I want to follow up with the member about what you had to say with respect to housing for migrant workers, agriculture workers, because I think this is a really critical issue.

So many of us don’t want to remember the pandemic and all the difficulties it brought upon people in the province, but I remember reckoning with the fact that nine migrant workers died between January 2020 and June 2021. When a study was done—all of the various coroners’ reports, housing experts who were thinking about this—they linked the issues with cramped conditions of housing and the inability of workers to effectively isolate.

I remember a gentleman from Jamaica, I believe it was—he was in his forties—who died on his own while he was isolating, or attempting to isolate.

I’m wondering if you can elaborate—because this is a shared priority we have—on how we can make sure migrant farm workers, who come to this country to feed their families, are safe.

I enjoyed in particular the member for Niagara Falls talking about international students because I’m very concerned about them. I see an incredible amount of international students in Ottawa using food banks and who are very housing-insecure, and I just want to zoom out for a minute because there are other places in the world that treat international students very differently.

I want to cite in particular Germany. Germany is a place with over 300 public post-secondary institutions, and you can study there as a Canadian for free, for minimal tuition; there are nominal fees here and there.

The German economy is one of the most successful economies. I had the occasion to go there for some conferences when I was a student. I learned a lot from people I met over there about how particular industries run in that country, and I’m wondering if we could actually convince this government to financially contribute to colleges and universities. Why couldn’t we treat international students with more respect?

When I’ve heard the story of Wilmot told in this place, there are alarm bells that get raised, given the story I brought up about Watters Road. We have to save our farmland. We don’t have to trade off our farmland to make sure that we can build deeply affordable housing in Ontario. We absolutely don’t have to do that.

The other thing I would say, Speaker, is that developers again and again tell me—and I run into them all the time back home—they’re not in the business of building deeply affordable housing. That’s not what they’re in the business to do.

There was a time when the province of Ontario and the Canadian government worked together with municipalities and non-profit housers to do that work. We have to commit to do that work again. Thirty years of evidence has shown us that no one is going to do it for us; we have to do it ourselves.

So I think we do need to work towards the intensification of the downtown. As I said before, you have a willing partner in the people of Ottawa Centre. We want to make sure that happens.

But what I do know is there’s a whole lot of vacant provincial properties all over Ontario that could be repurposed. There’s a whole lot of LCBOs, for example, in strip malls upon which there are air rights where we could build housing, for which the province actually can make the decision. The last time I asked the Ministry of Infrastructure this question, my friend, it was 812—812 vacant properties in Ontario owned by the province. Why can’t we repurpose some of that for some usage, even if it’s transitional usage and it’s not fully outfitted homes? There is nothing stopping us from doing that. And I’m sure that where you live and where I live, there are partners willing to make that happen.

I remember the Prime Minister getting up at a conference in 2019 and saying, “Well, technically, housing isn’t my jurisdiction, but....” We have to stop talking like that. There is a federal Minister of Housing. There’s a provincial Minister of Housing. There are people responsible for housing at the municipal level. We can’t play a jurisdictional game anymore when it comes to housing.

And I will not accept the argument that there aren’t any resources available for us to get people housed right now, because the city of Ottawa, through its housing allowance to people who interact with our shelter system, has proven there’s a way we can keep people in their homes if we can get them money to make the rent.

So that’s what I would say. We can use the money the province has to keep people housed, and we don’t have to blame each other for what we’re not doing. We can do something.

There are a lot of things that could be put into this bill that you may see the members over here standing up to vote for.

I encourage both of us to pressure our respective groups so we get the best bill before the House.

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.

Thank you to the member for his comments. I just wondered if the member could share with the House some of his opinions on the necessity for us to build a lot of non-market housing. It really seems it’s the only way we can get that deeply affordable housing stock back into the system. I know, in my city, there’s a study that comes from Carleton University—Steve Pomeroy is the author of it—that for every one deeply affordable housing unit we are building in our city we’re losing 15, because real estate investment trusts are swooping into our community, buying up aging apartment buildings, barely renovating them and kicking a lot of those tenants out who are paying reasonable rent.

