Speaker, the previous Liberal Party leader and current mayor of Vaughan recently admitted that the housing affordability crisis actually started while he was in office, while the provincial Liberals were in power. As a municipal member for the last 22 years, I certainly witnessed all of that kind of challenge, and that the Liberal government, supported by the NDP at the time, took zero action on the housing crisis.

Can the member opposite speak to—if you’re so impassioned about moving forward and addressing the housing crisis, why didn’t you push the previous government to act sooner?

Thank you very much to the member from London North Centre. I was not here at that time. As you know, I came in in June 2022. I’m happy to consider anything I can to keep people housed—from an equity point of view, from an affordability point of view. We were just evicted from our constituency office. It’s different than a home, but my whole team has experienced what that feels like now and have a lot more empathy in that situation.

But I’m really perplexed that the government isn’t looking at bold and brave measures, as they have been told by their housing task force, as has been mentioned in this House a million times. Our own backyard is looking at provincial lands.

Many cities like New York, Manhattan, they don’t have downtown surface parking lots because they put the parking underneath and they build housing on those. So we are not looking at—I’m looking at the Minister of Housing over there, when he’s going to sign off on the MTSAs, things like that. There are many tools in the tool box we could be—

I am proud to stand here on behalf of my constituents of London–Fanshawe and give some stories about what they’re facing when it comes to housing in the London–Fanshawe riding. I’m sure everyone has stories, but I want to bring life to the bill, about how affordability in housing is affecting the people that I represent.

Under this bill, there is not a real commitment to affordability. When that’s not in the bill, things like, for an example, when people are living in an apartment, they’re renting an apartment—I have a lot of tenants who are facing relentless pressures from their landlords to move. That could be motivated by many things. Corporate landlords may want that person to move so they can increase the rent. And there is no rent control in this bill.

But landlords are seemingly willing to file whatever it takes under the Landlord and Tenant Board. I’ve seen those tactics. They’ve done tactics such as false non-payment of rent claims against Gerry, who is one of my constituents. Or they’re trying to evict people on fixed incomes because sometimes they’re late; they don’t always get the payment right on time, and that would be John’s situation. And then there’s claims about behaviour, and that’s Laura. Back years ago, landlords, corporate landlords, were a little more willing to tolerate and work with tenants, but now, with this housing market and how they can just kick anyone out and increase rents, they’re attacking and really putting the most vulnerable tenants at risk.

When these tenants have to move out of these buildings because they can rent for a higher cost, what happens to them? Our office is linked to an organization, and they send us, every month, affordable places for people to rent. But do you know what that list entails, what’s called affordable? It’s always rooms to rent. There are not affordable rental units out there, so if you’re living in a place, you’re forced to find a room somewhere.

In one of the ads that we get—and these are on Kijiji, and we can’t guarantee any of the information because we don’t know what the landlord is like, what the safety concerns are and the quality of accommodations, quite frankly. But one of the ads is about sharing a bedroom. So you can have a single room, or you can share a bedroom with someone. Now, I don’t know the set-up. If there’s maybe double, single beds—I don’t know. But how is it that we’ve come to this point that people, when they’re kicked out of their rental units—and sometimes it’s legitimate and sometimes it’s not, but in this case, these corporate landlords, I know for a fact that these people are being harassed, quite frankly. Their option is to share a room with someone to try to make ends meet, because the lowest room that I found in a single in this ad was $600 and the highest was $900. So it’s not a good situation out there when it comes to affordability, when it comes to housing.

Quite frankly, the Landlord and Tenant Board is broken. There are wait-lists for getting hearings over a year. The corporate landlords can absorb those finances—you know, if someone stops paying rent. But the small landlord, who has perhaps another unit in their home and someone stops paying, and then their mortgage comes due and their interest rates go up, they can’t wait a year. So you’re really putting people who are trying to invest perhaps in their retirement, trying to make ends meet—because maybe they got a job, they’re trying to supplement their retirement fund. But here we are really hamstringing them, because the Landlord and Tenant Board isn’t streamlined to deal with small landlords, when there is truly a situation they need to get out of.

It’s the same thing with corporations, right? They need to have the streamline for tenants who are being pushed out by corporate landlords, and so that they get their fair share in court.

