There are things in this bill that I think are useful. There is some elimination of red tape. There are also some extremely difficult problems that have been left behind and a loophole that has also been introduced through the provincial policy statement that’s very worrying.

We have actually seen some rolling back of some bad legislation that the government forced through with great fanfare a year ago: Bill 23. At that time, AMO was not provided an opportunity to present to the Legislature’s standing committee on heritage and culture during the review of Bill 23. It was pretty shocking that AMO was not allowed to speak to a bill, and they were very, very concerned. Their submission outlined key areas of concern and recommended that a number of provisions should be removed, including those that shifted the costs of growth to property taxpayers, those that undermined good planning practices and community livability, and those that increased risks to human and environmental health. We haven’t seen any improvements to looking after human and environmental health, but we are seeing some of these issues addressed, and we see that the money is coming back—development money is coming back to municipalities. So that’s very good thing. It’s a rollback of a bill that was passed with tremendous enthusiasm and fanfare. Fortunately, that has been basically rolled back.

What’s also interesting to me is that municipalities are now being consulted in terms of having fourplexes by right, so instead of bringing in fourplexes by right, we’re leaving it up to municipalities. That’s respectful of the municipalities. It’s just interesting how there can be such a flip-flop between all these arguments about how irresponsible municipalities are and they spend too much money—I believe it was the Premier who expounded tremendously on municipalities not being trustworthy with money. But today, we like municipalities, and that’s probably appropriate.

Backtracking on the dissolution of Peel—that’s interesting, too, since we spent a lot of time on that.

There are some good things. Making changes to the building code to allow 18-storey mass timber buildings—I’m very supportive of this development. Developers no longer required to build parking in developments near transit—we’re good with that; a use-it-or-lose-it law that gives municipalities more power to motivate a developer to build a development one they’ve been given the approvals, and so on. Providing standardized, pre-approved home designs—this could be very helpful, and we like the proposal because it will help Ontario build more homes more quickly.

But this is the part that’s very, very worrying: the provincial policy statement. This wipes out settlement area boundaries and municipal comprehensive review processes so new development on nearby farmland can be approved at any time. Let’s be clear about that. We’re talking about easy approvals for expanding onto farmland that needs to be preserved as farmland to produce food. Developers can appeal any municipal refusal to the lands tribunal to amend a municipal boundary and approval—

Thank you very much, Speaker.

Just to recap, the rules work like this: If a municipality allows sprawl, people cannot appeal; if a municipality denies sprawl, a developer can appeal. So who are the rules set up for? They’re set up for the developers. Sprawl means fewer homes being built. There’s no minimum at all built into the policy statement.

Previously, if you were destroying farmland to create housing, you needed to build 80 homes per hectare; then, that 80 was reduced to 50; and under the new plan, there’s no requirement whatsoever. So you can have a home per hectare of land, and nothing anybody says within the municipality can stop it from happening. That is appalling. This is like the greenbelt all over again; not just greenbelt 2.0, which the member from Waterloo has been telling us about, where farmers—I think it’s 650 acres, hectares, of farmland. A lot of farmland is now going up for development. So she has been raising the alarm about that. I think of this as the greenbelt to the power of N—“N” as in “no limits.” If a developer wants to build on farmland, they get to do whatever they want, with no restrictions and no ability for anyone to stop them. What is this? This is a shocking loophole. No, I’m not going to call it a loophole; it’s planned.

Then we have issues with rent control. The rent control system, over the last decade, has helped landlords hike average rent by three times the amount allowed in the guideline. Rents are going up. According to Ricardo Tranjan from the CCPA, you could drive a very large truck through the loopholes in our rent control system. I imagine a large Hummer blasting its way through rent controls.

Rent control guidelines do not apply to units added to the market since 2018. That’s something the Conservatives brought in. Vacant units are exempt from guidelines, so that when tenants move out, landlords can charge new tenants whatever they want.

