To the member across, thank you very much for your presentation. The OEB ruling could, in fact, make building new homes more affordable because it means you would have to build only one type of energy infrastructure—the electricity—and not require a very expensive and obsolete second one. And it will be obsolete at some point as we move towards a climate-neutral economy.

Reversing the OEB ruling could result in building methane gas infrastructure that will take about 40 years to pay for—infrastructure that will be delivering fossil fuels into the year 2064, Speaker, 14 years beyond the time when the world has agreed to achieve net-zero fossil fuel consumption; infrastructure that will be made obsolete by the ongoing energy transition.

To the member across: What in this bill will actually meet the needs of the citizens of Ontario tomorrow, because this bill is being passed and pushed forward today, but we need to plan for the climate emergency?

Thank you very much to the member for the question. I am a firm supporter of transit integration, especially as we have people who are coming from further and further outside of the core of the city to come in to work. We rely on those individuals, those commuters, to come and actually fill up our office towers. We rely on them to actually help build this economy. To me, it’s all about one Ontario, to be quite honest. One southern Ontario is how we’re competing region to region.

Fare integration is absolutely critical in order for us to have a successful, well-connected transit system that’s reliable. But we also need to make sure that we work with our labour partners. We need to work with the men and women who actually provide the transit service itself—that they’re at the table. I hope to see that in the coming days, even if there’s an amendment to this bill or if there’s an announcement saying that you’re going to start talking to ATU 113.

Any time we can support transit integration and do it well, I’m definitely with you.

So, yes, when new plans and new strategies are coming up without actual consultation and deep engagement with municipalities or the transit workers, there is going to be cause for concern, because that has been the history that we’ve had with the Premier.

But the bill is not just one schedule, is it? The bill has two schedules, and I think the second schedule is worth digging into and exploring, because that is the section of the bill that I will challenge you and any member of this House to give me an economic study that will tell me and everybody else in Ontario that you can have the private sector pay for transit exclusively without you putting in any money. It’s just not going to happen.

What we see in this bill is some troubling outcomes, and the troubling outcome is that it doesn’t actually talk about supporting the construction and the funding of transit through this House. This order of government, which has the most responsibility when it comes to regional transit; this government, which actually has the most—

Withdraw. Thank you, Speaker.

Allow me to reframe this debate for you since we’re talking about the strong mayor. I want to share with you a recent experience that the cities have. You can call it any city.

What happens when your strong mayor refuses to take basic steps to march in the Pride parade to support the 2SLGBTQ community? What happens when your strong mayor has a history of police having to investigate domestic violence, including pressing charges? What happens when your strong mayor was documented handing out $20 bills in social housing to win favour? What happens when your mayor is the kind of person who says, “If you are not doing needles and you are not gay, you won’t get AIDS probably”? What happens when your strong mayor always votes against funding HIV/AIDS programs? What happens when your strong mayor rips out bike lanes and blames cyclists for cars hitting them? What happens when your strong mayor promotes digging a private toll tunnel under the Toronto Gardiner Expressway to avoid hitting cyclists?

What happens when your strong mayor charges into his own deputy mayor during a city council meeting, causing her to live with chronic pain until the day she died? What happens when your strong mayor tries to buy and privatize the abutting public parkland next to his house to enlarge his backyard? What happens when your strong mayor tries to take over the waterfront by dropping a mega mall and Ferris wheel without support from the local residents or city council? What happens when your mayor says a home for the developmentally disabled youth in Etobicoke had ruined the community? What happens when your mayor calls women reporters “bitches”?

This Premier wants to impose a strong-mayor system in Toronto to support his provincial priorities—

This Premier wants to impose a strong-mayor system in Toronto to support his provincial priorities, yet we have no idea what the provincial priorities are. The mandate letters aren’t even made public, and you expect us to just accept this carte blanche. But given our recent experience in Toronto, I would say no thanks.

Speaker, mayors are human, and everyone makes mistakes. I know that we can expand ourselves and go beyond that. But some are corrupt and some are incompetent.

City councils as a whole are far more accountable because we can allow the checks and balances to take place. There will be far more accountability with a strong local government when we deliver good and open government for the residents of Toronto and for Ottawa. A strong-mayor system opens the door for corruption and costly mistakes. These are not my words or my assumption; this was already said by the integrity commissioner. That is a price that I don’t think Torontonians are ready to make. It’s certainly a price that’s too expensive; we can’t afford it.

Recently, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing mocked me for promoting a red-light development system to stop development. What he conveniently omitted was that it was a red-light system to hinder bad development and a green-light system to advance good development. He forgot to say that.