Part of the problem as well when we’re talking about the Landlord and Tenant Board—and there are no solutions in here about rentals. We’re creating rentals. Under Bill 23, the government wants to build triplexes, but under this bill, people have to attend hearings now on Zoom. If you can imagine being on Zoom if you have a hearing issue or a visual, if you’re wearing glasses, if you’re not technically inclined—and even trying to get legal aid. Legal aid in London–Fanshawe—I don’t know about everywhere else in this province, but it is overwhelmed, and the people who need it the most can’t access those services.

So here we are with this bill, which isn’t addressing true affordability. There’s nothing about affordability in there. It’s talking about building houses—and no one is arguing that we need to build homes, affordable homes—but affordability isn’t in this bill.

The other part that’s not in the bill is homelessness. My colleague and I did a tour of a homeless shelter, one of them in London, Ark Aid Street Mission. They were making a really compelling case that having a home isn’t always just about owning and renting. People need shelter, and not just during the winter months when the weather is intolerable. It’s all year. They told us that as of May 31, the city will fund zero day-or-night drop-in spaces in our city unless there’s interim funding from the provincial and the federal government.

They’re saying that what happens is, if they have to shut down the facility, they have to lay off 100 employees. Those employees don’t stick around for the next season, when the weather is intolerable and they have to open up the shelter beds again. It causes all kinds of red tape, so to speak. We need to keep our shelters open 365 days a year, all throughout this province, until we get the housing crisis under control, where people can actually afford homes to transition to.

Not everybody has a job. Many people are on fixed incomes, and we need to make sure that they’re not on the street. These are solutions that we need to be building into our housing plan.

The other piece of that is supportive housing. I have constituents, the Rodgers family—I’ve talked about them many times in this Legislature. They have two adult sons that have developmental issues, and they’re in their late thirties, early forties. The parents, however, are in their mid-sixties, pushing 70. One of their sons finally was placed, and they had to wait like 35 years to get some supportive housing for one of their sons. They still have one son that they’re pushing and trying so hard, whether it’s Participation House, whether it’s Community Living, to try to get their son placed in a supportive home.

And that’s not in here. I think we need to rethink the kind of definitions about housing. Absolutely, home ownership and rental needs to be in there. Affordable homes geared to income need to be in here. Co-operative homes, co-ops, need to be in here and supportive housing, like Community Living. We need to integrate them into our housing plan, so that the Rodgers family—the parents that are aging—can have some peace and comfort, knowing that both their sons are in homes that are safe and they’re getting quality services, quality care. But this is not what’s happening in the province of Ontario, and I think we forget this.

As much as there are some good things in this bill, like development charges are being somewhat clawed back—that’s a good thing—like building minimum parking spaces when they’re building apartment buildings—but as the member from St. Paul’s pointed out, and I think the member debating at the time didn’t quite understand what the information she was relaying was, we need minimal parking for people who need their vehicles because they have disabilities. If you need to have someone come or you’re a PSW and you need to go to that person’s apartment and you have a vehicle, you need a place to park. It just makes it easier to access the client. If you’re somebody who has a mobile device like a scooter or wheelchair—yes, it’s great to build those public transit hubs and have apartments there, but they might need their vehicle to get around. That was the point that the member from St. Paul’s was making.

I think we need, again—maybe in committee is when the discussion will happen, when we can make sure that we tailor these bills. There have been many bills we’ve had to reverse. Because of poor judgment on the government’s side, we’ve had to reverse those things. It’s good that they’re reversing them, but there’s so much more that I think we need to do when it comes to housing.

This housing piece is needed, absolutely: multiplexes, high-rises, single-family homes, a mix of it all. But we have to include, for the most vulnerable, shelters, geared-to-income housing, co-operative complexes and supportive housing for our most vulnerable citizens in this province of Ontario.

I hope that in committee, we will get a plan to actually incorporate and integrate those things, because we don’t want to leave those people behind. We don’t want to leave people like that behind because it just creates more havoc.

I thank the member for St. Paul’s. This is what’s really happening out there when we’re talking about affordability.

I’m going to quickly talk about international students, who are living, literally—if you watch, I think, the Fifth Estate, there were five on the main floor and then six on the lower floor. In some cases, they actually rotate. They shift. So you share a room with someone else, and the person works nights and you work days. Literally, that’s what is happening because it’s so precarious when it comes to housing.

