SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Jessica Bell

  • MPP
  • Member of Provincial Parliament
  • University—Rosedale
  • New Democratic Party of Ontario
  • Ontario
  • Unit 103 719 Bloor St. W Toronto, ON M6G 1L5 JBell-CO@ndp.on.ca
  • tel: 416-535-7206
  • fax: t 103 719 Bl
  • JBell-QP@ndp.on.ca

  • Government Page
  • Nov/23/22 4:10:00 p.m.
  • Re: Bill 23 

Yes, okay—but what you’ve done is, you’ve made it so that the adjudicator can award costs. What that means is, the losing party is likely to pay costs to the winning party. What that means, for all intents and purposes, is that well-off groups can use the land tribunal but citizens’ groups cannot; they’ll think twice, and that’s very concerning. That passed, too, which is very unfortunate.

I have a request of this government. This is the government’s vision for how we should address the housing crisis. This is not going to address our housing affordability crisis. It’s going to harm democracy, public services, our farmland, municipal budgets and rental affordability. We do not need to sacrifice everything we hold dear to help developers and your wealthy developer donor friends.

There are other ways to address our housing affordability crisis. We can say yes to government investment in affordable homes. We certainly say yes to building 1.5 million homes over the next 10 years. We say yes to zoning reform so that we can build more townhomes, duplexes and triplexes in existing neighbourhoods. We say yes to increasing density near transit so we can build those walkable, transit-oriented neighbourhoods, those neighbourhoods people want to live in. We can build them too. We also say yes to building on public land so we can build affordable housing on public land, which is something this government is not doing. We should say yes and we are saying yes to real rent controls to make housing affordable, and we’re saying yes to addressing the homelessness crisis and the affordable housing crisis and the supportive housing crisis that exists in all our municipalities by saying yes to rent control and yes to building affordable housing and supportive housing.

Housing is a human right. We should be housing based on need. We should be building housing for Ontarians.

When it comes to reducing and eliminating development fees for co-ops and non-market housing, that is a measure that we support and we are pleased to see that in the bill.

357 words
  • Hear!
  • Rabble!
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