He’s right; the member from Whitby is right. We do care about affordability all over the province. Ottawa Centre, Whitby—people are having a really, really hard time out there. But we’re not going to make it better, Speaker, by embracing a technology that will be obsolete in 20 or 30 years. If somebody is investing into a natural gas-powered community now or in five years and is later reckoning with the fact that they may not even get that service anymore because the entire sector is moving towards electrification but it didn’t 10 or 15 years prior—we don’t want to put anybody in that situation, not a renter, not a property owner, not a homeowner.

If you look at the province, a third of our emissions are coming from energy. We have to make the right choices to make sure that we can make people’s lives more affordable right now but also going forward.

There’s a few things happening now, and the member knows it well. If we embrace gas-fired heating and cooling and we continue the Enbridge subsidy, we create a preference for that in new home construction. That will have a huge climate impact. But in addition to that, we’re embracing gas-fired electricity too. There are climate costs to every single one of these decisions, and the wildfires that are going to be happening this summer are not abstract from this; they contribute to this. It’s the environment in which we live. And the people we put in harm’s way, the woodland firefighters, that deal with the moment, these are the people we push into the emergency when we could be making the decisions to reduce emissions. But that’s not what’s going to happen with this bill.

In Thunder Bay, if the electrical capacity is a question, geothermal, if there is space, could potentially be an option. And the drilling technology is getting even more effective in smaller urban areas. So, we do have choices, but one of the choices I would hope we don’t make is doing Enbridge a favour and continuing a multi-billion dollar subsidy for them, when we could be helping people out on energy affordability by making the right investments.

So I’m very glad, and I hear we’re getting good news today on the industrial policy front. But we need to make sure that the housing that we put in the ground works, and that it’s good for the planet, too.

Thank you very much to my friend for his presentation. I’m just wondering if he has any reflections on the fact that at the rate that I’m seeing, with the evidence we have, we have a situation where, with every week, we have a few kids who are passing away in one way or another in care. He’s lived it. I’ve grown up with friends who have had a similar experience. While I acknowledge the positive things in this bill, we have youth in our province we’re losing. So how could this bill be amended to make sure that we get the services and the supports, as my friend from Hamilton Mountain was saying, into these homes to make sure that the kids who are in crisis get the help they need?

It’s a pleasure to rise today to talk to Bill 185. I’m just going to talk in my 20 minutes about the housing aspect of this bill, which is, I believe, the driving force behind this bill. This is one of the biggest issues I hear about at home, and let me begin—I’m going to zoom in and zoom out in these 20 minutes.

Let me begin by zooming into something very local that happened in my constituency office last Friday. I’m in meetings in the community, and I get a text from my colleague Erica who says, “Joel, there’s a guy in our office who needs a pair of shoes.” No joke, Speaker: There’s a guy in our office who needs a pair of size 12 shoes. He’s spending his nights couch surfing with different friends. He can’t find a home. He lives on social assistance. Our shelters, as I’m sure is the case with shelters everywhere in this province, are full. The average rent in our city is $2,000 a month. For someone on social assistance, on Ontario Works, in particular, making an income of less than $800 a month—brutal. There is a housing allowance that can maybe get you into a home if you time it correctly. This gentleman has worked with our offices, and a number of times, the timing just never works for him. But last Friday, he ended up in our office, asking for our help for a pair of shoes.

I was across town in a meeting with Professor Carolyn Whitzman—big room—with parliamentary assistant to the federal housing minister, Peter Fragiskatos. I may have mispronounced the parliamentary assistant’s last name. But it was a rich discussion about what we need to do for housing in the province, and my phone goes off from a colleague asking some advice about how we find someone a pair of shoes in the course of shuttling around the city, trying to find something other than the couch. So I think that’s the zoom-in picture, Speaker.

