This government is sitting on $22 billion. It’s giving money to wealthy people by allowing them to be exempted from development charges. They’re sitting on this additional money. And who’s going to pick up the tab? Municipalities in rural Ontario are going to pick up the tab.

Earlier, from the official opposition, we heard from our wonderful critic for municipal affairs and housing, who talked about all of the smaller municipalities that were going to be hit by these disastrous increases to tax. I believe it was the city of Pickering—they had to raise taxes by 2.44%; the region of Durham, 2.87%. Let me see—Pickering taxpayers have to pay 5.31%, and it goes on and on.

So much of this government’s actions have actually really hurt rural Ontario. They’ve neglected rural Ontario. They’ve taken rural Ontario for granted. They thought they could pave over farmland; they thought they could gift it to wealthy developers and wealthy speculators, allow them to flip it for a profit. It is a slap in the face to the people who feed Ontario.

In the municipality of North Huron, there are about 5,000 residents. They were talking about an additional municipal tax increase of 20.65%. There’s this government making the people of rural communities pay for their grift. In Kincardine, they’re looking at an 11.15% tax increase; Stratford, a 7.5% tax increase; Huron county—

I do get passionate about these things. It makes me very upset when people who can’t afford to have money taken from them have it taken from them, and when the government could do more to make sure that they’re making their lives easier.

Let me continue. In Bruce county, we’re talking about a 7.9% increase—I could go on and on. The city of Peterborough has a $7-million-to-$12-million gap over five years—I believe there’s also an additional $9 million because of the removal of development charges. Northumberland county—boy, oh, boy, it is shocking how many places in rural Ontario have been let down by this government while they tried to reward wealthy speculators.

What this government could do in terms of actually addressing the affordability of housing—they don’t have to give away these incentives to rich developers. Instead, what they could do is, they could actually incentivize the creation of municipal properties, non-profit properties. Why are they not making sure that these incentives that they’re providing are for those people who don’t have that profit motive, who are going to make sure they deliver the most amount of value to the people who need it the most?

If projects are exempted from development charges because they’re building affordable housing—but when you combine that with the fact that there’s no rent control for buildings that were first occupied after November 2018, how does this government make sure that things are even going to remain affordable? There are really no protections.

We have NDP legislation on the table right now that could be passed if this government truly cared about renters, if this government truly cared about affordability. Some of those include legislation that I have been proud to co-sponsor—the Rent Stabilization Act. There are also other wonderful pieces of legislation that the government could pass—there is Bill 48, Rent Control for All Tenants Act; as I said, Bill 25, the Rent Stabilization Act.

In my city of London, we’ve seen horrible situations where seniors who’ve lived for decades in rental units—they built a home there, they’ve raised families there. They’re in their retirement now. They’re enjoying their life, but unfortunately that building gets sold to a new person.

See, the Liberals in, I believe, 1997, opened up an adjustment to the Residential Tenancies Act that allowed vacancy decontrol. It allowed unethical landlords to kick good people out so that they could jack up the rent to whatever the market could withstand. It’s a gigantic loophole where people are losing their housing—people who have raised our families, built our communities.

I speak with folks all the time and they say to me, “What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to live in my car?” Those seniors have effectively paid for the buildings in which they reside. They deserve our respect. They deserve our protections. This government is seeing fit to remove protections to allow even more unethical people into the playing field. I could go on. I’ve barely even touched all of the issues that happened within the greenbelt.

Everything that’s happened within this sphere, within housing, that we’ve seen over the past number of years have done next to nothing to solve the unaffordability crisis. There are many options which have been presented, which we are happy to work with you on, but I can tell you when the government is only looking at the top tier of the people who have the most money expecting that money to trickle down expecting that affordability to trickle down—that simply isn’t going to happen. We have to prepare for years and decades down the line. We have to make sure that our policy is sound, that our policy is thoughtful that unintended consequences aren’t going to get in the way.

I also want to ask: Will this definition that they’ve provided of affordable housing be extended to areas other than exempting development charges, such as social assistance recipients or RGI funding calculations? I too also wonder is this going to be a loophole for this government’s developer buddies. We see that they’re focused on speculators. They’re just focused on their insiders. Is that allowing them to make their billions back after the greenbelt scam was discovered? It’s a question that is on the top of mind of all the folks I speak with in my riding.

People saw what this government did, despite all the distraction, despite trying to shield themselves, pretending it was about housing. Everybody knows this was never about housing. This was about the shifting of public money into a few peoples’ hands. This was about corruption at the highest levels—