There’s too much heckling in here.

Thank you very much.

Home ownership is so important. It is really something that—I live in the first home that my father built—well, with my wife too. That was built in 1960. I was three years old when we moved into that house. It was a different time then. My father never borrowed money. He put it away and saved and saved. There were 10 children at that time and two parents living in, I’m going to say, maybe 800 square feet on the top of our old store, on the second storey: 10 children and two parents living in there, getting by, because he wasn’t going to be borrowing money. You know that’s really not feasible anymore today.

We bought our first home in 1983. It was a bungalow, nothing too fancy, a nice lot. In the city, the lot would probably be worth a couple of million dollars. We bought that home for $47,500 in 1983. The last four vehicles I’ve bought, none of them could have been close to being bought for $47,500. In fact, one time when I bought a little better truck, and my wife mentioned, “For the price of that truck, you might be living in it.” But it was a lot more than $47,500, but, of course, I had to finance the truck.

This is the world we’re living in today. How are we going to—I read something in the newspaper the other day, that we need—how many homes was it that we needed to build? We needed a stock of 22 million homes in Canada before we would see an appreciable reduction in the cost of homes. And I know, and I heard from one of the members over there one time when they were speaking—again, I was already in my chair, so I didn’t have far to fall. They said that the theory of supply and demand is a myth. Speaker, it is the most basic rule of economics, absolutely the most basic rule of economics. That is why those experts—and I know my friends on the other side often like to quote experts, but they quote the experts they like. An old saying—and I’m going to be guilty of it myself—but there’s an old saying: Do you know what an expert is? That’s anybody with a briefcase more than 25 miles from home. So those are who they quote as experts sometimes, because it suits their narrative, right? Somebody rolls into town with a briefcase: “He must be an expert.”

A quantity of experts are saying clearly that if we don’t increase the supply of homes, we cannot bring down the price of homes, and it really is basic common sense, Speaker. So, what does our government do? As I said, 16 bills, each and every one of them since we got elected in 2018 is designed to do just that: to increase the supply of homes. Because without increasing the supply, if there are 20 people looking for a house and there’s one house—I mean, you’ve seen it; everybody has seen it here. It’s crazy in a place like Toronto, but it’s even happened up where I come from, in little old Barry’s Bay, as the House leader mentioned yesterday. Even in little old Barry’s Bay, if there are more people who want a home than there are homes available, the price of the homes go up. It’s basic math, basic economics.

And you’ve seen these—what do you call them? Bidding wars—bidding wars on houses in Toronto and elsewhere, where the price just goes crazy. So, how does that help? It doesn’t. But why does it happen? Because there aren’t enough homes for sale. There are more people wanting the homes, and we’re living in a situation, Speaker—and I know that even at the federal level, they’re beginning to talk about how they might address it. When you have hundreds of thousands of people coming to Canada and the majority of them coming to Ontario and the majority of those coming to the greater Toronto-Hamilton area, that puts more pressure on the reality that if we don’t have enough homes to serve the current population, how are we going to serve the increased population?

So I am very excited about what the minister has done here in Bill 134. I know we’re addressing the changing of the St. Thomas boundaries legislation. I think that was Bill 63, if I’m not mistaken. That was a bill that the opposition actually supported. And as I say—and I know you can’t question the motives of anybody here, but I think we all know where some of that pressure came when the time came to support that bill.

But let’s get back to Bill 134, which I’ve been, of course, speaking on all along. So, Speaker, this bill, which is going to define and put more clarity on what affordable housing is, or what qualifies or can be defined as affordable housing, is going to be tremendously helpful in areas like mine. I’m not sure how many of you people have ever been to my riding—probably not very many—but we have some significant pockets of good jobs. Canadian Nuclear Laboratories exists in my riding. That’s a very high-tech nuclear facility. There are a number of people who have very, very good incomes, but we also have a portion of the population that simply does not. This new definition that the minister has brought forward is going to be hugely helpful in allowing those municipalities to be able to approve building permits and developments that will not be subject to development charges.

I can tell you, development charges, when you’re a young person—we weren’t as young as a lot of people, but when we bought our first home, there was no such thing as development charges in the communities then.

I did say to one person who was talking about development charges—