So I’m wondering if the member could share with us some of your thoughts about how this House, this province, could prioritize building non-market housing to keep those people in homes.

A question for the minister responsible—one of the things that I know he cares about, from previous discussions we’ve had about the need to speed up housing, is what happens sometimes when processes aren’t quite right. The minister intervened when the urban boundary expansion impacting my city of Ottawa led to some very questionable decisions with respect to how developments took place. To his credit, he took action on that front. But it disturbs me this morning, as we debate Bill 185, to read some advocates in the sector worried that this could repeat. There could be the repetition of, according to Environmental Defence, more “greenfield scandals” if we don’t ensure proper protections are in place that make sure that further development isn’t only sprawl development of single homes stretched onto wider terrains.

The government knows that everybody in this House wants housing to be built. We’re here to collaborate with developers, particularly for non-market housing.

I’m worried, and I’m wondering if the minister could respond about whether or not the processes that are now going to be set in place with this speedy development could tumble us into more problems that we’ll only have to correct later.

I’ll be honest in my response to what the member has said. I’m not interested in playing culture war games in this place when it comes to community safety, and I would invite the member opposite to consider the same. We can try to play “gotcha” politics in this place by using catchphrases, or we can make the community investments we need to make to keep our community safe. I talked about specific investments we can use to make the community safe. I note the federal Conservative leader was playing similar games in the House of Commons yesterday in question period.

We have to be driven by evidence. We have to be driven by effective solutions that work. The case I was making this morning that I didn’t hear any evidence or response to from that member—I hope I hear it in debate—is, are we making the right investments, are we helping first responders and are we helping neighbours in crisis? Those are the pertinent questions.

Housing, supportive housing, and support for people with mental health and addictions—I heard the associate minister of the government yesterday praise those initiatives, and I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to hear that, in this place, we’re following the evidence and not the culture wars.

I’m glad the program’s working for your community. Jury’s out for me on whether I’m going to support it. I need to make sure there’s enough money in the bill to support all communities.

We need the government, we need the public to make sure we incentivize and figure out ways to help people get housing. It doesn’t always mean cranes, either. Supportive housing can be repurposing existing rental stock, supportive housing could be wrapping services around places like rooming houses, but we can’t do that on $800,000 a year with the Homelessness Prevention Program, and we can’t do that with the limited resources currently allocated towards public and non-profit housing in this province. We need much, much more.

It’s an honour to rise to this issue, and do you know why? Because the history of affordable housing in this country is the history of the New Democratic Party. Let me tell you why. In 1944, when people who fought for our freedom returned from a war overseas and veterans and their families were being gouged, who stood up for them? New Democrats, social democrats across this country. We linked arms with them, and we stood up for them, while the Liberals and the Conservatives did nothing as price gouging of veterans and their families happened in droves.

And then I’m proud to say that once that standard was set and when the business lobby, the big corporate lobby, counteracted and took away rent control when it was given in 1944—took it away in 1949—the NDP didn’t give up. Did the NDP give up?

So I’m not going to take any lectures from these members opposite, certainly not when the great Evelyn Gigantes is my neighbour back home. Evelyn Gigantes stood in this place, was the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, and under her leadership—not this government’s leadership—non-market housing increased in Ontario by 60%.

Co-op housing, community housing—that’s the NDP record on housing. And do you know why? Because when you go to any one of our fundraisers, you’re not going to find the DeGasperis family. You’re not going to find the Cortellucci family. You’re not going to find the real estate investment trusts like Smart Living, which—in my community back home, Smart Living is throwing 121 tenants out of their homes, in the south end of our city, to create gentrified units of $3,000 to $3,500 a pop. And these are some of the last remaining affordable housing units in this area. Who fought for them to remain? Who stood by the tenants? The New Democratic Party stood by the tenants. ACORN stood by the tenants while these vultures from Smart Living swoop in, buy up housing stock that they know is dilapidated, refuse to fix it, and throw people out on the street.