We have a situation in our community in Ottawa of 45,000 people, according to Professor Carolyn Whitzman, who are one or two paycheques away from homelessness, one or two paycheques away from eviction. And it depends upon the outreach worker from the city recording the data at night, but we have hundreds of people sleeping rough all year round in our city. Our shelters are full. That’s the zoom-in context of housing. So when members in this House say we need pieces of legislation to expedite the construction of deeply affordable housing, the answer from my community is, “Yes, yes, yes. What can we do? What can we do?”

I do know that in 2018, the government signed a contract with the federal government that committed the government to build 19,660 affordable housing units. Let’s be clear what we mean by affordable housing units, because the federal government has often slid around in its definition of what this means. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., according to housing experts like Professor Whitzman, Steve Pomeroy from Carleton University, Kaite Burkholder Harris from the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa, the definition that makes the most sense is 30% of income—30% of income. And it used to be 20% of income in the post-war period, when we built all those victory homes for veterans who were otherwise facing poverty and homelessness after serving our country, making the greatest sacrifice overseas. It was 20%, but it became 30%. But then that definition lapsed.

But that was what the government agreed to in 2018, to build 19,660 affordable housing units—units that cost 30% of income. But how many units have been built in six years in Ontario? It’s 1,180. That’s barely 6% of the target.

Now, I don’t want to hang all the blame on this government particularly. I think we have had a problem for generations because we’ve put faith in the wrong place. We have put faith in the fact that the housing market, on its own, is going to resolve the issue we have—that I felt in my office, personally, last Friday—of the need for deeply affordable housing. And the market, by any measure, has manifestly failed.

For me, for affluent folks, sure, there are opportunities. They’re getting harder and harder to come by in major urban centres. But for the people like the gentleman in my office last Friday, it has manifestly failed, because we put blind faith in the notion that governments should play no direct role in provision of housing. But it was not always so. It was not always so.

That’s why, when I hear the member from University–Rosedale hold forth in this place, it raises my heart, because she has said time and time again that it’s time for the public’s money to be invested in creating that deeply affordable housing because it is the only way it will ever be created. We have given the private market three decades to pull this off. And at this point in the housing and homelessness crisis, we have people sleeping in tent cities, we have people coming into MPP offices without shoes.

But there was a time, Speaker—and I want to say this for the record—the period of 1989 to 1995 that Professor Whitzman spoke about last Friday was a period in which over 14,000 co-operative homes were developed in the province of Ontario. I had occasion to talk to former Premier Rae about this. I had occasion to talk to former municipal housing affairs minister Evelyn Gigantes, who was the MPP who had this seat for my community. She told me, former Premier Rae told me, that under that government, in that period—there’s some overlap there, 1989 to 1990 to the previous government—over 14,000 co-operative homes were created in the province of Ontario.

They were created because there was a program at the federal level that funded, through financial terms, advantageous financing for co-ops to grow quickly. There was a willing partner to get the financing. Cities and provinces worked together. And what was the result? A significant amount of homes. But almost overnight—almost overnight—in 1995, Ontario stops funding the development of affordable housing, co-operative and social and community housing in a significant way.

In 1998, rent control is removed from vacant units. So you have that problem of people moving out of a unit, paying a vastly different rent to the person coming in. And then in 2018, as the member for University–Rosedale said, as other members have said, under the current government, you have a situation that, for any form of rental housing built since 2018—no rent control.

The cost of rent is $2,000 a month, on average, in my city. In this city in which we’re standing right now, that would be a bargain.

So the question is, if we’re going to reckon with the evidence—the evidence is telling us that the market has had three decades to solve it and can’t solve it. So how do we solve it?

Well, I look, frankly, to the very west of this country; I look to the province of British Columbia, not only because it’s an NDP government, but because they’re following the evidence. They’ve created a $500-million acquisition fund in the province of British Columbia. If older, private rental market housing—because it needs to be renovated; it needs to be repurposed; it needs to be reutilized—is coming up for resale, the province of British Columbia has an acquisition fund to make sure that housing stock can stay in the hands of its current rent providers, and it gets refurbished and renovated on a not-for-profit basis, and those people who are currently living there get to stay in their homes. What’s happening in too many places across this country, and certainly in Ontario, is that large real estate investment trusts are swooping in at that very moment to buy up old, affordable housing, lightly renovate it, kick the tenants out, charge whatever the market will bear.