He conveniently forgot to tell the whole story, which was widely reported in the Toronto media at that time. But the Toronto city planners will remember this story because in 2019, after this government first took office, the minister unilaterally tore up the city of Toronto’s downtown secondary plan. We had been working on this document for a number of years and it was going to guide our urban growth for the next 25 years.

The planning document was clearly studied and consultations took place with residents and home builders alike. This government’s 224 changes, surgical changes to Toronto’s downtown secondary plan, included eliminating and reducing infrastructure such as daycares and other community facilities as a condition of development. With a stroke of their pen, they enriched developer donors without binding them to building sustainable, responsible buildings in complete neighbourhoods—what every urbanist is asking for.

As a response to this ripping up of our secondary plan, downtown councillors, with the support of our city planners, created a “red light, green light” system to evaluate which development proposals got prioritized, which ones were going to be advanced. We were determined to make sure that even if you tore up, even if this House tore up our secondary plan, we were going to do everything we could to hang on to it because we worked so darn hard at it.

In Ontario, land use planning has always been an important part of the work expected from the local representative. In 2012, I worked with city council to free Toronto from the Ontario Municipal Board in getting the Liberal government to reform and modernize the quasi-judicial, unelected, unaccountable board.

The very next year, after this government was elected, they tossed all those consultations and all that work out the window, into the garbage bin, and then they brought back the OMB, bigger, stronger and uglier than ever before, with a brand new name: the Ontario Land Tribunal.

This government does not stand for good planning or even good development. They don’t even hide the fact that they reward their wealthy developers and land speculator donors. This government prints MZOs like it’s money for rich donors, paves over wetlands for developers, and illegally tears down heritage buildings, like the foundry buildings in the west Donlands, for mystery buyers. They stopped the construction of North York housing for the homeless. The government doesn’t care about housing, but only about those who are enriched and who can keep them in power.

If the Premier truly cared about housing—I want to make this case—he would:

—meet with the co-op housing federation’s requests for seed grant funding;

—empower cities to investigate rule-breaking Airbnbs so that we can actually get our bylaws back under order. We could put 6,500 family homes right into the market today with a stroke of your pen;

—investigate and crack down on money laundering in the housing sector and land speculation;

—introduce rent control and vacancy decontrol legislation to rein in spiraling rental costs;

—fund the construction of new affordable housing so that the most precariously housed among us will be stabilized;

—create incentives to build the right kind of housing, not small bachelors for speculators but the right kind of housing that’s large, family sized, with three, four, five bedrooms. This House would even invest in creating rent-to-own programs for communities like mine in Regent Park, and family-sized and rent-geared-to-income units; and

—mandate universal design and accessible housing standards so that people who use mobility devices will have access to every single unit without being asked to languish on a wait-list.

If this government truly supported housing, you would actually support Mayor Tory’s HousingTO, a $24-billion plan to build 40,000 homes over the next 10 years, which requires a financial commitment from three orders of government, approximately $7.1 billion each—that’s billion with a B.

If this government actually wants to build housing, then you need to spend the money that you’ve been hoarding and not the millions that you sprinkle around, that you re-announce and re-announce and re-announce. We’ve all heard those stories before and we’ve seen those press releases at the city of Toronto.

In fact, every three to six months, city council will reiterate its request to this government for the outstanding $7 billion of capital and operating funding that we need in order for the mayor to meet his housing targets.

If this government was serious about housing, then they would issue the city-initiated MZO that the city council has been asking for for two years at 175 Cummer Avenue in North York, but instead the MPP and the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing has put the brakes on that, asking for more consultation. So we now have 69 units of new, prefabricated housing that could be homes, sitting in a parking lot while people are sleeping in encampments, while we carry out bogus consultation.

Residents know that talk is cheap. This government talks a good deal about housing, but when it comes to building housing and paying the bill for housing, to get shovels in the ground, very little is taking place. Residents are expected to pay their rent on time; we expect the government to pay their bills on time.

For all those reasons—and I could go on, but I’m not going to because I’m getting a little worked up. And to be quite honest, so are the residents of Toronto and so are the members of city council and so is our planning department, because we have all worked so hard to build one of the most globally competitive and dynamic cities in Canada, if not around the world, where we’re world leaders on innovation, green tech and sustainable technology. We are a major employment cluster, a major producer of the GDP, yet we get treated like this. Torontonians deserve better. City council deserves better.

We are looking for a partnership in this government to build housing for Ontarians. This bill doesn’t do any of that, and that is why I cannot support it.