Thank you to the member from Ottawa Centre for that passionate speech. You shared your personal story, and you also shared your friend’s story with us yesterday. Thank you for that.

This bill, the Supporting Children’s Futures Act, 2024, is all about protecting the children and youth in our great province. I know we not only have a legal responsibility; we have a moral responsibility to protect children and youth in our custody.

My question to the member—the higher rate of compliance would mean that young people in out-of-home care receive a consistently higher quality of care that is safe, supportive and responsive to their needs. Does the member opposite support stronger oversight and accountability for those providing care for Ontario’s most vulnerable young people in this province?

Thank you, colleagues. Hopefully I’ll get a bit more applause than that by the end of the speech, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

It’s an honour to rise today, on behalf of Ontarians and Canadians, certainly millennials, new Canadians, and also seniors that are simply priced out of the market and that’s even if they can find somewhere to live. The housing supply crisis is a problem that has been decades in the making, and it’s been something that our government has been tasked with fixing since we got elected, and certainly something I’ve been tasked with tackling since I got elected in 2022.

I want to give some context to the members across about our housing need. You know, in the mid-1980s, the average home in the GTA was $102,000. You fast-forward that, with inflation, everything around, and in today’s dollars it’s around $286,000. That same home, as a GTA average is actually over a million dollars now, including in my community in Brampton, which is a community that used to have people come live in Brampton because they couldn’t find an affordable home—or to find an affordable home. Now, they can’t even afford to live in Brampton.

What we’ve seen with this government—there’s no government in history that has done more to build homes, certainly not the previous Liberal government for 15 years, which was backed by the NDP, certainly not the NDP government under Bob Rae.

I want to talk a little bit about what we’ve done, not just in Brampton but also all across Ontario, where we’ve done things like remove maximum heights in major transit station areas around transit—the idea that you can build big towers, build lots of density when people can get on transit to get to work. I think it makes a lot of sense.

We’ve looked at sensible solutions around expanding urban settlement areas so that, if there are places where we can’t build homes yet, let’s think of what we can do to build homes in that place. That’s something that members opposite from the Liberals and the NDP have consistently voted against every single time.

You know, some of the things that we’ve done include reducing taxes on rentals, so we’ve reduced the HST on purpose-built rentals, we’ve eliminated that entirely with the help of the federal government.

We also got rid of development charges on non-profit affordable housing, and we’ve reduced it on rental housing as well. And that’s the approach of our government, led by our Premier. That’s the approach that our government has taken to address the housing crisis, and we’ve seen, in the last three years, more homes built over the last three years than we’ve seen in decades across Ontario.

Our plan is to build 1.5 million homes across the province by 2031, and our plan to build the homes Ontarians need is working, but we also recognize that there is more that needs to be done. That’s why we’re working with municipalities and partners to reduce the roadblocks, cut red tape and get Ontario building.

Ongoing economic headwinds and high interest rates are affecting home building across the country. Ontario’s not immune to that, which is why we’re taking action to cut red tape, support municipalities and build more housing faster, improving the quality of life and creating strong communities for everyone from students to families to people in need. We’re helping our partners to build more housing so that residents can finally get a home that they can afford and realize that Canadian dream.

In order to reach our goal of building at least 1.5 million homes by 2031, we’re focused on removing red tape in the process of home building. Something that we’ve heard consistently time and time and again is the cost of delays, where every month a delay on a project can add, you know, $4,000—almost $4,000—on the cost of a unit. And that was a few years ago, so with inflation it’s probably higher, quite frankly, now, than it was then.

If you look at that over 12 months of delay, that’s a lot of money. That’s almost $40,000 just on one unit—that one year of delay can cost on a unit. So reducing red tape is important. We want to build capacity and certainty around municipal planning approvals and we’re making investments in housing-enabling infrastructure.

I’ll note we just tabled a budget. Our finance minister tabled a budget with $1.8 billion for housing-enabling infrastructure: one of the funds around water, $825 million; and another billion dollars that we’ll be rolling out. And members opposite voted against that, that same budget. They voted against housing-enabling infrastructure, which we know, and we’ve heard from municipalities, is going to help us get shovels in the ground to get homes built.

They talk about fourplexes as of right. I would ask, under NDP or Liberal governments, or the Liberal governments that they propped up, where was the zoning that was permissible for fourplexes as of right? Because under this government we’ve seen Toronto, Hamilton, Kitchener, St. Catharines and Burlington all pass laws to make fourplexes as of right across their municipalities. We did that by working with municipalities, not by forcing them to take these policies forward.

One of the places that passed a law like this is actually Mississauga where we had the queen of the carbon tax, Bonnie Crombie, as the former mayor. Actually, at a time when Ontario was growing—we’re seeing hundreds of thousands of people coming into the province every year—and, frankly, Mississauga being a place that actually has the biggest airport in Ontario, Pearson airport, they actually managed to shrink their population, not grow their population at a time when everybody else was growing their population and we need all municipalities to do their part. We need them all to step up.

This anti-development approach has not only consequences on the population in the area, it has consequences across the province. Look at highways. Every major city has a bypass highway, and then when Brampton—we’ve grown; we’ve doubled over the last two decades in population—finally gets a government ready to build our bypass highway, Highway 413, everybody gets the torches and pitchforks out, and the downtown Toronto environmental activists start to say, “Oh, no, we have a problem. It’s okay to build highways elsewhere in Ontario, just not for Brampton—just not for you.”