I want to point to an example from Hamilton—we have some Hamilton members in this room: Kevin O’Toole, interviewed by CBC’s The Fifth Estate. Mr. O’Toole was talking about the fact that he spent his life working in the service industry as a waiter, and he was talking about the fact that his rent, almost overnight, after light renovations to his building—the building having been bought by a real estate investment trust—was going to double. The landlord was going for an above-guideline increase that was substantial, that would have driven him out of his home. The tenants fought back. They went to the Landlord and Tenant Board. They waited a long time to get there. They managed to cut the rent increase in half. But he is barely struggling, right now, to make ends meet.

Real estate investment trusts are returning dividends to their shareholders that are very handsome indeed. The research that I have available to me is that we’re looking at over $2 billion in profits, in the last six years, being returned to the Blackstones of this world, being returned to the large real estate investment trusts, whose one goal is to buy up these large apartment buildings in municipal areas in Canadian jurisdictions, lightly renovate them, ditch the tenants, jack the rent. Has there been a single law in Ontario to stop this? There has not.

The country of Denmark has literally passed a law to make sure that large real estate investment trusts can’t buy up large swaths of the rental stock and throw people out onto the street. There has been an active approach to create that balance between responsible ownership, taking a responsible margin in the rental housing business, but maintaining affordability in the downtown.

I find the lack of action in this place on the creation of non-market housing and the protection of renters to be astounding.

What I know now is that there are consequences if we fail to protect tenants and renters. People aren’t just statistics. If in one moment they are a tenant in an affordable unit that they can no longer pay for after their rent has been jacked by who knows how much, they could become homeless. The cost to that person, the loss of dignity to that person in losing their housing is one thing, but there are also the financial implications for the province of what happens when someone is homelessness.

In our city, we have something called a portable housing allowance benefit to try to keep people in their homes; we’re talking about an expenditure per person of about $6,000 a year. I remember, when this got proposed, there were more conservative-minded colleagues in my city saying, “This is too expensive. We can’t afford it.” But if you look at what we can’t afford, it’s the cost of homelessness. Steve Pomeroy from Carleton University has told us that the same per-person cost of somebody being homeless is not $6,000 a year; according to Professor Pomeroy, it is $53,000 a year—talk to any paramedic, talk to any police officer, talk to anybody working in an emergency room, and they will tell you exactly why. All of those interactions with those critical nodes of community safety in our system are unnecessary if we can find people an affordable home in which to live. They’re all unnecessary if we can find people an affordable home in which to live.

So the government wants to build housing quickly. I think it’s a fantastic idea. They are reversing some of the decisions they made previously. I like the aspects in this bill that have to do with the rapid construction of timber buildings. I like the idea of telling developers that they have to use properties they have slated for development or lose it. I like all of these sticks, Speaker; I like all of these different carrots and incentives. But what I don’t see in the government’s bill before us today are specific provisions to deal with the predatory behaviour of real estate investment trusts or specific protections for renters or specific plans about how we’re going to build non-market housing.

My landlord back home, of our community office, is the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp. It is the largest non-profit landlord in the province of Ontario: over 17,000 residents, of which our five in our community office are one, on the commercial side. They’ve had a very particular mandate. Their mandate has been to charge appropriate rents. So the CCOC, Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp., has a stream in their buildings of people who pay rent-geared-to-income units, but they also have a stream of residents in their system that pay market-rent units. I’ve always felt that’s a much more progressive model of housing. Rather than saying everybody who is having a hard time paying the cost of living, let’s have everybody living in one building together—when the goal should be to build diverse neighbourhoods, where we get to live together and get to know each other.

The minister has been to Ottawa many times. I’m sure he’s aware of the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp., but if he hasn’t met with them yet, I would encourage those interactions now. If we think about how to build housing now—what if Ontario did have, rather like the province of British Columbia, an acquisition fund, a community land trust? What if you worked with community land trusts so we could keep the housing we have, so Mr. O’Toole in Hamilton and others like him aren’t thrown out onto the street—another person who may one day show up in my office looking for a pair of shoes.