The member for University–Rosedale mentioned that the average rent in this city of Toronto is 3K; it’s 2K in Ottawa—that’s up 11.5%.

Everything in our lives is becoming more expensive under a Conservative government—groceries, rent, gas. The way to get out of this mess, on this day when we are fighting for affordable housing, which is an NDP tradition, is to get rid of the Conservatives who serve the rich and powerful. You should have a government that works for you.

Thank you to the member for that address. I enjoyed it. I want to just begin on a point of agreement: I agree, we are in a housing emergency. Something I brought up with the infrastructure minister at committee a couple of weeks ago is a revelation that I didn’t know about until preparing for that committee. In a report the Auditor General wrote in 2017, she noted that there were, at that point at least, 812 vacant government of Ontario properties in the province of Ontario—heated, electrified, utilities supplied, vacant. It would seem to me that a great thing to work on at committee with this bill is having an action plan on how we reutilize that vacant housing for housing and other purposes, and I’m wondering if the member agrees.

I’m rising today to debate the government’s latest housing legislation, Bill 97. There are many things that come to mind for folks in Ottawa Centre. I do want to ask your indulgence, Speaker, to be able to say a few things off the top that I believe are related to this legislation, if not directly in some of the schedules and some of the aspects of the proposed bill.

First of all, we need housing, of course, but there’s also the question of how we get to our housing. A major way in which Ontarians want to get to their housing, certainly in urban centres, is with public transit.

I want to take this opportunity, as I begin my debate on this bill, to thank the Ottawa firefighters who rescued people on April 5 from our LRT, which stalled for a second time—a second time, Speaker, if you can believe it—given an ice storm. We live in a Nordic climate. We invested $2.1 billion in this light rail transit system. We managed to convince the government, in the last Parliament, to declare a judicial inquiry into this system because of the mess it has become. I want to note for the record: Transit is critical for how we get to our homes, and twice in 2023, in January and on April 5, first responders had to be called to the crossover by the Rideau River near the Lees station to cut a hole through a chain-link fence that people had to crawl under and through, to get out of an unheated train they had been waiting on for over an hour—including frail seniors, people with disabilities. I mention this for the record of this House, because I respect the job and the responsibility of this House, and it deserves mention that this is an absolute abomination, when we think about how we’re supposed to be building public transit that works. So I hope government members are listening to that. I do want to thank the firefighters and the first responders, and I do want to thank the people who took to Twitter as they waited, freezing, on the train. I want to thank them, but it shouldn’t have to come to that.

Secondly, I want to give a shout-out to some of our neighbours in Ottawa, who, sadly—because we have to think about how we pay for our housing, don’t we? We work for a living to pay for our housing. And 155,000 members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada have given the Trudeau government a deadline of 9 p.m. tomorrow night, after two years of delay and obfuscation at the bargaining table, to finally come to a mutual collective agreement. It shouldn’t have to come to this. The very people, when nine million Canadians were unemployed in the pandemic, who made sure that that Canada economic recovery benefit that my colleagues in the NDP federally fought hard for—they’re the people who set that system up, they’re the folks who made sure people could get income when they were unemployed and their small businesses were shuttered. And now the Trudeau government is insulting them by threatening to throw them out on the picket lines. I want to say to all the PSAC members at home that going on strike is not an easy decision, but we support you 100%. We will be mobilizing to support you 100%, and I hope the Prime Minister gives you the deal that you deserve at the bargaining table. It is not a lot to ask, for people making $45,000 to $60,000 a year in key occupations in our public service, at the Canada Revenue Agency and at the Treasury Board. You deserve a deal, and we will be with you on your picket lines to support you.

Thank you, Speaker, for your indulgence. Let’s get into this bill.

