To the Minister of Citizenship and Multiculturalism: There’s a rent strike in his riding, with thousands of tenants coming together to form a tenants’ union. They are fighting expensive, above-guideline rent increases by their corporate landlords. His tenants are feeling unprotected, and they are desperate and angry because the rents have become so unaffordable over the past six years in Ontario. They know that this Conservative government voted against real rent control and took away their final tenant protections.

To the minister, on behalf of your struggling tenants and those across Ontario: Will you bring back real rent control for all homes, including those built after 2018?

People are struggling. They are frustrated with surging rents, broken elevators, mouldy walls, leaky faucets, and many other maintenance issues that are plaguing their buildings, that are not being fixed by greedy corporate landlords. This is leading to hundreds of demoviction applications in the city of Toronto alone. This is going to displace tens of thousands of people from their rent-controlled homes—the cheapest, most affordable apartments in Ontario.

To the minister: What will you do to stop the housing affordability crisis in Ontario? And will you protect everyday Ontarians from greedy corporate landlords?

My constituent Angela recently received a 20% rent hike, totalling over $400 a month, which is something that she and her fiancé did not budget for and simply cannot afford.

Yesterday, this government voted down a motion from the NDP to bring real rent control to all buildings.

What is the Premier going to do to protect Angela and her neighbours from this unaffordable, yet legal, rent hike?

A one-bedroom apartment in the city of Toronto now costs over $3,000 a month, a historic high, under this government.

If not real rent control, what exactly is the Premier going to do to stop rent gouging in Ontario?

It’s always an honour to rise to speak on behalf of the good people of Toronto Centre.

I want to invite all the members of this House to go for a 20-minute walk with me. If you go for a 20-minute walk, you’re actually going to land right in the middle of St. James Town. It’s one of the most densely populated neighbourhoods in all of Canada. Its density is 18 times that of any neighbourhood in Toronto. There are over 14,000 people who call St. James Town home, and the average household income is just $20,000. What we don’t have over there is a lot of money, but we have a lot of heart. Over 64% of people who live in St. James Town are newcomers. Neighbours know each other, kids play across the hallway with other children, and seniors will often take care of each other to break social isolation. This is a true neighbourhood.

It’s also an amazing place to live because of—make no mistake about it—rent control. Most of those buildings in St. James Town—the majority of them, until recently—have been under rent control.

The Conservative ideological opposition to real rent control and their slavish devotion to serving big landlords has actually created a condition now in St. James Town that is leading to much further harm. We’re seeing older buildings that are rent-controlled being demolished and replaced with new buildings without rent control, and what we’re now seeing is a lot of residents who are calling my office because they’re scared.

Most recently, a constituent whose name is Angela called my office to tell me that her rent under this government is going up 20%—20%. She’s getting a rent hike of $400. She and her fiancée are now struggling with the decision of whether or not they stay or they go. This is an untenable situation that is about to hit all the residents in that same building, and they are literally scared. They have no place to go without help from this government, which includes the implementation and the support of this motion of real rent control.

Paving over the greenbelt is not going to increase affordability of housing in Ontario, and neither is the government’s housing plan. They have failed to be able to address the housing crisis in Ontario. Things are getting more expensive and much worse for all Ontarians. Speaker, $3,000 for a one-bedroom apartment is untenable. I’ve lived in Toronto for all of my life in Canada. It is the worst that it has ever been, and this government is in charge of all of that.

This is a party, on this side of the House, where we are putting forward some real solutions; we’ve asked the government to come forward with their own. Their policies have failed; we have others. You can say yes to ending exclusionary zoning. You can say yes to investing in affordable housing, such as public, co-op and supportive housing. You can say yes to clamping down on greedy speculators. And yes, you can say yes to rent control—rent control that is desperately needed right now, right here for your tenants, for your constituents, and for mine.

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?

I would like to present this petition.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas there is an affordable” housing “rental crisis in Ontario;

“Whereas massive loopholes in the current rent control laws have led to unaffordable rental prices;

“We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to:

“(1) Stop massive rent increases by re-implementing rent control for all units in Ontario, regardless of when they were built;

“(2) End the system that gives landlords incentive to drive people out of their units and homes so they can rent at new, much higher rents by implementing vacancy control;

“(3) Provide real financial consequences for landlords who fail to maintain their buildings, and ban the use of mandatory above-guideline rent increases to pay for standard maintenance and repairs.”

I will affix my signature and hand this petition to our page Wyatt.

It’s an honour to rise on behalf of the residents of Toronto Centre today and to speak to the government’s budget bill, Bill 2.

With skyrocketing inflation, tenants need support from their government more than ever before: tangible supports to keep people housed, to keep them in their homes and out of encampments. But instead of helping, this government is actually hurting Ontarians, especially renters, by allowing rents to rise by a historic 2.5% this year. But despite these increases in recent years, the number of applications to the Landlord and Tenant Board to evict tenants for renovations or repairs has actually surged.