In the time I have left, I also want to talk about the issue that I was concerned about. I asked the minister a question after his one-hour lead, and he did respond. I know it’s an issue that he cares about, and it’s the issue of urban boundaries, Speaker. Because overnight in our city, we were told by a previous housing minister that our urban boundary in Ottawa had increased by 654 hectares. Now, that’s a big deal in Ottawa, Speaker, because we have literally one of the biggest urban boundaries in Canada. You could fit the cities of Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver inside Ottawa’s urban boundaries. We are massive. We’re rural, we’re suburban, and we’re urban. But overnight, our city was told it’s going to be 654 hectares bigger. It was quite a shocking thing to learn.

We also learned that there was a farm bought right at the previous fringe of the urban boundary by a group of five gentlemen from the Verdi Alliance group of contract companies for $12.7 million. It was bought for $12.7 million, Speaker—a family farm that overnight was massively worth a lot more. The minister, to his credit, responded to letters from city councillors who sniffed something deeply wrong. We’re losing arable land that we can grow food upon, but we’re also seeing land speculation which did not pass the smell test. Councillor Shawn Menard, for Capital ward, raised the alarm bells. He got 11 people on city council to sign a letter to the minister. The minister acted.

But here’s what I’m worried about in the revisions to the provincial plan statement contemplated by this bill, Speaker: I worry we’re going to be going back to this kind of chaotic housing development. The ministers often talked about it in this place, and it’s a good topic, about how we can build enough water and sewer infrastructure to make sure that the housing that we want to build can be built. It’s not just the structures that you see, Speaker: the apartment buildings, the individual homes. It’s the services that need to be run to all those communities in order for those homes to be built.

But in this case, of this development, which now won’t happen, it would have cost the city massive amounts of money to pipe all of those utilities out to that development. We thankfully won’t have to deal with that. We’re going to be having the discussion of how we intensify development in the downtown and the suburbs, for which I’m a willing partner. But if we allow smaller municipalities who could potentially be more open to persuasion to these kinds of developments, I worry about the cost of it, Speaker.

I’ll point to one that is sadly going ahead. It’s the Tewin development in the far south end of the city. City staff actually encouraged the previous city council—not the current but the previous city council—not to green-light this development. Why? Two reasons: The cost of running sewer and water out to that community, given how far south it is in our already large boundary, was—get ready for it, Speaker—$600 million. That’s $600 million for water and sewer in this community. The federal government has just announced a new program, the Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund of $6 billion. People at home are telling me our likely share is maybe $180 million. That one project on its own is too expensive for what the federal government is prepared to offer us to build housing quickly.

So my point to the government is, if you’re going to be encouraging housing to be built, we have to be thinking about what kind of housing we build. Asking for homes to be built far outside the periphery of existing urban boundaries is expensive, inefficient.

I grew up in rural Ontario. I grew up in Vankleek Hill. The member for Glengarry–Prescott–Russell is here; he knows he represents a beautiful community. I grew up there. I love the bucolic countryside. I love that part of our province. But the municipalities of Glengarry–Prescott–Russell are intact units with their own systems that work. If we’re talking about major cities like Ottawa and Toronto and we’re saying the future development for housing in our communities is pushing outward into arable farmland like what we stopped at Watters Road, we’re courting disaster. We’re not going to be getting to where I believe we need to go, which is working with allied partners to build the kind of non-market housing.

What Professor Whitzman and Professor Pomeroy tell me: If we do that, we can house people potentially quickly. The one successful program that the federal government has introduced is their—I’m going to forget the acronym here as I speak, Speaker, but it’s the rapid housing fund. What it’s been doing—rather like our municipal fund of $6,000 per person helping people pay the rent—is helping people who would otherwise be surfing on couches or surfing in shelters pay the rent that they have to keep them housed. I want to believe this bill that we’re debating now could be improved to have some provincial assistance on that front. There is the Homelessness Prevention Program, which I’m aware is doing some of that work, but that’s like in the $200-million region. I’m talking about an ambitious rent bank program that can keep people housed.