Let’s talk about rent protection bylaws—schedules 2 and 5 of this bill. Once again, after Bill 23, we see another measure being introduced here to diminish the capacity of rent protection bylaws. Why is this important? It’s critically important because when these large, often investor, companies swoop in and buy up buildings in many of our major municipalities, there is an obligation in the city of Mississauga, there is an obligation in the city of Toronto, and there is an obligation in the city of Hamilton to compensate people. And why? Because we are losing the affordable housing stock we have at an incredible rate.

The research that I have, which comes from the great Carolyn Whitzman, the housing professor at the University of Ottawa, shows us that for every one unit of affordable housing—“affordable” defined by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.—that is being built in Canada right now, we are losing seven. When large real estate investment trusts swoop into a community, buy up a property that a landlord has not maintained effectively—in some cases, for decades—and turfs them out on the street, it’s called a renoviction, and it’s one of the things that my friends in government are talking about addressing with this bill. But it’s one thing to increase fines on individuals or companies—$100,000 for individuals; $500,000 for companies. That’s negative liberty. That’s one thing. But where’s the positive liberty? Where’s the support you give people? It’s through rental protection bylaws.

In the city of Toronto, the latest research I’ve seen from city staff in this city—over 16,000 units of actually affordable housing that we have have been protected with rental replacement bylaws. That’s critical. If you’re trying to maintain a family on an extremely low income—and so many people, as every member of every caucus in this place has risen to speak about since this Parliament resumed, are suffering out there, scraping by, barely making ends meet given the price of housing, food, getting around. This is critical that we have something to replace rent. I heard a friend over there say that it was all because of the carbon tax. I want to acknowledge that transportation costs are significant. But I want to remind the government that one of the major costs to any person, whether they rent or own, is housing. The poverty line, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.—where they say you’re getting into trouble is if over 30% of your income is going into housing. What I’m talking about in situations I’m going to describe this afternoon are situations in which, for affordable housing—affordable housing people are trying to cling on to—42% to 45% of their income is going into housing.

I want to talk about Amanda, a mom of four who lives in Manor Village, which is an area in the south of Ottawa. Manor Village was targeted for renovictions by its owner, Smart Living Properties. Smart Living Properties said to the low-income, working-class tenants of Manor Village, “You’re going to have to move out. The building is dilapidated. We need to do some repairs.” In Ottawa, unfortunately, unlike Hamilton, Mississauga and Toronto, we don’t have rental replacement bylaws. We were fighting for that in our latest municipal plan, but Bill 23 that this government proposed didn’t help us towards addressing any of it. So Amanda and so many other folks in Manor Village faced the threat of losing their homes. Amanda lived in a three-bedroom home in Manor Village for $1,400 a month. You cannot find a three-bedroom home for a low-income family in the city of Ottawa for that price—impossible. They faced the threat of losing it.

Years before, in 2018, we had the largest mass eviction in Canadian history since the terrible story of Africville. I invite members, if you don’t know what happened in Africville in the great city of Halifax, to look it up. It was an instance where Black residents of Halifax were literally moved out of their community, with their possessions, in dump trucks. It was a mass eviction led by the city.

That inglorious chapter of Canadian history was actually made worse with Heron Gate in our city, where 500 residents were evicted summarily by Timbercreek. It has since changed its corporate name. I guess when you get a bad reputation for turfing low-income tenants, you’ve got to change your corporate name.

We needed a rental replacement bylaw to make sure that these folks could actually find comparable housing. It doesn’t exist in the city of Ottawa.

So what is in Bill 97 to make sure there are robust rental replacement rules so that tenants, who have rights, as the member for University–Rosedale said very well, can get access to similar housing? I don’t see it. I see fines, but everybody in this place knows that smart, well-resourced people in housing can wait out a judicial process; they can drag their feet. And it puts the onus on the complainant to lawyer up to the same extent that the well-resourced person has. What you needed were resources off the top, a rental replacement bylaw system that actually works, that compels the landlord if they want to massively renovate a property and make a margin for that. Fine—make sure that the tenants have comparable housing. That’s what a fair regime would do, and I don’t see that in Bill 97.

