It’s great to be debating this legislation here this morning.

Recently, it has come to light that there are some 48 members of the Premier’s office on the sunshine list, and his gravy train is getting bigger and bigger and bigger as every year goes by.

I’m wondering if the minister can explain to the House how many Ontarians who are not on the Premier’s gravy train sunshine list, making over $100,000 a year, which is more than the average family in Ontario—how many Ontarians who aren’t on the Premier’s gravy train will actually be able to afford to buy a home as a result of this legislation?

It’s a pleasure to rise. I have a feeling I’m one of the last people who will be debating this, as we’re nearing the end of our time.

I want to commend my seatmate from University–Rosedale, who has done a great job as our housing critic, not only in addressing this bill and many others, but in fighting, especially, for tenant rights in Toronto and across the province.

We know that the government obviously has a majority, so this will end up in committee. I know we’re all going to work hard to improve this bill when we get to committee.

The last six years, watching the government attempt to address the housing crisis, have certainly been interesting. I think we know that it has not been very successful. We saw a 7% drop in housing starts last year. The government likes to say that they’re making great gains, but actually, when you look at the numbers, that’s not really the case. We’ve talked a lot about the fact that we believe that’s because we need to have a proactive approach to the housing crisis, not a reactive approach. We’ve talked many times about the need for the government to get back into the business of housing.

I’ve heard, throughout this debate and in question period, Conservatives talking about the former Liberal government as the government under which the housing crisis started. I would suggest that’s not really true. I’m not going to defend the Liberals’ record—certainly, their most recent record in creating housing. But I’ve been around politics for a long time. I was a city councillor prior to coming to this place. I was also involved in federal and provincial politics since the mid-1990s. I actually ran for provincial government in 1995—a long time ago. I was still in university at the time. I can remember, in the late 1990s, when that Conservative government got elected, the massive downloading that happened from the province to municipalities. Housing is certainly one of the things that suffered most from that downloading. There’s lots of blame to go around. There was a downloading of the federal responsibilities from the then Liberal federal government to the provinces. But certainly, the provinces had a choice, and Ontario, under that Conservative government, decided to engage in a massive downloading to the municipalities. That’s really when the crisis began, in my opinion, and certainly in the opinion of many people who look at this problem.

So municipalities already have this massive issue with funding housing. For our regional housing in Niagara, I can tell you there’s an 18- to 20-year wait. You might as well not even be on the list for regional housing. That’s a problem that has built up over many, many years.

You’re going to hear us talk about a proactive approach to housing, which is the government getting back into the business of housing, making sure that we have affordable housing, that we cut down on speculation, that we look at things like social housing, co-ops, and that the government gets back into the business of actually working with municipalities to directly build housing. Many experts across Canada are calling for that solution and, of course, for governments to work together.

The other thing I want to talk about briefly in the time that I have is the governance review committee—the standing committee that travelled. My friend across the way was there. I was at most of those meetings, in places like Barrie and Vaughan and Kitchener and Niagara. We heard a lot from those municipalities. I have to say, while our criticism of this bill is certainly that it’s not the proactive approach that the province needs, at least municipalities and the complaints that were brought forward to that committee are reflected in this bill.

We see a number of things that we heard over and over and over again as we travelled across the seven regions. The first thing that we heard, actually, that I should mention is that there is no appetite for any kind of significant restructuring of those municipalities. People have said loud and clear, from city to city and region to region, that they are interested in addressing the housing crisis directly and working with the provincial government to bring things forward; not in engaging in some kind of navel-gazing exercise, where we’re forcing municipalities to amalgamate and those kinds of issues. So that came through loud and clear. They wanted to focus on housing.