It won’t just be those 45,000 people in my city who could be potentially homeless that will be happy for that help, it will be all the first responders, it will be people in the emergency rooms, it will be people who will otherwise be dealing with those folks in crisis that will also be happy. There is a multiplier benefit, Speaker—long story short—to keeping somebody housed. We restore dignity to the person, we restore opportunity to that person to contribute back to our society and we avoid spending a lot more money later. I encourage the government to listen to that advice and make changes to the bill.

I think the only way I can answer my friend from Hamilton is to say that this is a case of regulatory capture. I mean, it’s not only here in the province of Ontario. This Greener Homes Grant I was talking about before: The federal government embarked upon this piddling $2.6-million experiment. Guess who was the co-sponsor of this initiative, who you have to work with to get that into your home? Enbridge. Enbridge helps vet the applications for the Greener Homes Grant. What sense does that make?

Yes, we have to work with Enbridge, because they are the agents for those ratepayers, but there has to be a regulator. It’s a private company. It has a private interest. Some 90% of the situations in our city where people replace their home heating and cooling situation are when they break down in the wintertime. What do we think the rep says at the door? “Welcome to your new gas heat pump.” We need something that’s independent, that gives people good choices that are affordable; and this government is not doing that.

The fact of the matter is that the profitable places for Enbridge to expand to are the ones near major urban centres: the plans they have for Windsor; the plans, I’m sure, they have for suburbs around Toronto and Ottawa. That’s who they care about. We’re not surprised by the fact that Enbridge’s priorities line up for their bottom line.

Where we do get surprised and a little uppity is when we start making decisions in this House for a company that made $46 billion last year, whose CEO makes $19 million a year, while people are starving and having a hard time feeding their kids. We should be standing up for them, not for Enbridge. This bill is a disgrace for the province of Ontario.

The good news is that it’s not too late for us to chart a different course. We could actually promote some of the programs we already have, which I talked about. We could tell Enbridge, “No, you’re not going to get your handout. We’re not going to sign up on your corporate welfare. We’re actually going to make sure that when we give assistance, it is to the hard-working people of Ontario who make this province the great place that it is.” That isn’t Enbridge. Enbridge has a contract with the province of Ontario that they’re required to fulfill. It’s not even clear to me that they are fulfilling it, when I hear about issues of compromises in the pipeline, people getting sick in communities around pipelines where there are leaks. The fact that I haven’t heard anything from this government about those health and safety concerns bothers me.

We are going to pass this specific bill to make Enbridge richer. I think it’s wrong.

We don’t require Enbridge to tell us if there are any problems in the pipelines. And by doing that, we’re not protecting the workers responsible for maintaining those pipelines; we’re not protecting the community around the pipelines. Those pipelines aren’t going to go anywhere. We need them to be safe.

I’ll end on a positive note. The people of Ontario, who work hard, deserve nice things. They deserve a heat pump in their building and home. They deserve access to good public transit. They deserve the opportunity to have clean air, clean water and healthy communities. But this bill does a favour for Enbridge, and it doesn’t do a favour for them.

We should rewrite the bill. We should make sure Enbridge pays for its mistakes. End of story.

I want to thank the member for Toronto–Danforth, not Davenport, for that great presentation. I also just want to note, you mentioned that the minister enjoys the benefits of a heat pump for a home that is not serviced by gas.

I was surprised—because I’ve read the 147-page report that you referenced in your remarks—when the minister said that the Independent Electricity System Operator was not consulted, was not involved, because if you refer to page 5 of the report, what the OEB says is that, in fact, the IESO was one of the people who contributed to the years’ worth of research, the over 10,000 pages of evidence that the OEB came to a decision.

I guess I’m asking the member to reflect upon the conflicting position of the minister. Is he the minister for energy or is he the minister for Enbridge?

