I’m pleased to be here today to speak to this bill, Bill 69, the Reducing Inefficiencies Act. I love the titles that you folks come up with. It’s always interesting to read what efficiencies and inefficiencies can mean when this government really gets to work.

This bill is pretty short. It has two main pieces to it. One is to essentially give power to the Ministry of Infrastructure to manage government properties, both leases and land that is owned by 14 provincial agencies. Those agencies include Agricorp, EQAO, the Ontario Arts Council, Ontario Creates, Ontario Trillium Foundation, OFA, Fire Marshal’s Public Fire Safety Council, Destination Ontario, FSRA, OSC, Human Rights Legal Support Centre, Intellectual Property Ontario, Skilled Trades Ontario and the Higher Education Quality Council.

We’ve reached out to them this morning just to ask for feedback on this bill, because it’s very important when we bring in bills to this Legislature that we take the time to do outreach to the agencies, to the individuals, to the organizations that are going to be impacted by this bill to find out what they think: What do they like? What don’t they like? What kind of amendments do they want to see?

It remains to be seen whether the government did that kind of consultation. I guess I’ll wait and see and find out.

The second piece of the bill is to accelerate approvals of infrastructure projects by allowing the 30-day period for class EAs—by basically allowing the government to waive the 30-day period that exists after public comments have come in. The whole purpose of having a public consultation period—time where people can give their feedback in writing—is for the government to consider what Ontarians think about a bill and how it’s going to impact them. This government is making the decision to stop even the pretense of caring what people think, and just doing away with it altogether, which is a concern.

I’m going to focus on the first section of the bill, which is about the real estate piece, with the time that I have. I’ve listed the agencies that are impacted and, in short, these agencies will be prohibited from owning and managing real estate. It requires all real estate to be handed over to the Ministry of Infrastructure.

The first part of this, and I’ve heard the minister talk about this, is that it would allow the Ministry of Infrastructure to control office leases. You amalgamate agencies; you try and get a good deal with leases so office space is rented out at a good price. On the surface of it, I don’t have a lot of problems with that.

One thing that I noticed when the minister was talking is that this is being done because the Auditor General did an investigation into Infrastructure Ontario, which is going to be the likely agency managing this, and actually found out that it’s Infrastructure Ontario itself that is doing a bad job at managing office leases. That’s interesting that you’re potentially going to be handing over these office leases and all this real estate to an agency that doesn’t have a very good track record of managing these agencies, these leases and these real estate portfolios. So I’m kind of intrigued by that.

The other thing that I was really intrigued by when I went and printed out the public comments section for the regulation for this section was the part that this decision to consolidate real estate is the first step in a broader plan this government has to centralize real estate under what is essentially a single entity. And when I hear about that, I begin to think about what does this government want to do with the public land that Ontario owns and what could we be doing instead with the public land that Ontario owns? That’s where my mind went.

The reason why my mind went there is that Ontario owns a whole lot of public land. And they happen to own public land—not just crown land, but also land in dense urban regions that have extraordinarily high rents and extraordinarily high housing prices. So there’s this real opportunity here to use the land that Ontario has to address one of the biggest crises we’re facing in Ontario today—it’s a generational crisis—and that is housing affordability.

The Centre for Urban Research and Land Development—it’s a department within TMU, Toronto Metropolitan University—did a scan to look at how much land Ontario and the federal government and the city own that we could build affordable housing on. They found there’s 6,000 government-owned properties in Toronto alone that we could be using to build affordable housing on—very exciting. Maybe, maybe the government is looking at moving ahead and building affordable housing on public land. Maybe this is part of that broader strategy.

Then I thought to myself, “Okay, well, let’s take a little bit of a deep dive and look at what the Ontario government, what this government, has done already when it comes to building on government land.” I think about the foundry property in the member of Toronto Centre’s riding where this government made a secret deal with Dominion—a very secret deal; we don’t even know the details of it today—where Dominion was given the authority to build a whole lot of housing, and very little of it, I would say almost none of it, was affordable—

Interjections.

Then I think about Mimico GO Station, which is in the riding of Etobicoke–Lakeshore. There’s a big development that went ahead there, and, once again, the deal was secret. It was public land and there was no affordable housing requirement with that land as well.

I think about Ontario Place, also public land, and then I see this government moving ahead with making secret deals with for-profit corporations when this is public land that could be used to deal with and address the crises that we have of our time. Because when I speak to Ontarians, they do not say to me, “We need another spa. What’s going to make my life so much better is a spa.” No, no, no. They’re talking about affordable rent. They’re talking about being able to pay the bills.

So that is this government’s track record so far over the last four and a half years when it comes to using government land. They’ve been using it to make secret deals for large condos, lots of housing, and there’s next to no affordable housing requirement. I’ve got a lot concerns about that. The reason why I have a lot of concerns about that is because we should be using this land in ways that will truly tackle the affordable housing crisis.

I think about the value of moving forward with inclusionary zoning so any new development that’s built next to a transit station has an affordable housing requirement. The Ontario government gutted that. I have so many big buildings going up in my riding. We do need new housing, but there’s no affordable housing requirement in these buildings. It’s very concerning.

I think about what’s happening in the city of Toronto right now with Housing Now. It’s a very innovative program. They’re looking at using 21 government-owned sites to build 13,000 homes, and 5,400 of them are affordable. That’s a great example of how we can be using public land to tackle the housing supply crisis that we have and the housing affordability crisis that we have in a way that keeps our resources under public control. I’m not seeing it with this government and I’m very concerned about that.

The second bit which I’m just going to conclude on is the government’s decision to waive the 30-day waiting period after public consultation has been done on a class EA. This just falls totally within the playbook of how this government treats the natural environment, treats people who don’t agree with their values and them, and really has contempt for democratic processes. It falls in line with all that we saw in Bill 23 with the gutting of conservation authorities to share their expertise; with the decision to eliminate planning by upper-tier municipalities; by the decision, with Bill 39, to bring in strong-mayor powers and do away with representative democracy on some of the most important legislation that Toronto passes, including the city budget. I have a lot of concerns about that and I have a lot concerns about this bill.