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.