Now, imagine, if you didn’t have a home, all those basics that the members talked about. But one of the things that London has actually pointed out—very important; very smart—is that health care needs to be tied to housing, because if you don’t have housing, your health care also suffers, along with your economic ability to get a job or go to school. So health care and housing are two things that are so important in this province, and we’re not doing a great job if we don’t include housing that’s affordable for all.

However, when people are on social benefits or people are on fixed income like CPP, they may never be getting off social benefits. So as far as I’m concerned, over the years, governments should have always been in the business to be building housing that’s truly affordable and geared to income, because we wouldn’t have the homeless situation that we’re facing now. We wouldn’t have this kind of sharing a shift in a room to get a sleeping bed. It’s really happening.

I think what happens is that sometimes, when you’re not in that situation, you can’t see yourself in that position. We have to listen to the people who are telling us what’s really going on. Absolutely, I want my kids to afford a home. I want your kids, everybody’s kids, to afford a home. But I don’t want people sleeping on the street. I want shelters. I want affordable housing—when it comes, geared to income—and I want to make sure we have supportive housing for the most vulnerable in our society.

If you had an adult child with a developmental disability and you were 70 years old, you would want to make sure that your adult child had a place to be that was safe and was being looked after. That’s just a basic thing I think we all would want. So it needs to be fixed. Supportive housing needs to be fixed.

But I can tell you this: When I first got elected, one of the things that I presented, and that was over 12 years ago, was a bill asking the Liberal government at the time—and I would have done it with the Conservatives as well if you were in power at that point. It was to make sure that we actually funded housing stock that was already in place, which was rent-geared-to-income, and make sure it was still viable, because all of it was not being looked after. It was built 25 or 30 years ago and it was falling apart.

So that’s another piece in legislation. If we’re going to be building all this housing, we shouldn’t let the stock that we have now deteriorate. It needs to be maintained so that we can get ahead of the problem, and that’s part of the issue. We’ve got to stop worrying about the politics and we’ve got to get ahead of the problem.

Back then, people didn’t look to the future. They were so comfortable because interest rates were low and things were affordable. No one thought about how we keep this going. How do we mitigate affordability in our province?

I want to thank the member opposite for her comments. My question to her really is this: Recently, the former Ontario Liberal leader, Steven Del Duca stated, “Frankly, this housing affordability crisis began when I was still sitting at the provincial cabinet table. The first inklings, the first hints that we were going to have this challenge spiralling out of control began in 2016. That was eight years ago, and we were in a low-interest rate environment at that point in time, but the challenge was already beginning, and why? Because we have a fundamental supply problem.”

My question to the member opposite is quite simple. With a Liberal Party in power for 15 years, supported by the NDP, why did they sit on their hands and do nothing until we started this discussion in the last election?

It’s a privilege, always, to be able to stand in the House. Today, I think this is definitely a topic that is very concerning to my constituents, to the city of Hamilton, to so many folks. When I’m out in the community, all the time, this is the number one issue that I’m hearing from people: the lack of housing and the concern over young people not being able to afford a house, the concern over affordable housing on its own, supportive housing—I hear that often. I hear from families who are concerned greatly, and rightfully so, because they have no idea where their young adult children are going to be able to live out their years and be able to start that family and bring grandchildren into the family because of the affordability measure. And this, unfortunately, is not in this bill. If the government would have taken the time to actually listen to community, I think they could have done a better job in ensuring that affordable measures were built into this legislation and ensure that people have a place to live.

As I’m sure you have seen, Speaker, there are tents everywhere throughout our city. They’re in our downtown. They’re at our city hall. They’re on our waterfronts. They’re through our escarpments. They’re in our parks. Everywhere you turn, there are people panhandling on corners, there are people sleeping in bus shelters. Really, anywhere where they can find space to hopefully stay out of the wind, they’re there, and that’s not okay. That is not the Ontario or the Hamilton that I grew up in. I have never seen anything like that, as I’m sure many of us have not, but now it’s a common occurrence. It’s unfortunate when our young children are seeing this and they think that it’s the norm because this is what they’re growing up with. It’s not the norm. This didn’t have to be this way. I think that the government could have done better to ensure that the legislation that’s put forward—once again, on another housing bill—would have done better to ensure that we did have the ability to build that housing.

