My question is to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing. New government documents obtained by Global News reveal that this government continues to underfund affordable housing. The Conservatives have cut funding to community housing programs even though the wait-list for an affordable home has ballooned to well over 65,000 people.

My question to the minister: Why is this government cutting funding to affordable housing at a time when the homelessness and housing crisis has never been worse?

School boards in Toronto are facing a funding shortfall because of this government’s failure to properly fund education in Ontario. The Toronto District School Board is short $27 million. Parents often contact me about how this underfunding is affecting their kids’ education.

I think of Adhi. His son is in a developmentally delayed class at Clinton school. His son has been attacked twice by another child. He has been scarred physically. The school knows they need another skilled educator in the room to keep kids safe, but they don’t have the staffing allocation.

I think of Janice and Christine at Kensington. They’ve just learned they will have a grade 4/5/6 class for this coming year. That means a teacher will have to explain three different classes all day, every day. That’s a very difficult task. It means that older kids will sit there in the class and be bored, and it means younger kids will sit in the class and feel completely overwhelmed.

Stories like this come into my office every single week. Every school is having to do more with less, year in and year out.

The TDSB has asked the ministry to fund schools properly and to account for the extra costs they must shoulder because of provincial and federal directives, because of COVID, because of inflation. How does this ministry respond? How does the minister respond? They look the other way.

I want schools to be properly funded. I want our kids to have an excellent public school education. The TDSB is asking for a new funding deal, and I support these requests, and I hope the ministry and the government support these requests as well.

This is a petition that reads, “Fund Ontario’s Public Schools.”

“Whereas the TDSB has a deficit of $63.2 million for the 2023-24 school year due to continuous underfunding by the Ministry of Education;

“Whereas the Ministry of Education has not reimbursed the $70.1-million TDSB reserve used to cover pandemic expenditures;

“Whereas the deficit and pandemic costs combined result in forcing schools to reduce special-needs assistants, educational assistants, clerical staff, teachers and vice-principal positions at TDSB schools;...

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“Whereas continued underfunding means that students receive less one-on-one time with educators;

“We, the undersigned parents, guardians, caregivers, students, staff and community members, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to:

“(1) To adequately fund and strengthen public education in Ontario so students and education workers get the support they need;

“(2) To reimburse schools and the TDSB for the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Many students and parents in my local school of Clinton have signed this petition. We did lose a vice-principal last year. It’s common, and it’s concerning. I fully support this petition and will be assigning my signature to it and giving it to the page.

Overall, in terms of the structure of this one-hour chat today, I will be giving a little bit of a response to what I heard the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing and the associate minister say in their lead. Then, I’m going to provide an overview of the bill. And then, I’m going to go through the amendments and then conclude.

Overall, there are a few comments that the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing said in his opening remarks that I think are worth drawing attention to. One is that the minister congratulated the Attorney General’s work to improve the Landlord and Tenant Board. Let’s be very clear: The Ombudsman has done a deep dive into the Landlord and Tenant Board and has concluded, after a very lengthy investigation, that the Landlord and Tenant Board is “moribund.” It is broken. It is not fulfilling its basic duty of providing fast and fair access to tenants and landlords in order for them to get their day in court and their issue resolved—maybe it’s a tenant who is not paying their rent; maybe it’s because a landlord is trying to illegally evict them. It is a tribunal that is not working. It is also Ontario’s busiest tribunal. Over the five years that this government has been in power, the wait-list has not decreased; it has increased. And the wait-list after the worst of the pandemic has subsided has also increased, so that excuse can’t be used anymore.

What is also very interesting is that the Ombudsman pointed out that the number of adjudicators at the Landlord and Tenant Board is actually higher than it used to be. So I don’t know what is happening with that at LTB right now, but it is not working. I am calling on the Attorney General to get control of the LTB again and fix it, because it’s important for many people.

The second thing I wanted to just briefly respond to was the minister and the associate minister’s insistence that they’re very concerned about first-time homebuyers. I’m concerned about first-time homebuyers too. But the challenge I have with what this government is doing, when they focus on supply and nothing else, is that they’re ignoring the reality that it’s less and less first-time homebuyers who are buying these homes. It’s less and less that the type of homes that are being built are being built for first-time homebuyers. Increasingly, they’re being built for investors to make maximum profit, and they’re being bought by investors to then rent out to an individual who would prefer to be paying off their own mortgage instead of someone else’s third mortgage. I don’t hear this government talk about the need to make it easier for first-time homebuyers to get that home. That’s what we really need in Ontario today.

