Thank you for the opportunity to answer this question. The NDP housing platform is on the website. There’s a lot in there. I can’t get into it all in less than 30 seconds, but what I can offer you is this: The province of Ontario used to be in the housing business. You used to fund and support the construction of co-ops. The Mike Harris government actually downloaded the provincial housing portfolio onto the city of Toronto, and now we operate it as something known as Toronto Community Housing. But you left us with a massive capital deficit and reduced operating costs. You’ve shirked off your responsibility.

What I’m saying and what the business community in Toronto is saying is let’s get back to business and build affordable housing for those who deeply need it. Governments have a responsibility, and you have the power to end chronic homelessness. This is something that can be done—and it can be done. Finland has done it, so we can follow their lead.

We have proposed the creation of an Ontario housing corporation that will build and finance about 250,000 units of housing right here in Ontario over the next 10 years. It’s going to be subsidized and it’s affordable. We’re going to need some support, but that support starts by this government putting their money where their mouth is, so therefore we can then go to the federal government and they can take us seriously by saying, “We’re in it for this much money to meet these targets. How can you support us?”

Thank you very much to the member across for the question. The challenge that we have is that there are some municipalities that have already strong and stronger rental replacement bylaws, and what the government is proposing in this bill actually is less than what some municipalities have. The city of Toronto has had a rental replacement bylaw empowered by the previous governments so that we can develop our own, so we can meet the needs of Torontonians. This bill actually is going to undo that or looks like it’s going to muddy those waters.

As you try to lift the boats around other municipalities in Ontario, you’re actually sinking the tenant protections in Toronto. That’s certainly something that needs to be clarified and fixed at committee, and I really urge you to do that because it’s going to make a huge difference in the communities that I serve and, I suspect, in the communities that you serve as well.

Businesses and BIAs and the most prominent downtown business owners are all calling on the government—this government, in particular—to lead. They know that municipalities can’t do it themselves, which is why the biggest cities in Ontario have called on this government to convene a meeting with the Premier to specifically address homelessness, mental health and addictions. And as far as I know, that meeting with the Premier has never taken place.

It’s a pleasure and honour to rise in the House to speak on behalf of the good people of Toronto Centre.

Here today, we’re debating government Bill 97, Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act. Like already pointed out by some of my colleagues, the title of the bill doesn’t always line up with the true intention of the content of the bill, which I think is rather misleading. But we are accustomed to that here, especially as every bill has a nice, benevolent-sounding title, but what the bill does is oftentimes something very different, perhaps less benevolent.

This bill does not do anything to prevent the demolition or the destruction of rent-controlled, serviceable buildings that are currently in the city of Toronto or anywhere else in your communities or right across Ontario.

It actually creates a lot of confusion regarding the rental replacement program, especially for some cities that may have a stronger bylaw than what the province is proposing. So it looks like we’re actually going to be perhaps weakening what is municipally provided rental replacement, and of course, that’s the wrong way. We want to lift all boats, not sink them.

Neighbourhoods like St. James Town in my community—it’s one of the most dense in the country, and now, there is encouraging legislation on the table which is before us, which is what we’re debating today, that will actually incentivize the owners, the corporation, to go tear down these older buildings that are protected under rent control.

This bill doesn’t do anything to encourage and actually foster the completion or the design of family-sized units, which is what people really, actually want, especially if we’re going to intensify to protect the ecologically sensitive greenbelt.

This bill doesn’t do anything to address the public sector’s role in the provision of affordable housing. Instead, the government is overly relying on private sector developers, which we know is always going to fail to meet the mark with respect to social housing needs. That is just how the market works: They’re not going to build you non-profit subsidized units. That’s what governments are there to do.

I know, in my communities, that some of the largest, most prominent BIAs as well as the biggest pension funds, which own some of the most significant real estate in downtown Toronto, are asking, every single time, when this government is going to get serious about building public housing. Because they’re seeing the chronic homelessness on the street, and they need to have that addressed, and they are not going to build it for you. You will have to do it yourself.

There are so many other challenges with this bill. I think that it’s been spoken to before, Speaker, but I want to be able to hit the point around sprawl. Bill 97 does a lot of things, including promote very expensive sprawl, which will ultimately hurt the pocketbooks of every single Ontarian. It will cost more in housing to build very large mega-mansions that are over $1 million, $2 million, $3 million on the greenbelt. It’s going to be an environmental fiasco as it pertains to how much you have to clean up afterwards if you’re building this sprawl. Infrastructure costs will go up under this bill. Energy consumption will go up under this bill. Road congestion will go up under this bill. Transportation costs, including social fragmentation—all of that is actually being manufactured by Bill 97.

In my community, in Toronto Centre, we have over 80% of our population actually living in high-rise communities. Some of them are in purpose-built rentals that have been there since the 1960s. They’re in really great shape; what they need are investments, and the government’s bill right now actually de-incentivizes that. Instead, what it does is it actually encourages them to go apply for demolition permits.

