It’s always a pleasure and an honour to rise in this august chamber to discuss the issues and the challenges that are facing Ontarians that they are struggling with the most. Many will know that I come from a clinical background. I’m an emergency doctor, but for many years, I’ve also had a number of leadership roles in homeless shelters here in the city of Toronto. And so, I’ve seen first-hand the critical importance of addressing housing affordability, making sure that we’ve got supportive housing environments and ensuring that we do everything possible to get housing right in this province, lest people end up having no choice but to turn to shelters.

Over the course of my remarks this afternoon, I’m going to touch a little bit on the scale of our crisis right now, what we really needed and were looking for in this legislation, what we actually got, my reaction to that and then where to go from there.

Currently, as I alluded, we have a housing and homelessness crisis. The scale of the suffering is difficult to describe. We have people sleeping in tents. We have fully employed personal support workers who cannot afford rent or a home to call their own, so they go to sleep in shelters. We have hospitals that have gone into the game of development because as they try to attract nurses, they don’t have anywhere for them to live. In our colleges and universities, we’ve got students living 25 people to a home because they can’t find anywhere else to live. And we have a massive out-migration from our province because young people cannot afford to live here after they finish their education.

Now, amidst that background, we have a government that purports to be ambitious. It says it will build 1.5 million homes by 2031. My first question is, is that even the right number? Mike Moffatt came out last week with a study saying we actually need 1.7 million homes. Regardless, even if we accept that “1.5 million homes” number as gospel, the government is failing even to keep up with that number. They’re falling thousands of homes behind on an annual basis, so much so that they’re forced to scramble to redefine what a house is in order to save face. We’ve got dorms and long-term-care beds now that are getting redefined as new housing construction—anything to distract from mismanagement and to pad the numbers.

Call it incompetence, call it self-interest, call it cowardice—call it what you want, but at the end of the day, housing starts have declined for the last three years in a row, missing provincial targets by 70,000 in 2022 alone. For six years now, we have had a government that has been driving in reverse. What we have needed is one that takes serious action. Instead, this is what we got.

Every few months, this government comes out with a new piece of housing legislation that usually walks back something that was in the last piece of legislation. Take it for the greenbelt, urban boundary expansion, development charges, and then, outside of housing, even looking at Bill 124 and Bill 28. Even if some of those ideas were good—and to be clear, there have been many bad ideas that have deserved to be walked back—within the context of housing, how are builders and municipalities supposed to have any confidence or ability to plan their construction whatsoever?

And so, with so much incompetence and inaction, you can imagine my excitement when a new housing minister was announced. Some of you may not know, but last time, the housing minister stepped down as a result of the greenbelt scandal.

The Premier tasked a single staffer, who quickly and quietly started removing lands from the greenbelt owned by his developer friends, and the housing minister—the last one—says he didn’t notice. So now he faces an RCMP criminal investigation, and that housing minister was forced to resign.

Now, thankfully, with this greenbelt giveaway, the people of Ontario were able to stop that. They looked at the evidence. The evidence showed they could build the homes that were needed without threatening our greenbelt, and here we are. So, a greenbelt flip-flop—with so many other flip-flops and failures, we have been left billions of dollars in the hole and years behind.

Anyway, thankfully, we have a new housing minister, and I am genuinely very excited. This was an opportunity to right some wrongs, to get things right. But regrettably, we have been let down. This bill could have been a shining debut, a moment to introduce landmark legislation to leave an indelible mark on the future of our province. But instead of courage, we have cowardice; instead of ambition, we have apathy; and instead of foresight, we see failure.

This is the kind of bill that could have been forgiven if it was in year 1 of this government’s mandate, not year 6. For all the talk about housing supply actions plans, this is being touted as a red tape reduction bill, and that’s not surprising because this government has never been about action. Two years—two years—after their own Housing Affordability Task Force report came out, they’re still talking, essentially kicking the can down the road so that they can say they’re doing something without actually.

I’m going to take some time now to reflect on the bill within the broader context of many of the other housing announcements that have come at the same time. I want this government to be successful because my constituents in Don Valley East and Ontarians across the province need it to work.

This bill purports to cover four areas, euphemistically titled as follows: building homes at a lower cost; prioritizing infrastructure for-ready-to-go housing projects; improved consultation and greater certainty to get homes built faster; and building more types of homes for more people.

I’ll dive into each of those four pillars, if you will.

Let’s start with building homes at a lower cost. This section includes things that indicate just how out of touch the government actually is. For example, it purports to remove minimum parking restrictions around major station transit areas. But if you listen carefully to municipalities and the building and developer network, the question that they’re asking isn’t about minimum parking requirements. The question they’re asking is, how much density can go around an MTSA? There is no answer.