What did residents in Heron Gate and Manor Village do to fight for their rights, in the absence of a rental replacement bylaw—because as I said, we don’t have it in the city of Ottawa. They worked with great organizations like ACORN in our city. They organized home to home, and they made sure that those landlords were held accountable for their decisions. I’m happy to say that the residents of Heron Gate negotiated an agreement with the landlord who threw them out, and people have found new homes, but not without a massive fight. And I’m happy to say that the residents of Manor Village persuaded the city of Ottawa to re-route our LRT so it wasn’t going directly though their community, to save their housing, and they are fighting, as I’m saying these words, to make sure they have comparable-quality and comparable-cost apartments—but by citizen action, people on their own, neighbour to neighbour. It’s important.

But we should actually have a safety net that matters in this province. I don’t see it in this bill.

If you go to downtown Ottawa, in the neighbourhood of Centretown, 142 Nepean Street is a three-storey walk-up that you’ll see. The city council at home just recently made the decision to demolish 142 Nepean Street—for a 27- or 25- or 34-storey building, you would think. It makes sense. Densification—that’s what we need. No, for a parking lot—for a parking lot. Despite the fact that there are parking lots at adjacent buildings, that was the priority for the developer. They told those residents of that affordable building right in the downtown, close to work, close to transit, close to amenities, that they had to move out. They fought back, but there is no rental-replacement bylaw that exists. The landlord offered spaces for a certain amount of time, three years, but then after that the rent can be jacked up by whatever the landlord would seek to charge, because, as the member from London North Centre said, after 2018, all bets are off when it comes to rent control in Ontario. It’s the Wild West.

So what was Amanda’s reaction from Manor Village when she was facing the loss of her housing for her four kids? She said to the CBC, “I don’t know what we’re gonna do. We could ... end up on the street or living in my van.”

That, sadly, is the reality of so many of our cities’ neighbours, who have become destitute or homeless, because the housing rules that we have favour large, multi-property owners and real estate investment trusts and they don’t work for people.

In the time I have left, I want to talk about the expansion of the urban boundary, which this legislation proposes, by changing a previous standard that had been talked about for development of 80 residents per hectare to 50 people per hectare. And the worry advocacy groups have with this bill is that you’re going to be encouraging housing further and further from urban centres and not moving towards what everybody seems to agree upon, as we work towards these 1.5 million homes we need to build, which is more densification in the downtown.

I love to ride my road bike at home, Speaker. It’s one of the ways I get my mental health. One of the communities I love to roll through when I have the chance is Piperville, southeast of Ottawa, Carlsbad Springs area. There’s a great park out there called the Ludger Landry Park on Piperville Road. Well, there was a bunch of neighbours recently there at a protest because they were awoken at 4 o’clock in the morning to the sound of clear-cutting of thousands of trees—thousands of trees.

And this is an area that wasn’t zoned for development of housing. This was an area, unbeknownst to the residents of the community, that had historically been farmland, but there had been an urban forest that had grown up. Kids went in there to play—I certainly have that memory from my youth, of just going into the adjacent forest to play, in rural eastern Ontario. People would walk their dogs in there.

But at four in the morning, for some reason, a mass clear-cutting operation happened, unbeknownst to the neighbourhood of Carlsbad Springs. It caused a complete uproar. And my question, Speaker, is the allegation here from Taggart Group—which is the developer—is that this is going to be used for farming, and that we need arable land for farming—no question. But I find it curious—for the record of this place, it is right adjacent to a development that is barely inside the urban boundary, once it was expanded by this government, called the Tewin development. City staff told Taggart that it was extremely expensive to pay for the utilities to be worked out there, to think about public transit to be worked out there, to extend municipal services out there. They actually recommended to city council, in the last iteration of city council, not to approve this development, to reject it. But this government changed the urban boundary. The Tewin project was approved. And just last month, residents in a plot of land even further away were awoken to the sound of clear-cutting in the middle of the night. I ask you, Speaker, is this the way we do development in Ontario now, where communities have to be surprised?

