

So the government wants to build housing quickly. I think it’s a fantastic idea. They are reversing some of the decisions they made previously. I like the aspects in this bill that have to do with the rapid construction of timber buildings. I like the idea of telling developers that they have to use properties they have slated for development or lose it. I like all of these sticks, Speaker; I like all of these different carrots and incentives. But what I don’t see in the government’s bill before us today are specific provisions to deal with the predatory behaviour of real estate investment trusts or specific protections for renters or specific plans about how we’re going to build non-market housing.

My landlord back home, of our community office, is the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp. It is the largest non-profit landlord in the province of Ontario: over 17,000 residents, of which our five in our community office are one, on the commercial side. They’ve had a very particular mandate. Their mandate has been to charge appropriate rents. So the CCOC, Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp., has a stream in their buildings of people who pay rent-geared-to-income units, but they also have a stream of residents in their system that pay market-rent units. I’ve always felt that’s a much more progressive model of housing. Rather than saying everybody who is having a hard time paying the cost of living, let’s have everybody living in one building together—when the goal should be to build diverse neighbourhoods, where we get to live together and get to know each other.

The minister has been to Ottawa many times. I’m sure he’s aware of the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp., but if he hasn’t met with them yet, I would encourage those interactions now. If we think about how to build housing now—what if Ontario did have, rather like the province of British Columbia, an acquisition fund, a community land trust? What if you worked with community land trusts so we could keep the housing we have, so Mr. O’Toole in Hamilton and others like him aren’t thrown out onto the street—another person who may one day show up in my office looking for a pair of shoes.

In the time I have left, I also want to talk about the issue that I was concerned about. I asked the minister a question after his one-hour lead, and he did respond. I know it’s an issue that he cares about, and it’s the issue of urban boundaries, Speaker. Because overnight in our city, we were told by a previous housing minister that our urban boundary in Ottawa had increased by 654 hectares. Now, that’s a big deal in Ottawa, Speaker, because we have literally one of the biggest urban boundaries in Canada. You could fit the cities of Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver inside Ottawa’s urban boundaries. We are massive. We’re rural, we’re suburban, and we’re urban. But overnight, our city was told it’s going to be 654 hectares bigger. It was quite a shocking thing to learn.

We also learned that there was a farm bought right at the previous fringe of the urban boundary by a group of five gentlemen from the Verdi Alliance group of contract companies for $12.7 million. It was bought for $12.7 million, Speaker—a family farm that overnight was massively worth a lot more. The minister, to his credit, responded to letters from city councillors who sniffed something deeply wrong. We’re losing arable land that we can grow food upon, but we’re also seeing land speculation which did not pass the smell test. Councillor Shawn Menard, for Capital ward, raised the alarm bells. He got 11 people on city council to sign a letter to the minister. The minister acted.

But here’s what I’m worried about in the revisions to the provincial plan statement contemplated by this bill, Speaker: I worry we’re going to be going back to this kind of chaotic housing development. The ministers often talked about it in this place, and it’s a good topic, about how we can build enough water and sewer infrastructure to make sure that the housing that we want to build can be built. It’s not just the structures that you see, Speaker: the apartment buildings, the individual homes. It’s the services that need to be run to all those communities in order for those homes to be built.

But in this case, of this development, which now won’t happen, it would have cost the city massive amounts of money to pipe all of those utilities out to that development. We thankfully won’t have to deal with that. We’re going to be having the discussion of how we intensify development in the downtown and the suburbs, for which I’m a willing partner. But if we allow smaller municipalities who could potentially be more open to persuasion to these kinds of developments, I worry about the cost of it, Speaker.

I’ll point to one that is sadly going ahead. It’s the Tewin development in the far south end of the city. City staff actually encouraged the previous city council—not the current but the previous city council—not to green-light this development. Why? Two reasons: The cost of running sewer and water out to that community, given how far south it is in our already large boundary, was—get ready for it, Speaker—$600 million. That’s $600 million for water and sewer in this community. The federal government has just announced a new program, the Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund of $6 billion. People at home are telling me our likely share is maybe $180 million. That one project on its own is too expensive for what the federal government is prepared to offer us to build housing quickly.

So my point to the government is, if you’re going to be encouraging housing to be built, we have to be thinking about what kind of housing we build. Asking for homes to be built far outside the periphery of existing urban boundaries is expensive, inefficient.