Above-guideline increases, an application process through which rents can be raised dramatically for renovations, allow landlords to recover more than they spend. We’ve seen very large corporations that are publicly traded—we know their financial state—and they apply for above-guideline increases consistently.

Consumers are being exploited, taken advantage of. The market isn’t functioning properly, because landlords are taking advantage of a scarce resource: rental units. The state has to step in and do something.

The Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing is claiming that they’ve undertaken historic measures to support tenants, but we’re actually not seeing that happening. We’re seeing renoviction after renoviction after renoviction. The fines are minimal to landlords. And, frankly, it’s a war zone out there in terms of getting housing.

What we’re actually seeing is that tenants are organizing rent strikes, and that’s a pretty dramatic development. It’s not like people don’t have very busy lives and things to do, but they’re organizing rent strikes because of the abuses of landlords and the fact that if they lose the place where they’re living, they’re not going to get into a place that’s more affordable; it will be less affordable.

We’re also seeing this, of course, with seniors. We talked about this a little bit already this morning. That Chartwell home that has been sold out from under 200 seniors—what we’re dealing with is real estate corporations that exist to make money. It’s not about housing. It’s not about looking after people’s needs. It’s about making a lot of money.

This is where the NDP is different, because we think of housing as something that people need. It needs to be affordable. It needs to be built in a responsible way, looking after people’s needs, not generating profits.

We know also that the people in Mississauga who are losing their homes are seniors. They’re 90 years old. They’ve been there for 25 years—paying $1,600 a month in rent right now. There’s absolutely no way they are going to find equivalent housing anywhere at that rate. And while the corporation is saying, “We’re going to help house you,” and so on, where are they going to house them? In another Chartwell, at $5,000 or $6,000 a month? There’s nothing there to support these people, as much as the corporation wants to say that. Chartwell certainly does not have a reputation as being there for people. The rules were changed. In this case, it’s an apartment complex. In the other cases, they have owned long-term care and it has been enormously profitable. We know that the Premier at the time, Mike Harris—whatever happened legislatively, it became possible to buy up all kinds of long-term-care homes and make them for-profit.

We see the consequences of this. It’s incredibly expensive to live anywhere in a retirement home, and seniors don’t have affordable places to go. The profits keep going up, so somebody is happy; just not people who need to find a space to live.

Now I want to talk a little bit about short-term rentals and what that’s doing to affordable housing.

In Thunder Bay, right now, there are about 221 full-home units available on Airbnb, with about 154 of them being in the cores, where housing is most affordable. So what’s happening is that—we’ve got blocks of apartments where people have been living for many years, and it’s affordable housing. What’s happening is that those owners are gradually kicking everybody out, often without notice. We know that because they come to our office, and then we say, “Actually, it’s not legal to kick them out without notice.” But people don’t always know that. As soon as they can get the tenants out, they’re converting them into Airbnbs or Vrbos—I’ll just call them short-term rentals to be clear. Again, it’s a money-making operation, and with tourism and so on they’re able to make quite a lot of money on these. But now there’s no housing for people, and people are winding up homeless or couch-surfing or whatever it is they have to do to keep a roof over their head.

I’m going to quote the city of Thunder Bay. I’d like to acknowledge Shelby Ch’ng, a member of city council. She has been working with council to create a motion, and that motion will say things such as:

“Short-term rentals reduce the supply of available long-term housing options, as property owners may choose to rent units to tourists instead of local residents....

“Local residents are priced out of their neighbourhoods, as property values and rents increase due to the demand from tourists....

“Short-term renters may not have the same investment in the community as long-term residents, leading to issues such as noise, partying, and other disruptive behaviour, which negatively impacts the quality of life for local residents.”