This government has recognized this problem and made some moves to track when landlords apply for renovictions for their tenants. That’s good. However, the Toronto housing secretariat recently noted that a significant number of illegitimate evictions are still happening without documentation. The Toronto housing secretariat has called for a centralized data system on rental units, not to mention vacancy rent control. There is no funding of any sort for this kind of program in this government’s budget.

With skyrocketing inflation, vacancy rent control is the least expensive way that this government can curb the cost of living and help the most precariously housed in Ontario. But with such a growing backlog of cases at the Landlord and Tenant Board, I don’t see the measures in this budget to help those who are really needing the support. We need to be able to provide tenants the support that they need to get, and those laws are actually on the books, but they’re not being enforced.

So let’s speak about the laws on the books. I want to comment that there are no new measures in this budget to correct the problems facing Ontario’s tribunals. Ontario’s tribunal backlog needs investment, so that they can function at the level that Ontarians rightfully expect from their courts and government. The wait time for cases before the Landlord and Tenant Board, the Human Rights Tribunal, the Social Benefits Tribunal and Family Court are creating avoidable costs for my constituents, your constituents and businesses. I’ve heard about law firms now being worried about taking on additional family law cases, because the costs are so high and case completion times are so protracted that families now let go of their lawyers early, because they can’t afford to pay them. So we are finding that Ontarians are not getting access to justice.

Speaker, I do not see investments in legal aid in this budget, something that I understand, based on studies in other jurisdictions, has shown to be a net-neutral effect on government budgets, because investments in legal aid reduce the costs and prevent homelessness-associated costs and mental health costs. It allows for a more speedy resolution of complex cases, rather than having it fall into our judicial system.

Since 2018, this government has now subjected our legal aid system to years of cuts after years of cuts after years of cuts. This is having consequences that I’m being told mean that people in Toronto Centre and other communities are now finding that people are no longer able to get access to trials in a timely fashion, which means that cases that have underlying mental health or economic issues at their core will not be resolved, because the legal aid system is so poorly funded. From the limited information available to me as an opposition MPP, it seems that spending on justice is not even keeping up with the rate of inflation.

In 2022, in April, tenant representatives reported that tenant applications are being scheduled within nine to 10 months after they are filed. By comparison, only two years earlier, those applications took nine weeks to schedule—nine weeks, and now we’re at nine to 10 months. Those same reports note that eviction for non-payment of rent took seven weeks to schedule in the year 2020, but a year later, they’re now taking 18 weeks. This is the backlog this government has created when we don’t actually invest in the programs and we’re denying Ontarians access to justice. Literally everyone is stuck in the system—landlords, tenants, business owners, everybody—and they’ve got no place to go.

Again, while I do not have access to the detailed budgetary information which I need, but I don’t have, I also know that with respect to the Landlord and Tenant Board, CTV found out that the Tribunals Ontario business plan shows a shrinking operating budget, from $81 million in 2020 to about $63 million today. That is a defunding of $18 million over two years, which is the wrong direction to be headed in.

Delays in access-to-justice issues at Tribunals Ontario are connected to the following—and I’m going to try to summarize: the government depleting the overall skills and experience of the adjudicators at Tribunals Ontario by appointing in some cases, not all, poorly qualified adjudicators and by insisting on the removal of physical access points for service and in its place primarily digital service, which has left many Ontarians unable to assert their rights because of technological, language, disability and other barriers. That is a problem that has to be addressed. The Zoom hearing format is not suitable for the busiest and most litigious tribunal in the province, which is the Landlord and Tenant Board, which now further extends the time needed to adjudicate disputes. Legal aid clinics which used to routinely resolve their matters now are not able to do so, again because of the digital divide, because low-income Ontarians can’t get access to the Internet or stable Internet.

The duty of care is failing our residents. This is a problem that this government can fix by addressing it in the budget, but they’re choosing not to.

Legal Aid Ontario’s budget must be at least restored to its pre-pandemic level. That is the baseline where we need it to go. Otherwise, we’ll see more Ontarians fall through the cracks and fall on hard times that we’re not going to be able to resolve.

I’m just going to take some time to speak about what I’m seeing in the Statistics Canada recently reported data. This is important, because I think all of us care about safe communities. But what I want to flag for everyone here is that the budget is entirely silent on new funding when it comes to gender-based violence. And yet, at the same time, Statistics Canada is telling us that the rates of violence and incidents of violence have now gone up over 18% from 2020.

While sexual assault is underreported to the Toronto police, we need to see that survivors need support. A survey by the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres found that during the pandemic, what they saw was 81% of Ontario sexual assault centres saw a rise in crisis calls for their programs. Yet their funding has not moved for years—not under the Liberal government, not under the Conservative government. This budget, again, remains dead silent on new funding for gender-based violence. Not addressing sexual assault is costly. When the government does not invest in appropriate services, it costs taxpayers much more later on. Studies have shown this repeatedly.

This is the time to fix this budget. We are willing to work with you to fix this budget. There’s no reason to delay, especially when the needs of Ontarians are there for us to meet and yet we are failing to meet their needs.

So I implore you. You have said that you want to work across the aisle. I’m putting forward some solutions that, I believe, can be worked on. These are non-partisan solutions, but they’re solutions that get us to where we need to go.