So there are the two comments I had from the presentations that I heard.

Now I want to give an overview of Bill 97. We’ve been debating Bill 97 for a little while. In short, it’s a bill that has some modest improvements to renter protections. It makes it easier for developers to pave over farmland with expensive sprawl. That’s the essence of Bill 97. The reality, also, is that this bill is not going to solve our housing affordability crisis or our housing supply crisis. They’re two issues we have right now—and this bill doesn’t effectively do either.

When I think about the Conservatives’ track record with solving our housing affordability crisis, the thing that constantly comes to mind for me is, I look at how expensive it is to rent a home in Ontario—and it has never been more expensive. And I look at how expensive it is to buy a home in Ontario—and it has never been more expensive. That’s the Conservatives’ legacy. Until housing gets more affordable, the housing affordability crisis has not been fixed.

In committee, we introduced many amendments in order to improve the bill. Our focus was multi-pronged. We wanted to bring in amendments to really clamp down on the big increase in illegal evictions that we’re seeing. Because as housing prices go up, as mortgages go up, as interest rates go up and as rent prices go up, the incentive for a landlord to illegally evict and move in a tenant who can pay more than what a long-term rent-controlled tenant can pay—that incentive goes up too.

There’s a reason why the number of evictions that are taking place in Ontario today is on the rise. Some of them are bad-faith evictions. Some of them are genuine—a landlord wants to move in because they just bought a home; they are a new, first-time homebuyer—but some of them aren’t. Unfortunately, the laws in Ontario today don’t protect tenants who are facing an illegal eviction.

We also are looking at bringing in better measures to build more affordable housing, to end exclusionary zoning, to protect our farmland, and to increase density and intensification so that we build homes in areas already zoned for development. We increase density in these areas in municipalities in order to build right, in order to build in a sustainable way, and also to build in a more efficient way, because it is far more cost-effective for a municipality to service a new home if it’s in an area already zoned for development than it is to pave over farmland and service a whole new area; it’s far more efficient.

I’m going to be going through these amendments in turn. What we found, overall, is that the Conservatives are not very interested at this point to really tackle the issues that we’re seeing in the housing sector. Unfortunately, the amendments that we introduced were turned down. That is unfortunate, because we’re not going to give up and we’re going to keep organizing on these issues.

That’s the overview of the bill.

Now I’m going to turn to what actually happened in committee itself.

I want to thank the many individuals and organizations who came to committee to share their expertise and discuss how this bill would affect them. Those people include the Federation of Rental-housing Providers of Ontario; Megan Kee, who works at the Niagara Community Legal Clinic; Rebecca Murray, who also works at the Niagara Community Legal Clinic; Dania Majid from the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. They also gave an excellent submission, which I’m going to dive into a little bit during my presentation.

We also had the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, Peggy Brekveld. I do hear in the letter that Minister Clark just sent to the OFA that it does seem that there has been some movement. This government has recognized that protecting farmland is important and that it is time to slow down and pause and make sure they get things right.

The Building Industry and Land Development Association, BILD—thank you. Kevin Love; AMO—the president, Colin Best, and Lindsay Jones came in. Rescon, the Residential Construction Council of Ontario—thank you for attending. The Toronto Region Board of Trade came and they had some very interesting remarks about Bill 97’s move to change how employment lands are protected. Don Valley Community Legal Services, Mortgage Professionals Canada, and the Ontario Home Builders’ Association came in and spoke. We also had many submissions.

Thank you for taking the time to make these bills as good as they can be.

Now I want to talk a little bit about the amendments that we introduced—and we did introduce a few. The first one that we introduced was around the rental replacement bylaws. This is an issue that came up in Bill 23. The government made a decision to bring in some laws that would allow them to weaken or eliminate municipal rental replacement bylaws. It was very concerning for many residents in Toronto, because we have a fairly strong residential replacement bylaw. It made a lot of people very scared.

Essentially, what the municipal residential replacement bylaw means is, if you are a tenant and you live in purpose-built rental and a developer comes forward and says they want to turn your purpose-built rental into a condo, you have some protections in that scenario where your building is going to be demolished. Municipalities monitor that process. They ensure a renter gets compensation as they’re waiting for that building to be built. Sometimes it takes a few years for these buildings to be built. They also ensure that the renter can return to the building and return to their home at about the same rent once the construction of that new, bigger building is complete.

