As the affordable housing crisis worsens, more and more Ontarians are falling into homelessness. The approach so far has failed. We need a coordinated, resourced provincial strategy to tackle the homelessness crisis.

My bill requires the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing to establish a homelessness task force to support the government of Ontario in creating and maintaining a provincial homelessness strategy. In a province as rich as ours, no one should be unhoused.

This petition is titled “Bring Back Rent Control.” Rent control existed for all units occupied by tenants regardless of what year they were built until this government came into power in 2018 and rent control for buildings built after 2018 was removed. As such, many renters in Toronto and across Ontario who are living in these units built after 2018 do not have protections of rent control. When you don’t have any cap on rent increases, it puts tenants in precarious housing. Massive, unpredictable rent increases also take away stability and predictability to build a life and to plan a life.

As such, this petition is calling on the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to pass my bill Rent Control for All Tenants Act so that we can ensure all tenants can live with rent control protections in safe, affordable homes.

My question is to the Minister of Housing. We have an affordability crisis, and housing is a big part of it. Tenants across Ontario are experiencing drastic rent increases simply because they live in buildings built after 2018. For example, in Livmore High Park, last year, rent was raised by 14%, and this year, rent is going up by 13%. With stagnant wages and rents skyrocketing, the cost-of-living crisis is pushing people out of their homes.

Why won’t this government provide stability to tenants in the midst of an affordability crisis?

Minister, will you reinstate the protections you removed and protect tenants from unlimited rent increases?

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?

My question is to the Minister of Housing. A new report shows that Ontario rents have risen three times higher than guidelines due to rent control loopholes, with an average increase of 54.5% over the last decade.

Thousands of tenants in Parkdale–High Park and across Ontario are experiencing massive increases to the cost of housing, and there is no end in sight.

My question is, will you close rent control loopholes so Ontarians can find and maintain housing?

The cost-of-living crisis is getting worse. According to a recent report from Feed Ontario, 23% of food bank clients spend 100% of their income on housing. That’s all their income on housing. Without real rent control for all tenants, people are paying a larger and larger percentage of their paycheque towards rent, leaving little for all other expenses.

Premier, will you bring back real rent control measures that not only help keep people housed, but also help keep food on the table?

Under your watch, more and more children are going hungry. What are you going to do about it?

The Associate Minister of Housing.

Second reading debate deemed adjourned.

The sad reality is that such tragedies happen far too often. Last year, in Ontario, 52 women, which is nearly one per week, were killed at the hands of their intimate partners, and by September of this year, there were already 46 similar cases.

Shelters and support organizations are overwhelmed by the demand for help, and these numbers are not going down; they are on the rise. Over 30 municipalities in the province have already declared intimate partner violence an epidemic.

The Renfrew county inquest last year made 86 recommendations. The first recommendation was for Ontario to formally declare intimate partner violence an epidemic, which this government has refused, arguing that intimate partner violence isn’t an epidemic because it’s not an infectious disease that spreads from person to person. This kind of petty debate over language in the face of such tragedy is ridiculous. Declaring intimate partner violence an epidemic is important because it means the government acknowledges the urgency of the problem and is committed through resources to address a very real threat facing women and families.

I urge this government: Show some leadership. Declare intimate partner violence an epidemic. We don’t have time to waste.

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.

I rise today to speak to Bill 97, Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act. This is the government’s fourth housing legislation in four years. That means four out of four times the government has failed to address the affordable housing crisis meaningfully and it’s taking, once again, the wrong approach to addressing housing supply issues. Now, this bill makes changes on two key fronts: on development policy and on tenant protections. I’ll talk about the development policy first and then get to tenant protections.

Speaker, this bill fails to eliminate exclusionary zoning and allow construction of more affordable housing options—such as duplexes, townhomes, walk-up apartments—everywhere that single detached homes are allowed. This was a key recommendation from the Housing Affordability Task Force report, and it is an idea that the official opposition, the NDP, supports. It was, in fact, part of our housing platform.

The government’s previous housing legislation, Bill 23—the infamous Bill 23—included allowing secondary and tertiary suites as-of-right within existing structures, which we support. But according to the government themselves, they expect that this change will deliver only 50,000 new homes over the next 10 years, which is barely 3% of the 1.5 million homes that are needed. Instead of eliminating exclusionary zoning, Bill 23 preserves restrictive zoning rules like two- or three-storey height limits, maximum floor space indexes or minimum setbacks that effectively prohibit what we call missing middle forms of housing. That bill fell far short of what the Housing Affordability Task Force recommended, and now with this bill, Bill 97, it still does not address the shortcomings.

Instead this bill, once again, relies almost entirely on deregulation and tax cuts to incentivize the for-profit private market to deliver 1.5 million homes over the next decade. Speaker, this narrow-minded approach is failing, and we know it’s failing because the government’s own budget revealed that the projected housing starts in Ontario are going down instead of going up.

Now we in the NDP, the official opposition, have called for a strong public sector role to deliver new affordable and non-market housing that the for-profit private sector can’t or won’t deliver. There is no provision in Bill 97 to facilitate new non-market housing. This bill, combined with some major changes that the government is making to the provincial Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe and the provincial policy statement—what the government is doing is further accelerating farmland loss and unsustainable sprawl.

Speaker, doubling down on sprawl is going to make it so much more expensive for municipalities to provide the basic services that these developments are going to need. From roads and transit to electricity and sewage, all of these services are going to cost more, because it costs more to service low-density single-family-home subdivisions than it costs to provide these services and infrastructure in areas that are already zoned for development.

