If denying solutions to the housing crisis was an Olympic sport, this Conservative government would be setting new records with their performance and denials.

Just a week ago, a landlord in the Premier’s own Etobicoke riding placed an advertisement renting out half of his bed. The kindest thing that I can say about this posting is that this landlord is at least making more housing than this government.

But this is just another serious story that Ontarians are living with because this government is refusing to bring back real rent control.

Will the Premier restore real rent control, or is he simply satisfied that more Ontarians will just rent out half of their beds to desperate tenants in order to respond to the housing affordability crisis?

Interjections.

To the member across from Mississauga–Lakeshore, thank you for your presentation. I’m just going to ask you about the 407.

Obviously, part of the term sheet in the original agreement between the provincial government and the 407 operator was to maintain a certain amount of vehicles on that highway to reduce the congestion on the 401, and that meant that the operator had to set the tolls at a particular price. It couldn’t be too high, otherwise you would see a drop in vehicle use, and of course we saw that the tolls were too high, and the vehicles came off the 407.

Your government, in 2021, waived a billion dollars of congestion penalties from the 407 for-profit operator. Do you have any regrets about waiving that billion dollars now that we’re facing a $9.8-billion deficit?

Thank you to the member from London–Fanshawe for her excellent presentation.

As you know, the Ontario NDP has never supported any type of provincial carbon tax on regular consumers. We oftentimes have supported the cap-and-trade system focused on large polluters, which is where that focus should be.

When the Ford government proposed a new carbon pricing system by scrapping the cap-and-trade program that the Wynne government had put in, it effectively launched a new carbon pricing system in Ontario—a new provincial tax. That was launched January 1, 2022. Yet there was, on the bill right now, a piece of legislation left over from the 1990s Harris government called the Taxpayer Protection Act, which specifically said that any new tax had to go forward to a referendum. So, in some ways, it replicates what’s already in schedule 5. Yet, we know, in 2022, there was no new carbon tax referendum under the Ford administration.

So can the government bind any government to a referendum if they couldn’t even follow their own rules?