Now, I understand that the minister will say that he’s consulting and will refer me to the draft provincial planning statement. But why are we still looking at consulting two years after the Housing Affordability Task Force already answered the question of density around MTSAs? And to make things even more infuriating, the government has already been consulting on that recommendation for the last two years as well with municipalities. So yet again, we’re repeating an announcement, kicking the can down the road to create the impression of action when none has been taken and there is no intention of doing so.

But on this, on these repeated talks of announcements that have already been getting announced, already getting consulted upon, this is where life really begins to get even more bizarre.

In related announcements, the government has said they will allow mass-timber construction up to 18 stories. All right, it’s not a bad idea. It’s good for supporting our forestry sector in our province, allows for more housing options, great, but the development community isn’t asking for 18 storeys for timber construction on that kind of construction. Instead, they are clamouring for clarity around restrictions that make it difficult to build that, like guidance around angular planes. None of that is in this legislation.

Similarly, there’s a promise to consult fire safety stakeholders about single-exit stairs in small residential buildings, but this was something the last housing minister said he was consulting on two years ago, around the time of Bill 109. So yet again, we’re announcing more consultations on things that were deemed to be a priority literally years ago.

The second pillar of this housing ambition was around prioritizing infrastructure for ready-to-go housing projects, and this is where I really begin to feel bad for builders, developers and municipalities: The lack of foresight, planning, and courage of this government has led to an environment in which no one can plan and no one can build.

First, development charges were off the table, throwing municipalities province-wide into chaos, causing property taxes to skyrocket and resulting in developers adjusting their construction accordingly; now, an unexpected walk-back with no warning whatsoever.

This government is introducing a complete and utter lack of confidence through precisely the kind of circular thinking that leads the housing community to have zero confidence in this government. When hundreds of millions of dollars are on the table, and people don’t know what they can expect next month, they cannot get in the business of constructing.

The third pillar of this is improved consultation and greater certainty for more homes built faster. Where do I even start? As I’ve mentioned, we’ve already been consulting. The government has already been consulting for the past two years and seems caught up in it as a way of delaying, but they certainly don’t consult with these stakeholders when it counts, on things like development charges or whether they’re going to walk back on that.

One of the most worrisome elements of all of this is that the bill institutes a near-universal ban on third-party appeals. That is heavy-handed. Make no mistake about it. We do see abuse of the Ontario Land Tribunal. We do see that there are long wait times—of course, it’s infected by political appointments—but a blanket ban that ignores the root causes of the appeals process in the Ontario Land Tribunal? That is heavy-handed, and what we need is a nuanced and calculated approach, and the Housing Affordability Task Force gave us that approach. Whereas this government is taking a machete when a scalpel is needed, the Housing Affordability Task Force made some great recommendations to prevent abuse of the land tribunal, like waving appeals on affordable housing, like having to show merit in a case that is intended to be brought to the tribunal, and increasing filing fees.

I want to take a moment to explain why banning all third-party appeals is dangerous. Sometimes developers appeal other developers because one plan can actually stop them from building even more housing. So we need to be careful that appeals, which can absolutely be important—we need to make sure that they are allowed to function in a reasonable manner and, if done so, we can protect our environment and actually increase the number of houses that we have in our province.

And finally, the fourth pillar of this intended legislation and plan is to build more types of homes for more people. And here, one of the landmark elements of that is to exempt universities from the Planning Act to accelerate student housing and put them on a level playing field with publicly assisted colleges. But here’s the thing: Colleges are suffering too, and putting them on a level playing field doesn’t necessarily solve the problem for universities nor for colleges. What might actually help is funding them properly.

There is much more to be said, but with my time waning and only 90 seconds left, I will reflect briefly on what others have said.

John Michael McGrath points out that this legislation is “broad but shallow, covering many different areas but not pushing too hard in any one place. It does not enough of too much.”

Martin Regg Cohn from the Star points out this collection of anti-climactic legislative proposals made news only because it “codifies a series of climbdowns over screw-ups of the past.”

So how could it have been better? Because I believe firmly we must be, on our side, a group of proposition, not just opposition. Well, in keeping with the legislation I introduced weeks ago, this government could have allowed construction of at least four units and buildings on any residential lot—by-right, province-wide multiplexes, exactly as the Housing Affordability Task Force recommended; introduce minimum height and density requirements around MTSAs; invest in the Landlord and Tenant Board; and require home builders to include at least 20% long-term affordable units as a condition of sale of all provincial surplus lands for housing development, but none of these things.

It saddens me that we have a government so allergic to the concept of real action on housing and on gentle density that they are willing to forgo billions of dollars from the federal government because they are ideologically opposed to fourplexes. We are in a housing affordability crisis. The current situation demands strong leadership and courage, but this government is flying by the seat of its pants. We deserved a bill that would solve our crisis, and we didn’t get it.