I grew up in rural Ontario. I grew up in Vankleek Hill. The member for Glengarry–Prescott–Russell is here; he knows he represents a beautiful community. I grew up there. I love the bucolic countryside. I love that part of our province. But the municipalities of Glengarry–Prescott–Russell are intact units with their own systems that work. If we’re talking about major cities like Ottawa and Toronto and we’re saying the future development for housing in our communities is pushing outward into arable farmland like what we stopped at Watters Road, we’re courting disaster. We’re not going to be getting to where I believe we need to go, which is working with allied partners to build the kind of non-market housing.

What Professor Whitzman and Professor Pomeroy tell me: If we do that, we can house people potentially quickly. The one successful program that the federal government has introduced is their—I’m going to forget the acronym here as I speak, Speaker, but it’s the rapid housing fund. What it’s been doing—rather like our municipal fund of $6,000 per person helping people pay the rent—is helping people who would otherwise be surfing on couches or surfing in shelters pay the rent that they have to keep them housed. I want to believe this bill that we’re debating now could be improved to have some provincial assistance on that front. There is the Homelessness Prevention Program, which I’m aware is doing some of that work, but that’s like in the $200-million region. I’m talking about an ambitious rent bank program that can keep people housed.

It won’t just be those 45,000 people in my city who could be potentially homeless that will be happy for that help, it will be all the first responders, it will be people in the emergency rooms, it will be people who will otherwise be dealing with those folks in crisis that will also be happy. There is a multiplier benefit, Speaker—long story short—to keeping somebody housed. We restore dignity to the person, we restore opportunity to that person to contribute back to our society and we avoid spending a lot more money later. I encourage the government to listen to that advice and make changes to the bill.

Thank you to the member from Niagara West for his debate here today. I know, like me, he shares the frustration of seeing red tape that slows down the building of housing, and in particular, infrastructure.

I know the member from Perth–Wellington touched on it a little bit, but I wanted to give the member a chance to maybe talk about some projects in his riding that have just taken so long to come to fruition because of the lack of infrastructure and the lack of availability from the municipalities to be able to participate in this. So maybe I’ll give him an opportunity to touch on some great projects in his riding that he’s looking forward to seeing move forward.

It’s always an honour to rise in the House and speak—today, on Bill 185, the government’s most recent housing bill.

Speaker, I just want to highlight something that I don’t think we need to highlight—but to remind everyone, we are in an unprecedented housing crisis. For the first time, a whole generation of young people are wondering if they’ll be able to own a home or if life is actually going to be more affordable and better for them than it was for their parents. We know that this crisis has been a long time in the making. As a matter of fact, in 2018, when I first ran for election, one of the issues I made a top priority was addressing what we thought then was a pretty bad housing crisis, which has actually only gotten worse over the last six years.

It’s unheard of, at least in my community, that the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Guelph is now over $2,000. It would take a minimum wage of $25.96, in Ontario, for a minimum-wage worker to be able to afford average rent. There is no city right now in the province of Ontario where a minimum-wage worker can afford the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment. As a matter of fact, in Toronto, even two full-time minimum-wage workers cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment that doesn’t cost more than 30% of their income. It takes 22 years now for the average young person to save up enough money to be able to afford the down payment on an average starter home.

Some 16,000 people tonight on any given night in Ontario will be sleeping rough. More people are on the social housing wait-list than the number of social housing spaces that are available. And part of the reason that’s the case is that 93% of the deeply affordable homes built in this province were built prior to 1995, when the provincial government, following the federal government, decided to stop investing in deeply affordable homes in the province. So it is a crisis, an unprecedented crisis. It’s like a forest fire raging out of control. And when I read this bill, it feels like the government is bringing a garden hose to put out the fire.

There are some good things in the bill but woefully insufficient to address the scale of the crisis that we’re facing. After six years of putting well-connected, wealthy insiders ahead of actually building homes that ordinary people can afford, it feels like the government is almost admitting defeat on this file, begging municipalities to bail them out, especially when the Premier joined the NIMBY crowd and said no to housing multiplexes—six- to 11-storey buildings along major transit corridors—said no along with others in our communities who are fighting housing.

So I want to just quote some of the advocates in Ontario who have been leading the charge to say, “Yes in my backyard,” because we need a “yes in my backyard” campaign in this province. When I was helping community groups say no to opening the greenbelt for development and when I was talking to groups who had signs on their front yards that said, “Premier, keep your promise. Don’t open the greenbelt for development,” I also told those groups that, “Also on your yard, you need to have a sign that says, ‘Yes to building a fourplex in my neighbourhood’ so we can actually build the homes we need.”