In most cases, these purpose-built rentals are turned into condos. Usually, the final building consists of a percentage of rental units that are managed by the property manager; then there’s a percentage of units that are sold off as a condo—so it’s a mix of a building. It’s fairly common in Toronto.

The challenge with Bill 97 is that you’ve reintroduced this power to gut municipal rental replacement bylaws. You’ve put in a little hopeful spark because you’re also giving yourselves the power to strengthen them, which is good. I hope you expand on that. But it has made a lot of tenants very, very worried.

We introduced an amendment—we introduced a few. The first one was to create a strong provincial standard for all tenants who are facing a demolition of their building. It doesn’t matter where they live—Hamilton, Ajax, Sudbury, Peterborough, Ottawa, Toronto—this strong provincial standard would guarantee the right of return to that tenant into the new building and also ensure that there’s compensation for the tenant so that they can still afford to live in the neighbourhood that they call home while the construction of that building is complete. I think that makes a lot of sense because it’s a compromise; it’s a balance. It allows new supply to be built, especially if it’s near transit stations. But it ensures that we preserve our affordable private-market rental stock. It doesn’t hold up renters as being victims and sacrificial lambs—we just toss them out in order to meet the demand for new housing. I don’t believe renters should be sacrificed in order to meet the demand for new housing. We can do both, and we should do both. Our proposal to create a provincial standard would allow us to do both. The government chose to reject that amendment. My hope is that when I see the final regulations that come out, they are strong, because there are a lot of people who really care about this issue.

I think about an individual I work with right now called Pat. She’s in her early eighties. She lives in the Annex, a very expensive area. She wouldn’t be able to afford to live in that area if she had to move. When she found out her building was being demolished, her instant response was, “I have no idea where I’m going to go. There’s nowhere for me to go. I’m a senior. I’m on a fixed income. I have some pension. I can afford the rent. But if I have to move, my rent is going to go up from about $1,500 a month to $2,500 or more a month, and I can’t afford that.” So she’s terrified. I think Ontario has a place for Pat. Bill 97 and the regulations you introduce can either help Pat or they could evict Pat. My hope is that you help Pat. We introduced those amendments; they got rejected. Let’s see what the government does with the regulations.

The second move we did was around removing the provision requiring the city to provide a refund for a non-decision of a site-controlled application. Let me explain. With Bill 23, the Conservatives decided it would be a really good idea to continue to not look within themselves but to blame municipalities for the housing crisis. They said, “We’re going to make it so that if you don’t approve a building permit or a site plan application or a zoning application within a set period of time”—very truncated periods of time, especially for big buildings that require provincial and municipal approval, multiple-department approval, public consultation, stakeholder input, traffic studies—these are valid. If they don’t meet these very short time frames for approval, then the city has to give the development fee application funding back. The challenge with that is that sometimes, it’s not the municipality’s fault if the application is delayed. Sometimes a developer hands in an application that’s half done, so the city has to turn around and say, “In order for the clock to start ticking, we actually want a completed application, because the reason there’s a delay is because of you, not us.”

The other thing we heard in committee is that sometimes it’s the provincial government or another department or another issue that’s outside the municipality’s control that’s holding up this application for a zoning change or for a site plan application change. So we said, “Okay, there shouldn’t be any refunds at all. Let’s treat the municipalities like the partners that they are. Let’s do something like what the federal government is doing to provide additional funding to municipalities to hire the staff they need to speed up application processes. But let’s not punish municipalities; let’s help them.” The government didn’t like that.

I do want to acknowledge that in Bill 97, you’ve chosen to delay when the refunds come in, because you heard from municipalities across Ontario that the draconian and drastic measures you’re taking to change how planning works and how buildings are approved are putting municipalities into chaos; they’re having difficulty keeping up. We actually heard from municipalities that said, “All these changes that you’re doing, especially around the refund piece and the reduction in development fee charges, are slowing down our ability to approve applications, and slowing down our ability to provide the necessary infrastructure to get new homes online,” so that they’ve got the sewage, they’ve got the electricity, they’ve got the roads, they’ve got the daycares—all the services they need for the new residents who are moving in. They can’t keep up, and some applications to build, like in Waterloo region, are being delayed. It’s having unintended consequences. So we brought in amendments around that; the government rejected them. It’s a pity. But let’s see—maybe in a future bill. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised by some of the amendments we see in future bills.

I’m going to move on with that one.