We saw that from the leader of the Liberals during her time as mayor of Mississauga when it felt like she actually spent, it felt like, more time opposing a highway which would benefit the residents of Brampton than actually building homes in her own community to support the growth that her population was seeing.

Now I was very happy that we have a different approach in Brampton. We’ve been growing. Brampton’s a very shovel-ready city, and we saw that with the recent Building Faster Fund and the work that we did towards our housing target, $25.5 million—very happy that we had the minister there, the Premier there and my Brampton caucus colleagues all there to support that fund, and we’re looking forward to not only doing what we did this year, but we’re going to smash those targets next year, so hopefully an even bigger cheque from the minister when that gets done.

We need to listen to local communities who want to have their voices heard, but we need to set incentivized structures in place to make sure that municipalities are doing their part. We’ve listened to municipalities on some of the changes that we made around use-it-or-lose-it clauses etc., but we’ve also incentivized them to move in the right direction by setting housing targets.

This is something that was scoffed at when we were first looking at it by the opposition who thought that municipalities would never sign on to our housing targets. Look at where we are now, where almost every single major big municipality not only signed on to the targets, but most of them actually made significant progress at hitting them. Many of them even exceeded those housing targets.

This is an approach that works. It’s unfortunate we hear from the opposition—they talk about the need for non-profit housing. Why did you vote against removing development charges on non-profit housing? Okay. When we moved to have three units as of right in homes, legalizing nanny suites and that kind of thing, why did you vote against it then? When we removed height restrictions around major transit station areas—again, something that makes sense—why did you vote against it then?

It’s an opposition that has opposed housing at every step, and it seems like consistently from the members across that what we hear is, “We need the government to set up an agency, and we need more bureaucracy. If we just put more power in the hands of government, then everything will be okay.” We don’t agree with that on the PC side. We need more power in the hands of citizens, more power in the hands of residents, more power in the hands of industry to actually build the homes, get our market going and get some homes that my generation can afford.

It’s frustrating being a millennial, and people say millennials, oh, you know—you’ve got to realize millennials, some of us are 40. I’m not, but we’re not just kids anymore. We’re a big generation and we’re in our prime earning years. Simply put, my generation just can’t afford to get into the housing market. It’s not through lack of trying.

You hear—what was it—the mayor of Calgary said that people don’t want to own homes. Did you guys hear this? I don’t want to blast another—but we hear some of this rhetoric; she’s not the only one who’s made this rhetoric, that people want to rent.

I just want to be clear, Madam Speaker: My generation doesn’t want to rent. We have to rent—if we can afford the rent. We want to be homeowners. We want to own homes and we want to move our lives forward.

Frankly, nothing in this motion that I see from the NDP helps that and supports that, but everything that I’ve seen from the PC plan and our government’s plan is getting us in the right direction, and that plan is working. We’re going to continue to do what we can to promote development, to not only create jobs but to make sure that we’re building homes that people who are working those jobs can afford.

With the time I have left, I want to talk a little bit about the record of the Liberal leader. This is something that—you know, we hear a lot of talk from the Liberals now. They’re awfully quiet when we mention support of the carbon tax. They don’t want to take a stance on the carbon tax, but they seem to talk a lot about housing lately.

I just want to reiterate that, under their leader’s leadership, Mississauga is the only major city in Ontario to recently shrink in population. You know, under the Liberal leader’s leadership, Mississauga said no to thousands of homes for her community. While we were pushing to build up near transit and reforming zoning to create more gentle density, Bonnie Crombie, the leader of the Liberal Party, called a 17-storey, 148-unit rental development “way too much density.” Like, she’s campaigning to be the Premier of the province—I just want to, you know—just for context. When she was in leadership as the mayor of Mississauga—again, where these quotes come from—she also called a proposed 12-storey, 195-unit development “an abomination.”

And under Bonnie Crombie’s leadership—again, campaigning to be the Premier of the province, wants to be in charge of Ontario. When she was in charge of Mississauga, under her leadership, Mississauga said no to a 4,690-unit development because of sun shadow issues.

That’s not real leadership. That’s not the leadership that we need here in Ontario. We need a government that gets it done for people, not only building homes but building highways, long-term care, transit infrastructure, hospitals, to really get the job done and really get our province back to a good place. So we know that the people of Mississauga certainly deserve better than Bonnie Crombie, but I would also say that Ontario deserves better than Bonnie Crombie.

With the time that I have, I want to take some time to thank the minister as well, not only for the $25.5-million Building Faster Fund for Brampton but also for the 30% increase for the Homelessness Prevention Program that we got in Peel region last year. That money is really helping, really supporting. My colleague from Mississauga–Lakeshore talked about the fund going to Armagh House and other organizations. I mean, that’s a massive help. It’s big for our community and very, very helpful.

So, I’ll wrap it up by asking my colleagues across to rethink their motion and take a second look at our housing plan and what we’ve been doing. I know they voted against it. I know they voted against cutting taxes on rental housing. They voted against eliminating taxes for non-profit housing for Habitat for Humanity and awesome organizations like that. I know they voted against those things, but it’s not too late. They can support us in our plan to build homes. They can support us in our plan to build Highway 413 and to build 50 new hospital capital projects across Ontario.

It is not too late; we’ve still got two years before the election. I certainly hope that our colleagues change their mind, but frankly, when you look at this motion and the content of it, for all the reasons that I’ve talked about, Speaker, I won’t be supporting it and I encourage all my colleagues not to support it as well.