And since it is much more expensive for municipalities to provide these services, Ontarians are not only going to see property tax hikes—in fact, Speaker, folks all around the province and many municipalities are already getting these higher property tax bills now, but they’re going to see the tax hikes year after year, coupled with service cuts, because it is so expensive to build this infrastructure and to maintain the infrastructure. Low-density suburban sprawl is a costly and backward approach to planning. It is not going to address the housing affordability crisis or the housing supply crisis.

Let me remind the members of the government once again that the government’s own Housing Affordability Task Force said that the 1.5 million homes needed to be built in the next decade can be built within current urban boundaries. There is no need to pave over the greenbelt. There is no need for sprawl. That’s what I want to cover on the development policy changes.

In the remaining time I have, I want to get into tenant protections. Now, the tenant protections in this bill fall so short of what the NDP and tenants in this province are calling for. It’s like the government knows they have to do more to protect tenants and asked themselves what the least is that they can do that will not disrupt the status quo. That’s what the changes are in this bill: the slightest of slight improvements simply to be able to claim that the Conservatives are doing something for tenants.

Speaker, I want to talk about the AC use. That’s in this bill. Last summer, in the midst of the heat wave, tenants in my riding at 130 Jameson Avenue in Parkdale received eviction notices for using their ACs. Many leases forbid the use of ACs. Their corporate landlords at 130 Jameson said that AC use is prohibited under lease agreements, so either the AC goes or the tenants have to go.

The Residential Tenancies Act mandates a minimum temperature of 20 degrees during the winter, but there is no law on maximum temperatures. Municipalities in Ontario are asking the province to mandate maximum temperatures, including the city of Toronto. So given that there is no maximum-temperature legislation for protection of tenants, the tenants organize in order to be able to keep using their ACs because, in the hot summer months, this is a serious health and safety issue.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission was very clear. In fact, they issued a statement, and the opening line of their statement read, “Access to cooling during extreme heat waves is a human rights issue.” Their statement talked about the obligation of housing providers and specifically referenced the case of the tenants at 130 Jameson. They also stated that the current Residential Tenancies Act “leaves many Ontario tenants without protections against extreme heat” because air conditioning is not considered a vital service.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission called on this government to “include air conditioning as a vital service, like the provision of heat ... and to establish a provincial maximum temperature to make sure that ... tenants are protected against threats of eviction” simply for “using “safely installed air conditioning units.” That’s the background. This is what has led to what’s in Bill 97 today around AC use.

So what does the Ford government do? They prohibit the ban of AC in leases, which is helpful, but it still puts the onus on the tenants to install their own ACs to ensure that apartments don’t get dangerously hot in the summer, and they’re allowing rents to be increased for installing the AC. That’s why I say that the measures that the government has put in place for tenants fall so short. It does the absolute bare minimum.

It’s also a contradiction of an explicit ban that’s already in the Residential Tenancies Act on the use of seasonal fees. So I will flag with the government right now: When the bill is before committee, there has to be an amendment to ensure that seasonal fee ban continues on and that there are no extra charges for AC use. Just as the Ontario Human Rights Commission has called for, we need maximum-temperature legislation. This will also be consistent with the long-standing, already set-out principle that all tenants have the right to reasonable enjoyment of their unit. The temperature of the unit that they live in is an absolutely important factor.

Speaker, there are some other measures in it. I do not have time to go over all of them. All I want to say at the end of the day, when it comes to housing and tenants, is that housing is a human right, and so we need to be able to ensure that every Ontarian has decent, affordable housing that they can call their own, something that really meets the needs of the tenant.

My question is to the Premier.

Without any consultation, Premier Ford announced plans to tear down the current Ontario Science Centre building and build a smaller, new building at Ontario Place, where large parts of the site are also being privatized with no consultation or transparency.

The Ontario Science Centre is an important architectural landmark and a vital place for the communities of Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon Park. Tearing it down is a bad idea.

The Premier says that the plan is to build housing on the site.

Has the public land where the Ontario Science Centre sits—land that belongs to the city of Toronto—already been promised to a developer? If so, who?

The Associate Minister of Housing.

Also joining us in the House today are Sylvia Braithwaite and Inta Dukule from Fred Victor; Kate Chung from Accessible Housing Network; Hyunjin Cho, Monica Amenya and Mathuri Ravindranathan from Ernestine’s Women’s Shelter; and Margaret Bilson from Nellie’s. Welcome.

This year, I launched the first-ever member’s statement writing competition for high school students in Parkdale–High Park. Students could submit a statement on any issue they wanted. This competition is designed to empower young people and foster youth participation in politics by bringing their voice directly to Queen’s Park and speaking about issues in their own words.

The winner for 2023, as selected by an independent committee, is Ian Snider from Humberside Collegiate. Here is Ian’s statement:

“Ontario is in a housing crisis.”

Premier “Ford’s solution: Allow suburban developers to create overpriced, car-dependent suburbs. This isn’t so much a solution as a capitulation to those who caused the crisis in the first place.

“It is the increasing sprawl that has raised housing prices, especially in the city, where the poor have been priced out in favour of the highest bidder.

“The demand for walkable neighbourhoods is there, yet the government refuses to hold developers accountable to build the housing needed in Ontario: walkable, affordable, mixed-use development.

“Today, more and more Ontarians favour living in the city over the suburbs. As public transit is expanded in anticipation of new residents” Premier “Ford is unwilling to build destinations.

“As young couples are forced between living in the city and starting a family,” Premier “Ford refuses to build affordable housing. As food prices rise,” Premier “Ford lets cul-de-sacs replace farmland.

“Our neighbourhoods make all the difference in our lives. With walkability comes healthy living, a greener environment, and a sense of community. We can build our cities to support their residents, but this government is doing the opposite just for the profit of a few developers.”

The Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing.

I’d like to give a warm welcome to the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada, to Cystic Fibrosis Canada, and to OPSEU/SEFPO. Thank you for your advocacy.