I’m facing, and your community will be facing, exactly the same threat. Buildings that have over 250 resident families will be losing their home, as they are at 25 St. Mary’s, because a developer wants to tear it down so they can build, perhaps, two luxury apartment buildings as opposed to servicing the building that’s there. Those are rent-controlled apartments, and they will not be affordable when the new project is complete.

I’m extremely nervous, and I think you should be as well, about what you’re actually going to be doing to communities that right now are struggling to meet the affordability and housing crisis in Toronto, because certainly your bill is not going to help that. We need downtowns and we need all communities right across Ontario to be as diverse as possible. I want to live in communities where we have newcomers, long-time Canadians, students, seniors, people on disability, people of all incomes. That’s what makes a vibrant, dynamic community, and that’s what we need to design and build. But we’re not doing that with this type of legislation, which actually incentivizes only one type of construction, and most of us are not going to be able to afford that.

Diversity is what makes our communities vibrant. It’s actually what makes communities successful. But in this government’s future, you’re not going to be building any of that. We’re going to be seeing more people being squeezed out. Whether they be bus drivers, taxi drivers, receptionists, daycare workers, no one is going to be able to live in this Premier’s Ontario, to be quite honest, Speaker, and it’s going to make things significantly worse.

I’ve talked about St. James Town, a community that is one of the densest in Canada—it’s definitely the densest in Toronto and Ontario. This community is already overcrowded. We have some of the most overcrowded schools, overcrowded and overloaded community centres and libraries, and we need to be able to invest in the social infrastructure so that the neighbourhoods are vibrant, exciting and dynamic, and not actually worse.

That’s what your bill is going to be doing: It’s going to make things much more expensive. Rather than tearing down what is decent, acceptable, already rent-controlled housing stock—you’re actually tearing it down. This neighbourhood has been called by all occasions a world within a block, because it is so diverse.

Residents of my community know that disruption is coming. They see the threat on the horizon. They are following and tracking the government’s housing bills very closely, and they keep asking the question: What’s in it for them, and how is it going to work? They know that they’re asking a lot of questions that they’re not getting answers to, including: Where are they going to go when they’re being displaced? How are they going to afford to stay in the city—and your residents will be asking the same thing, to stay in their communities—and how long do they have to wait before they get to return, if they even come back to a community that they recognize?

All of this is happening under this government’s watch, and it’s not that we don’t know what to do; it’s just that the government is not willing to do it.

I’ve spoken to people who are living in apartments in downtown Toronto right now who are facing that imminent threat. Imagine if it was your child. Imagine if it was your kid who goes to you and says, “Mom and dad, my apartment has just been rezoned. I’m about to lose my rent-controlled apartment. Is there anything you can do as a government member to help?” Imagine what they would learn if you were to tell them this is actually going to be building more affordable housing and they know in their gut that it is not. That’s exactly what this bill does.

Every day, constituents visit my office. They share so many stories of how they’re overcrowded. They talk about the inaccessibility of some of their units. All that means is you invest in the properties that you have. You don’t need to tear it down. You don’t need to scale it and raze it.

The government likes to talk about building 1.5 million homes. The question is, who is going to afford these homes, and how are they going to be living in these vibrant and dynamic neighbourhoods when there’s nothing but homes? Sprawling subdivisions are expensive, and they will continue to be expensive. There’s nothing cheap about them. Even if it means an easy, quick profit for the developer, they are much more difficult and much more expensive to service for municipalities.

We should all agree that housing is a human right, and there are so many people right now, especially in our communities, in your downtowns and my downtowns, that are struggling with that. Government supportive housing is something that my local business community, including the financial district—the commercial business district of Canada is asking for government supports on that. The business community has actually identified this as being their number one priority. Believe it or not, it’s actually that, that they’re asking for more supportive housing than I have heard from activists as well as housing providers.

The business community in Toronto is leading the charge, demanding that the government get back involved with public housing service delivery and making sure that mental health and wraparound addictions supports are there. That’s what their ask is. And certainly, for a government that talks about being business friendly, their request is falling on deaf ears.

You may recall that I had a resident come to the House about five or six weeks ago. Her name is Sarah. She’s been homeless since she brought her newborn infant out of the hospital. She couldn’t return back to the apartment she was living in for reasons that are not her fault. She is plugged into every single housing provider in the city of Toronto, who are all doing the very best they can to help her. Sarah and her newborn daughter are still homeless—still homeless, Speaker.

I wish I could give her a response, I wish I could give her the keys to an apartment, but there is no solution for her. And certainly today, in Bill 97, there’s still no solution. Despite the fact that the government likes to brag that they’re delivering housing, for people like Sarah and so many others I’m aware of, there is no provision of clean, affordable, decent, safe housing for them, and certainly not coming out of Bill 97.

Thank you to the member from Parkdale–High Park for her excellent presentation. The city of Toronto has a very robust and, I would say, probably the best rental replacement bylaw in the province, if not the country. It actually goes much further than what the government is proposing in this bill. What do you think is the ramification of weakening rental replacement across the province rather than raising the bar so that everybody meets the city standard in the city of Toronto and exceeds it—but rather, we race to the bottom, as the government is proposing?