If I were in the government, if I were at their tables, I would be encouraging them to not move forward with that kind of an adversarial approach. The government has to be present. There have to be clear rules of engagement. And we have lots of success stories in Ottawa of great densification developments that happened, where neighbourhoods are consulted and they work, and everybody wins. But that’s not what’s happening right now, and I don’t see it being fixed with Bill 97.

So the rationale that was given to the residents of Carlsbad Springs—because immediately, when the city found out about the possibility of a clear-cutting operation on February 17, they sent their bylaw folk out there with a stop-work order. But apparently, after the clear-cutting happened, what city council learned last week is that there’s a gap in the bylaw. According to the city, in the reading of the bylaw, the injury or destruction of trees is required for farming practices. Again, I wish I could show the members of this House on some screen here, because members of the community flew drones to take pictures of the thousands of trees that were felled in the middle of the night. It is not starting off on a good foot to be treating communities like this. Community consultation should not be an afterthought. That’s what I’m trying to say.

I guess the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing doesn’t like that title. I embrace it. I’m happy for it—

The point is this: You can’t move this province in the wrong direction. I got persuaded to run for office in 2017. I had people I loved and trust corner me. I had been able to get out of these conversations for much of my life, but in this moment in 2017 they cornered me—students I worked with at Carleton University, people I know in the great city of Ottawa—and they said, “Joel, we need you to run as a candidate because we know we can hold you accountable and we know your number one goal is to make sure we do right by the planet. We know that’s your number one goal.”

And it is my number one goal. There is no other reason I go into this place, do the prep work, engage with colleagues opposite, take blows opposite and offer some of my own; there is no other reason I come into this place but for the spiritual experience of knowing that at this moment in time I had a seat in the House that could take action on the climate crisis. There’s no other reason.

Interjection.

The government is embracing the electrification of transport—great. You’re negotiating with industry partners on helping those industry partners be greener—great. But for the love of God, in the question and response we have for 10 minutes, let’s talk about not moving our province in a dirtier-energy direction. Let’s talk about not moving our province into more congestion, more smog, further sprawl of homes, not giving our agriculture sector the opportunity to take advantage of arable land to grow the amazing food that nourishes and sustains us. Let’s not trade that off. Let’s embrace Ontario’s strength.

This is a province with so much richness and so much wealth and so many opportunities, and it comes from its people and its natural environment. We can be a world leader. We don’t have to watch while states in the United States, countries in Europe and Asia—China—leap past us on growing renewable energy in a systemic way; leap past us on expanding public transit in a way that happens quickly and affordably through a public provision system; leap past us on educating and harnessing the talent of young people and giving them not just a seat at the table but grabbing the steering wheel. I can’t wait to retire, to be honest, sometimes. When I get into environmental conversations with young people, they are so much further advanced than I ever was at their age.

So what can we do to move away the red tape from those change-makers and make this bill better?

I also want to welcome members from ACORN Canada, who have come here to talk about affordable housing and living with dignity in Ontario—particularly Ashley Reyns, who deserves to be in this House. This is their House, too.

What a treat to hear my friend from up the Ottawa River this morning. It’s nice to be accused of being a half-baked pretzel.

What I’d inspire the member to think about is—we can all hold forth in this place as much as we want about housing, but you’re missing an adjective that I’d like the member to reflect upon. We need affordable housing. And how will we have affordable housing? That’s the question. I almost want to have the member’s mother-in-law come in here and say, “Not so fast. You’re proposing a piece of legislation you haven’t talked to the people in Ottawa about.” Member, not so fast. How are you going to build affordable housing, member? That’s the question.

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.