Here’s what More Neighbours, a long-time YIMBY housing group, said about this bill:

“After six years in power, the Ontario Progressive Conservatives are still unwilling to implement the changes needed to end the housing crisis.” The bill “has a few good ideas but largely passes the responsibility for making meaningful change on to others, adding delay and uncertainty, despite the province having full power to act now.... Cutting red tape should mean ... implementing provincial zoning standards.”

Let’s talk about another organization that has been advocating for bringing back the dream of home ownership for young families in Ontario, the Ontario Real Estate Association:

“We are disappointed that two key recommendations by the province’s own Housing Affordability Task Force (HATF)—strongly supported by Ontario realtors—have not been included in today’s bill,” referring to Bill 185. “We need to build more homes on existing properties and allow upzoning along major transit corridors if we are going to address the housing affordability and supply crisis in this province.”

Speaker, I agree with those commentators; there are some good things in this bill, and I’ll credit the minister for bringing those good things forward. But small changes, things that we could celebrate, are hard to celebrate when you look at the scale of the crisis we’re facing.

And I want to give you one example: Something I’ve long advocated for is using timber buildings and increasing the use of those up to 18 storeys. To me, that’s an example of a good measure in this bill, but as Environmental Defence says, “However, such an amendment to the Ontario building code will have very limited impact unless the Premier reverses his decision to leave in place the municipal zoning bans that make it illegal to actually build these types of homes on the overwhelming majority of ... lots.”

So, Speaker, I’ll support things in this bill like standardizing the design to reduce delays and costs of modular homes and panelized homes. I’ll support things I’ve been advocating for, like eliminating parking minimums in transit areas. But as John Michael McGrath, a journalist and housing expert, will say, “None of those items from the government’s plan is bad. They’re just not sufficient. In the face of a housing crisis that is, every year, driving thousands of Ontario residents to more affordable communities in other provinces, the Ford government is fiddling with the dials of housing policy, seemingly unsure of what it’s doing or even what it’s trying to do.”

“There’s nothing in the bill introduced Wednesday that’s going to fundamentally alter the trajectory of the housing shortage in Ontario.”

Speaker, I think what is so frustrating is that after six years in power, instead of actually bringing themselves to build homes that ordinary people can afford, the government still seems to be focused on, “How can we break all the rules and roll out the red carpet so wealthy, well-connected land speculators can cash in billions while ordinary people are still trying to find an affordable place to call home?”

I would have thought, after the $8.3-billion greenbelt scandal, that the government would have learned the lesson, but instead one of the concerns I have about this bill, especially when you combine it with the changes that have been made to the PPS, is that this bill will actually make the housing crisis and the climate crisis both worse because it’s incentivizing expensive sprawl, effectively wiping out the protective settlement area boundaries and municipal comprehensive review processes that prevent low-density sprawl. Allowing land speculators—at any time they could demand that our farmlands, wetlands and wildlife habitat be earmarked for sprawl development by the law allowing them to appeal boundary changes. These problems can be exacerbated by the act’s shifting of planning authority away from regional governments and downloading them onto smaller-tier municipal governments.

Speaker, the reason I’m so concerned about sprawl—and it’s obvious, as the leader of the Ontario Green Party, that I would be concerned about the climate implications, both in terms of increasing climate pollution but also making it harder for us to prevent things like flooding. It should be obvious that I’m concerned about paving over our farmlands and our wetlands and our forests, but I’m also concerned about the cost of sprawl. It costs 2.5 times more dollars for a municipality to build the infrastructure to service low-density development than it does to service gentle-density, missing-middle and mid-rise housing.

I see the member from Ottawa South is here in the House right now. In Ottawa, there was a study that was done for low-density development. Above and beyond property taxes, it cost the city an extra $465 per person. By contrast, in gentle- to mid-density areas of the city, after taxes, the city actually made additional revenue of $606 per person because of the lower cost of servicing those homes—a $1,000 difference per person.

So, if we’re going to talk about sustainable ways, both financially and environmentally sustainable ways, we can rapidly and quickly increase housing supply in the province, we need to legalize across the province as-of-right multiplexes in residential neighbourhoods and six- to 11-storey buildings along major transit and transportation corridors, which I don’t think has gotten enough conversation in this House. I spoke with one developer who specializes in mid-rise development who said, “Just your bill, Mike, to legalize six- to 11-storey buildings along major transit corridors would cut our approval times in half, allowing us to quickly and cheaply increase supply of housing in this province.”

Speaker, there are many solutions—there are many solutions we need—but it’s going to take a government that actually has the courage to stand up and put forward the bold solutions that will significantly move the needle on housing supply in this province.