Talking about this is important, because certain municipalities have created rules to try to address the situation with short-term rentals. Right now, as it stands, short-term rentals do not pay commercial levels of tax; they’re just paying residential tax. That’s basically wrong, and it’s depriving those municipalities of revenues that they should have. They also don’t pay the MAT, which is, when you’re a guest in the city, when you stay at a hotel—that tax also goes to the city. Some municipalities have dealt with this, but what we really need is the province to take a position and lay down those rules so that it’s not so easy for these short-term rentals to boot people out, not pay their share of taxes and basically use up—take away—affordable housing in hundreds of units, leaving people with nowhere to go. We can do that at the provincial level, and I think it’s very important that the government take this on.

We’ve also seen, in Thunder Bay, the direct consequences of the battle between the province and the federal government over funding. On this side of the House, we have been issuing warnings for quite a while that the province was going to lose out on federal funding, and that has happened. The Thunder Bay district social services board looks after all subsidized housing, rent-geared-to-income housing in the city. They are now short $4.2 million. This means that they are not able to do maintenance—there’s all kinds of things. They were supposed to be building new units; they’re not going to be able to do that. I hope this is not the end of that story. I hope very much that there’s going to be a negotiation and people will get the money that they were expecting. It’s also last minute, so the DSSAB has had no way to prepare for this—again, it’s going to be the people with the least ability to find other places to live. We actually know that a lot of the places have been—I don’t want to call it “neglected”; it is neglect, but the money hasn’t been there to do the repairs. The maintenance has not been done for a long time, and a lot of the places are really not great to live in at all at this point. I know that the DSSAB was very focused on making those improvements. I actually know that the province did provide money to improve things at the DSSAB, but now we’ve got another problem and they’re missing an enormous amount of money. It really needs to be addressed.

We had a seniors’ proposal in my riding that I’ve talked about, pretty much since the day I’ve been elected, called Suomi Koti. They have been trying to get funding to build a second residence for seniors. It would house 60 seniors and would open up quite a few houses in our region. It’s all run by volunteers. They’ve raised the money themselves. They own the property; there’s already a building on that property. It has been there for 30 years. I’ve toured the building. It’s in fantastic shape. It has really been a labour of love. Initially, it was designed to house seniors from the Finnish community, but it is open to everyone. It has a wait-list of six years. I think, “Well, six years. Should I put myself on that list?” It’s an affordable, nice place to live. They would like to put a second building up. They haven’t been able to access enough support. The province has provided support for a seniors’ complex in Thunder Bay–Atikokan. I would like to see something happening in Thunder Bay–Superior North. It has now been six years that they’ve been trying to get funding and haven’t been able to push this over the finish line.

I would like to talk about what we would like to see happen. In Thunder Bay, we have two very successful co-op housing projects. They’ve been there for a long time. They have a range of incomes, people living in them—it’s mixed-income. We also have social housing, which really functions, unfortunately, as poverty ghettos. It’s very difficult for people in those situations, especially as things are now, with gangs coming in. We have home invasions happening, we have vulnerable people—actually, I have a niece living in that area—and they’re frightened, often, because of the gang activity and so on. They’re the kinds of places that are under-policed. Many Indigenous people are over-policed when they’re out of that area and on the streets, but they’re under-policed where they actually need support.

I also know that people, when they’ve been able to move out of those social housing areas and into the co-op housing—they still have subsidized rent, but now they’re in a mixed-income neighbourhood and it’s a community, it’s safe, and people feel so much more hopeful about their lives. And they’re not frightened about who is coming into their neighbourhood. At one time, these social housing projects—perhaps they were a model that made sense at that time. They really don’t make sense now. What we need is mixed neighbourhoods.

I would love to see more co-op housing in our city. I’d like to see the NDP’s proposal of a new public agency, Homes Ontario, to actually be there to help support the financing of that kind of housing.

When people say, “Well, where is the money going to come from?”, I ask myself, “Well, where is the money going now?” This government is looking at breaking up the LCBO. That will take $2.5 billion out of the public purse. Why on earth would a government remove $2.5 billion from where it can be used to support housing, affordable housing, to support health care, to support education? It doesn’t make sense.

We are also seeing million of dollars spent on self-serving advertising. When the government was in opposition, the government actually introduced a bill to stop that kind of advertising, but now it’s taking place with this government.