I take what my friend has said to heart. I think people do want to live at home. They want to be at home. They don’t want to be in hospitals. A number of persons with disabilities and seniors I’ve spoken to don’t want to be admitted into long-term care. That is a personal choice they’ve made.

But what you’ve said and what the government has introduced to date has not done anything about the fact that we are losing 30% on the dollar of every—there’s a billion dollars contemplated with this bill, as I understand it. We are losing a third of every dollar we’re spending because we’re lining the pockets of the for-profit companies. So all the good work that you’re going to do to take those thousand people and bring them back home into the community—if they can’t get a care worker to show up on time, if those care workers are double-booked, if their travel isn’t covered, if they’re not making decent salaries, if they have no pensions and no benefits, then I believe your bill is set up to fail.

What I’m going to do just to punctuate the point for my friend from Oshawa is to say this: Can you imagine an Ontario where there was an agreed-upon minimum standard of compensation for all PSWs? The government, through Ontario Health, could do it right now. That is what Denmark does. There is one standard of pay, one standard of benefits, one standard of travel being covered. Can you imagine that?

I can tell you, for any lawyer working for this government right now—you better believe there’s a minimum standard that they expect to be paid. Any deputy minister? Oh, there’s a minimum standard of what they expect to be paid. And they work hard. Why can’t we do the same for PSWs? Why do we have to watch them be gouged by greedy companies that have been ripping off the public purse for too long? That, I believe, my friend, is what’s hurting Cindy, and we need a government that’s going to stop that and stop it right now.

What I would say to all of those homes that are being built that are culturally appropriate homes—I want the workers who are going to work in those buildings to know that they have the right to join a union. We had SEIU Healthcare in this building not long ago. They should sign up to SEIU Healthcare, because right now there’s no government that’s willing to guarantee a standard of living and wages.

The member is a nurse, and I respect the work that she has done in the province of Ontario. The member benefited from that work done by the associations representing her profession.

I want to see PSWs valued more and paid more. That is the missing piece, honestly. Back to my friend: We can build homes. Homes and beds are great infrastructure. But what makes them come alive are the people who work in them. So that is the thing we need a government to do. And if this government isn’t prepared to do it, believe me, in 2026, there will be a government prepared to pass laws to ensure PSWs are paid appropriately, their travel is covered, they have pensions and benefits just like all of us in this building.

I listened to the member’s comments closely, and I’m going to ask her, through you, Speaker: Given that the government is proposing this billion-dollar expansion in home care, how does the member feel about the fact that we have an Auditor General report that tells us that we lose as much as 32% of every dollar we invest in home care when we do it through for-profit agencies? And what is the government’s answer to a guy like Paul, a home care attendant I met in a grocery store the other day who tells me that when he travels around the city of Ottawa—he doesn’t have a car; he uses transit—travel is not covered?

As the member from Nickel Belt said, in three different pieces of home care legislation offered by this government, no one is covering Paul’s travel. He is looking in on neighbours; he’s looking in on people with disabilities and seniors. My question to the member: Why are you allowing 30% of the government funding to be lost to for-profit agencies, and why aren’t we covering Paul’s travel? Doesn’t that matter to you?

I enjoyed the remarks from the member from Thornhill. I particularly liked hearing about the member describing herself as one of those politicians that will actually do a shift at a homeless shelter and help hand out blankets and food. I love to hear those stories. I’m wondering if, from her experience, she could—and it was the Anglican church, if I’m not mistaken, that you had volunteered at with the blankets and the food—the Anglican church in your community?

I have a question for my friend from Orléans.

I couldn’t help but notice the assertion there that we hate developers here in the New Democratic caucus. It will come as a surprise to my uncles in the development industry, I will say. But what I can say we don’t like are developers who build improper homes.

So my question to the member, because that isn’t something focused in this bill—Cardinal Creek is a community in the member’s constituency that has had serious problems with improperly built homes, with zero help from Tarion and zero help so far from this government. Do you have a message for them, some vision for them, about how we can make sure that when people make that risk of buying that home, that it’s a properly built home?

