The minister can spin all he wants and deflect blame, but documents reveal that this government is spending less on community housing and is making the homelessness crisis worse. The goal should be to prevent homelessness, which is better for people and costs less in the long run.

Will the minister do the right thing and restore community housing funding?

We are experiencing a major affordability crisis, and a big part of it is the housing crisis. We have a record number of people who are unhoused and sleeping on our streets. We are seeing record evictions.

We’re seeing rising mortgage payments. We’re hearing of terms like “negative amortization period,” which I had never heard before—where payments don’t even cover the interest portion, and the remaining unpaid interest is added to the principal amount owing. Imagine that: making payments but owing more. We’re also seeing longer amortization periods—90 years. Imagine that: a lifetime of paying for your home, only to end up not owning it.

We are seeing generations of people feeling like their dream of owning a home is just that: a dream.

We need to build more housing. The Conservative government’s own Housing Affordability Task Force has said we need 1.5 million homes in the next 10 years. Speaker, I want to be very clear: The housing crisis we’re facing right now is both a supply crisis and an affordability crisis. I have always said that the affordable housing crisis is of such a massive scale that if we’re truly going to address the crisis in a meaningful way, the response must be of a similar scale. The scale of the response must meet the scale of the problem.

We need to build more housing, but we also need to build different kinds of housing, because people’s housing needs are different. After World War II, there was a huge need for affordable housing in Canada, especially as veterans were returning home and the population was growing, and then there was the realization that the private market alone was not going to build the kind of housing that was needed for people who were of low and moderate incomes, because it wasn’t profitable. That’s why the CMHC, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., was created with a mandate to improve housing access for everyone.

Shamefully, the federal government—both under Conservatives and Liberals—abandoned that responsibility, and in Ontario, the Harris government abandoned that responsibility. In the 15 years of Liberal government since, they did not reverse course. This is among the many Harris policies that the Liberals maintained.

And here’s the thing: Private developers have said that they alone cannot solve the housing crisis, and yet the Ford Conservative government is leaving it only to private developers to meet the demand and the need. What the NDP is proposing through this motion is that governments resume their responsibility of building non-market, deeply affordable housing based on people’s needs—housing that the market won’t build. We can do that by establishing a new public agency, Homes Ontario. Let’s get it done.

Last week, Global News reported that Metrolinx has sold eight parcels of land since March 2021. None of these lands were used for affordable housing. Seven out of eight parcels went to private companies, including large-scale developers. This is the same public agency that previously reneged on an agreement with the Jane and Finch community to hand over land for a community hub.

It is clear that Metrolinx thinks it can ignore its duty to serve the public interest. Does the Premier think that Metrolinx, a public agency, can ignore its duty to serve the public interest as well?

Speaker, it is clear Metrolinx does not care about “provincial interests with respect to social, environmental and economic purposes”—all it cares about is selling off public land to the highest bidder. Will the Premier ensure that surplus lands owned by public agencies like Metrolinx are used for affordable housing or, at the very least, for public purposes?