And then we have the issue of health care dollars, where private, for-profit health care agencies are receiving higher rates of pay for the same services, for OHIP services, and the incredible amount of money that is being spent on nursing agencies. That is still an after-effect of Bill 124, which did so much to push senior health care workers out of the profession.

So there is money. Always, when a government has power, there are choices about how money is going to be spent. We think it needs to be spent to support affordable housing, fully public health care, and fully public, well-supported education.

Thank you to the member for the question.

Yes, I do agree. We know that municipalities were asking for this before, and we know that this proposal has also come from this side of the House. Use-it-or-lose-it is absolutely essential.

Again, there are other things that need to be addressed in the bill that aren’t there to support affordable housing.

Rent control is critical, and limitations on selling out people’s apartments and turning them into short-term rentals, and support for seniors’ housing. Access to affordable financing, which is not there, is really needed. This is why the seniors’ complex has not been able to be built. There is no access to affordable financing.

There are many other problems in our region. For example, you can’t build down the road. There are 11 municipalities in my riding, and in many of them. we can’t get housing built, because it’s too expensive to bring in material and bring in the workers. At this point, in Terrace Bay, if you could convince a contractor to come, it would be a $750,000 home, but nobody in Terrace Bay could afford to have a home at that level, so the homes don’t get built. So we have a problem in the region of actually not enough housing to bring in professional workers.

Given my knowledge of what has been happening over the last six years, I would like to see—there are so many things that this government could have done and can still do differently to help people get affordable housing. That’s where I think our energy needs to be.

Yes, I wish that this bill did support, did recognize the need for supportive housing, to adequately fund it, to adequately fund—obviously, this is a housing bill, so it’s not talking about all of those wraparound services, but we have a tremendous need in our city; we have amongst the highest rates of any part of the province, with addictions.

People are working around the clock in their basically very underpaid jobs trying to support people trying to find transitional homes. They really are having an extremely difficult time doing this because the funding is not adequate. It’s critically important.

As I say, all of these things snowball. If the short-term rentals are taking up affordable housing, then that also snowballs and there are no other places for transitional housing because everything has been kind of knocked down along the way.

We know we need rent controls. We know we need affordable housing. We also know that the people on ODSP and on OW don’t have enough money to keep a roof over their heads, and if, God forbid, they live with someone, then their money is going to be clawed back so that they have even less.

We need to be building affordable housing that is not built for profit, not built for the betterment of investors; it’s built for the betterment of our communities so that people have safe, affordable, quality places to live.

We know that there is so much homelessness, particularly in our area—it’s desperate, really. So I need the provincial government to sort out whatever its issue is with the federal government, whatever it is that’s not being provided, so that the federal government sends that money to the province that can then go to the municipality, to the—

J’aimerais souhaiter la bienvenue à Anne-Marie Gélineault, Francine Vaillancourt, Sébastien Fontaine et Catherine Chereau-Sharp du Conseil scolaire du Grand Nord. Bienvenue.

Early childhood workers are asking when they will receive the provincial minimum wage increase promised for January 2024. There has been no communication from the government about this delay. And now the Trillium is reporting that the increase won’t take effect until June. This uncertainty has been incredibly difficult for workers to bear.

The government talks about empowering women, so why is the government shortchanging the lowest-paid workers in this women-dominated industry?

In my riding of Thunder Bay–Superior North, we are at risk of losing our only rural child care program because of a lack of qualified early childhood educators. People in my riding are desperate, especially those who live in rural areas but work in Thunder Bay. They have no idea how they will be able to keep their jobs if they can’t find child care.

The government loves to talk about construction workers, but the reality is that female-dominated professions and the care of children continue to be disrespected and underfunded.

What is this government doing to raise pay rates? We’ve heard that they’re going to raise them; tell us when, so that people can look forward to an increase in their pay packages.

On a point of order, I would also like to welcome Brian Crews from the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.