The results of the committee—there were a number of things that came through. One of them, of course, was—and we’ve talked quite a bit about the use-it-or-lose-it policy, something that we have been pushing on this side of the House for quite some time. The government, in Bill 109, I believe it was, came forward with measures that—municipalities had to process planning applications in a certain period of time, and that created a lot of issues for municipalities that were already struggling with capacity. We said that if the government is going to force municipalities to process those applications—and that’s not a bad measure, if we have reasonable time limits, if there were some developments that had been out there for many years. It’s also fair for developers and builders to have restrictions placed on them, so that when they use the resources of the planning process, they get shovels in the ground in an appropriate time period. There was a lot of resistance from the government. They are pretty captured with developers—a lot of the policies of this government have been that they listen only to developers and have come forward with the intent of making life as easy as possible for developers; certainly not for municipalities. So it’s good to see that the government has finally listened. We heard, I think in every single region and pretty much every presentation that was made, the need for some kind of measure to get developers to get shovels in the ground because of the amount of speculation that was happening right across the province, and because it’s only fair, if municipalities have to process those applications, that developers have to get shovels in the ground.

Also, with Bill 23, there was a loss of revenue to municipalities of upwards of $4 billion, according to AMO, and that had to do with development charges, of course. When the province came forward with their building communities fund, which was about a $1.2-billion fund—of course, that is only a fraction of the revenue that municipalities lost. One of the biggest problems for municipalities that applied for that fund is that the criteria for getting money was shovels in the ground, and of course municipalities have no control over shovels in the ground. With interest rates and inflation, it became less and less economic for developers to actually start their developments, so those started to stall even more. When you have the speculation that was happening and then you have those developments not moving forward—that was creating a real logjam. The Ontario Big City Mayors, for example, and AMO all came forward and said, “There are hundreds of thousands of homes in the pipeline. We have to get those moving. There’s far too much speculation, far too many developers sitting on developments.” I had one in Port Colborne, in my riding, that was there since the 1980s. These are builders and developers that took up municipal time and resources to put those through.

It is good to see measures. We’re going to watch very carefully how those come out in committee.

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, is something that we’re certainly supportive of, and we’re happy the government has come forward with that.

I’ve mentioned already the money lost in Bill 23 through the development charge issue. We see that AMO, in response to this bill, is still not completely satisfied with what the government has done here. They’ve made some move to help municipalities recover some of those funds, but there’s still an awfully big funding gap, and there are many municipalities that don’t qualify for the money.

I can tell you, in my area, in Niagara Centre—I represent a small part of St. Catharines, but most of my riding is Thorold, Welland and Port Colborne. Of the 12 municipalities in Niagara, as the governance review committee heard when they were in Niagara, in St. Catharines—they heard very clearly from Thorold, which is the city where I live, with less than 50,000 people, so they don’t qualify for that money, to get that money they lost through the DC changes back. They don’t qualify simply because they have less than 50,000 population. But they built more housing than any other municipality in Niagara, and so they’re actually asking the government for a housing target because they know they will far, far exceed it and they could use that money.

So there’s certainly an inequity from municipality to municipality in having some arbitrary cut-off like 50,000 population, and all of these municipalities, especially smaller ones, are not qualifying. That’s exacerbated because a lot of the small municipalities, of course, are in rural areas. And in rural areas, what’s the biggest problem that we heard over and over and over in the governance review committee? It’s water and sewer infrastructure. You can’t build homes unless you have that water and sewer infrastructure. Yes, it’s good that the government has finally come forward with a fund where those municipalities can apply, but there is an inequity there for municipalities that are working really hard and are actually asking for housing targets so that they can qualify for that funding.

We’re also pleased to see some changes with respect to MZOs—we believe very similarly to what AMO believes. AMO just came out with their analysis of this bill. In their analysis, they very clearly state that they believe MZOs should only be used in emergencies and in areas of the north, for example, where there is not a planning regimen there and so the intervention of the minister is appropriate. So we’re not satisfied; we still believe that MZOs are not something that should be used other than when they’re actually needed. But we’re certainly happy to see that there is a more transparent and accountable process for them now, and we’re looking forward to looking at that in committee and possibly putting forward some amendments to that.

I see I’m almost out of time, but I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on the Peel dissolution issue. As we travelled around from region to region, certainly we brought up what was happening with Peel at the time. The government moved forward without doing their homework, without doing their research, and created a situation in Peel where there were, at one time, 350 staff per week leaving Peel region—just on the rumour or on the legislation that was about to move forward. They don’t need to stay somewhere they’re not wanted or where they’re not going to be able to keep their jobs, so they were leaving in droves. It created a great deal of—