Earlier this year, the Ontario Ombudsman stated in a scathing report that the Landlord and Tenant Board was fundamentally failing in its mandate because of insurmountable challenges, especially for Ontarians trying to access quality, well-functioning, online hearings. In addition to the Ombudsman, we have also heard from anti-poverty organizations, tenant and shelter organizations—many who are here today for the national day of housing—advocating to bring back in-person hearings. After all, it has been three years since the COVID pandemic first appeared. The situation is so bad that not even counter service is available for any low-income or elderly tenants who don’t have computers.

When will this government listen to Ontarians and restore in-person hearings and services for Ontarians who actually need them?

Back in my neighbourhood, Neighbourhood Legal Services is a legal aid clinic which represented 584 matters as of last year. This included the prevention of evictions, protection of affordable housing and a very important, precedent-setting case that involved 200 families at 280 Wellesley Street who took their landlord to the board, seeking a rent reduction for the loss of facilities, compensation for multi-day power outages and water and heat outages, as well as frequent elevator breakdowns and utility blackouts. This was important, and without the legal aid support they would not have been able to get there. This is absolutely critical, Mr. Speaker. Legal aid clinics actually help low-income tenants in Ontario.

Speaker, there was no mention of new legal aid funding in the provincial fall economic statement. My question to the Premier is, will he stand up for low-income tenants by reinstating the 2019 cut of $133 million from legal aid?

The residents watching from the gallery today are from No Demovictions Toronto. They represent tens of thousands of tenants whose lives will be thrown into chaos when their homes are demolished to make way for new luxury condominiums. One tenant told my office how they’re considering applying for MAID, medical assistance in dying, because of the hopelessness that they feel about losing their home, which has been enabled by the Premier’s housing legislation.

Will the Premier give the tenants hope today and commit to a moratorium on demovictions in large rent-controlled buildings?

Terry lives in a 250-unit building in my riding which is slated for demolition. She’s 92 years old. She’s in the gallery today. She shared with me, “I want to die here. I live here alone. I am widowed. I am not even looking for another place.”

Terry’s story is not singular. Thousands of families are facing eviction from large but good rent-controlled buildings.

This question is from Terry to the Premier: Will he use his extraordinary powers today to help Terry and hundreds of her neighbours by stopping the demolition of their home?

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?

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.

In 2019, Nicole’s landlord filed for a personal-use eviction. She later learned that this was misrepresentation. Today, Nicole is still waiting for an LTB hearing after moving into a new apartment that costs her now twice as much. LTB’s own data shows that landlords are being fast-tracked for hearings over tenants.

Can the Premier explain why he is making tenants wait so long for access to justice?

Why is it agreeable to this Premier that tenants have to wait so long for access to justice?

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.

My constituent Andrew reached out to me saying, “I make decent money as an engineer but there is no way I will be able to afford a house in the next 10 years. It makes me want to leave. Many believe that zoning and supply are the issues, but demand is artificially generated by those who are rich enough to speculate and pay cash. Their greed will never run out.”

Speaker, every housing expert notes that supply alone didn’t create the housing crisis; speculators with insider connections did.

What is this government doing to stop the rampant speculation taking home ownership out of reach for young families and tenants?

Speaker, while encampments grow in every Ontario city, why is this government worsening inflation by allowing a historic rent increase?