Last night I had the privilege of visiting Halam Park co-op housing in my riding. I believe, as you were a city councillor, it was in your area. That is a wonderful example of housing that was built in wartime, for soldiers and their families. The 1970s, I believe, was when it was built, and then 20 years after that, it became a co-op house facility.

The people who come together to ensure that the gardens are done, that there are people active constantly, there are events, there are supports, that all of the wonderful amenities that come with living in co-op housing—Halam Park is a shining example of that. Last night, I had the opportunity to thank the volunteers who really do make Halam Park a wonderful place to live. There were children right to one woman, Shirley, who has lived there for 48 years. Her husband, Hugh, who is now deceased, was part of the enactment of bringing this into a co-op facility.

There is great pride in that community, and that is something that we could mimic. It’s an example of how we can do better. I don’t think there is a better example of good community housing than co-ops, and we never see that in the legislation that’s brought forward.

One of the things that I’m still waiting to see is the definition of affordable housing. Affordable for who? Where does that come from? That is something that is always missed here, but yet they’ve made sure that they took out some other wording that is old school. They could have updated that as well.

This bill will not help you find a home. It will not help protect you from illegal evictions. It will not bring rent control back into the picture.

An offside conversation, talking about rent control: We have members on the government side who say, “Well, the market has gone up, and my mortgage has gone up. The rent doesn’t reflect that.” Well, that’s a different story than just taking all rules away from rent controls. When we see apartments that were built after 2018 have zero rules when it comes to rent control and people who have their rent increase by $3,000 a month—who can afford to do that? I couldn’t afford to do that. Nobody in this place—mainly—would be able to afford a $3,000-a-month increase. This is the problem that we’re seeing when we have bad legislation put forward.

I have to say that it’s good to see some of the reversals that are in this bill because, once again, we have seen this government who has pushed forward legislation that municipalities and other folks were screaming, “No, no, no. This is bad. This is bad”—like Bill 23 and development charges for the cities, Bill 109 and application fees. I think there were a few more other reversals that are in this bill to reverse legislation that was previously put forward by this government that people had been speaking out about. If there’s anything that we should be doing as leaders in our community, it’s consultation. With consultation, they would have heard this feedback of how this would have hurt the city. So I’m happy to see those reversals in here and making sure that municipalities do have the funds to build infrastructure and that municipalities are not on the hook for developers when they don’t keep up their timelines because that’s not something that is in the control of a municipality and yet the government thought it was a good idea at the time to enact that.

I want to quote the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. They’re happy to see that walking back of Bill 23 because that undermined it, “They do not, however, replace the need for a comprehensive conversation to update the provincial-municipal fiscal framework to support sustainability, affordability and economic prosperity.” They have a lot to say to ensure that we are building for the future, and I think this bill misses it.

The interesting one was OREA, which is led by Tim Hudak, who is the former leader of the Progressive Conservative Party. They say they’re happy to see that there’s some recent progress on a couple of solutions, but “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” this “bill. 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 our province.”

The affordability task force, which was put into place by this government, is not seen in any of this. The fourplexes that the Premier refuses to implement, probably because Bonnie Crombie said something about it so that just made it all wrong, but this has been something that everybody has been calling for. This isn’t a four-storey building. Fourplexes are not four storeys in the middle of residential. It’s a bigger house, quite frankly, with units inside that house that could quite easily be transitioned into communities and, unfortunately, this Premier doesn’t see that being necessary, but would provide so many people with the opportunity of an affordable place to live, within a community, within walking distance to the schools and the local shopping marts and places where families need to be in that community.

Whether there’s good things in here or not, I think the bill misses the point on so many factors.

Thank you to the member from Toronto–St. Paul’s for that really important question, because if you look at the bill as it’s written, you would not see people who are underhoused or people who are struggling for that affordability piece or supportive housing. You don’t see them reflected in any of the bills.

What we have seen reflected is developers and builders. We’re now starting to see some municipalities and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario being reflected, but that’s from blowback, not really consultation, right? That’s blowback of, “You did this wrong and you need to change it because it’s hurting municipalities.” It’s raising property taxes in municipalities, and that goes against all of the no tax increases that this government seems to claim.