I want to thank my colleague from Nickel Belt for her question. She’s absolutely right: There is nothing in this bill that actually addresses the affordability crisis.

As I stated at the start, Ontario is in an affordability crisis. Energy costs are high, and consumers, the people in this province, are struggling to pay their bills. So why would the Conservative government, during an affordability crisis, bring forward a piece of legislation that actually drives up energy costs, that actually increases the bills that Ontarians are faced with, and on top of that, making matters worse, is also interfering with an independent regulator’s decision at great legal risk? Thank you.

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.