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.