Any thought would be nice, the member from Hamilton just said.

Again, I want to close the time I have, Speaker, before entertaining questions by remembering how residents have come together to defend their affordable housing. This is a good story. There’s an elderly couple that I’ve worked with on Elgin Street in downtown Ottawa that were forced to move from their home on Elgin Street, which they have lived in for 38 years, because of a building fire. But what was curious about the fact that this elderly couple—who would like me to not use their names now because we negotiated an amicable agreement with the landlord. They were told to move out of their home, as were many people in this building, because of the fire damage. But as people started to move back in that were actually closer to the fire in the building, they found it curious that they were still being told to stay out.

Their insurance was running out. Their ability to stay in a hotel was running out, because these are low-income seniors, so they gave me a call. They said, “Joel, we don’t know what we’re going to do. There’s a new, shady, kind of property manager guy around our building all the time and he gives us the evil look. He’s changed our locks; we didn’t even know about it. We can’t go in to get our stuff. This doesn’t seem right.” We hooked them up with Community Legal Ottawa to get access to their property and their stuff.

But what stepped into the breach once again was ACORN Canada. A bunch of neighbours came together at the doorstep with a locksmith they hired. They got into that building. They defied the landlord. The police came, and we said calmly to the police officers who came, “These tenants are being prevented from accessing their property. They are about to run out of their ability to pay for housing outside of this building and everybody else has moved back in.” Wouldn’t you know it, Speaker, they were living in a rent-controlled unit for all that time and everybody around them were more recent tenants, paying at least twice, if not three times what they were paying.

So this couple fought back. They got in the news. They organized their neighbours. They pressured the landlord, and thankfully, I’m happy to tell this House, they are back in there. They sent me pictures of their newly repainted room. It’s beautiful. They have a beautiful mauve dining room with an old table where they love to enjoy meals with friends.

But again, it shouldn’t have to come to this. There should be clear rules that make sure landlords cannot engage in this kind of activity. And you’re not going to stop this, Speaker, by increasing fines. You’re going to stop this, if I understand what the Attorney General is saying, by increasing the capacity at the Landlord and Tenant Board to give tenants and landlords access to justice, so when they are being harmed, they can get decisions.

But that’s not the Ontario we’re living in right now. We’re living in an Ontario where, under this particular government, the cost of a home has doubled, if you’re in the ownership market. Rent is going through the roof. Costs of life are going through the roof. And there are a lot of people lining up to help: the real estate investment trusts of the world, the Timbercreeks, the Smart Living Properties. They’ve got all the consultants and lawyers they want. What we need is a government that’s going to stand up for tenants, stand up for homeowners and stand up for communities. Bill 97 does not do that.

We need legislation with teeth to help people who are in a tough position, and that’s not what’s here.

What is driving up the cost of living, Speaker, are rich folks connected to this government driving up rent, driving up the price of food, ruining our communities. This government is not standing up and fighting for people. They are fighting for Galen Weston. They are fighting for the De Gasperis family. We will fight for people.

Interjections.

I’ll say to my friend from Carleton, I’m not only relying on the current mayor. I think it’s significant because that’s the current office-holder. There is not one enthusiastic supporter of this bill running for the office of mayor in our city right now—some have said they might want to use it. Wouldn’t that give the member pause to think this isn’t going to work?

What would a strong mayor actually do? If I was the mayor of the city of Ottawa right now and I looked at how I’m spending money—and we’re spending $25 million on police-related calls for homelessness, and $17 million on affordable housing. What would a strong mayor do?

We would build more housing through non-market housing—repurposing federal office buildings that are currently vacant because people aren’t working in them, and creating housing out of them.

That’s the kind of mayor we need. That’s the kind of leadership we need.

Folks in Ottawa are ready to work with you.

One needs to have mapped out the next steps of how we make affordable housing happen in Ottawa, how we help small businesses, how we help people who are suffering in the mental health crisis, how we fix our hospitals and schools.

One needs a plan, and hope is not a plan. Railroading is not a plan.