Thank you very much for the question. Regrettably, we do not see anything that addressed the root causes of the housing crisis in our midst right now. We do not see anything that will increase affordability for our constituents across the province, nothing to increase supportive housing for people across the province.

While there is a pillar of this plan that purports to build more kinds of housing, the foundation for that simply isn’t there. It’s merely words and lacking in any sort of substance whatsoever.

We’ve already seen—as we face in our health care sector. We have a shortage of health care workers. We have hospitals that are now being forced to go into the business of development, and we have now a government that wants colleges and universities to go into that business as well. If they want and feel equipped for that, that’s one thing, but the reality is that we have an underfunded post-secondary sector right now that is barely keeping afloat, and making this an option for them when they can barely keep afloat is really not fair and will be a drop in the bucket for a major crisis.

Interjections.

Interjection.

In any case, I welcome the opportunity to work with the other members. Evidently, there’s a proposal that needs a bit more review, and I absolutely will advocate for my constituents. That being said, there are many reasonable recommendations coming out of the Housing Affordability Task Force report that I have zero qualms in defending in this chamber to my constituents, because I know that when build more housing we are building it for our friends, for our neighbours and for our families.

I’ve been very clear, as I mentioned in my remarks, that one of the really important things that we could be doing is, when provincial lands are sold off for development, that a commitment to 20% and 30% be set aside for affordable housing, once we have clarity on what that definition is. Only if we can do that, ensuring that we have that kind of affordable and supportive housing in place, can we ensure that we get to the root cause of the housing crisis here and help those amongst us who are the most vulnerable here in the province of Ontario.

I would implore the Minister of Housing to do something like that, but I suspect he’ll remain with his ideological blinders and all of Ontario will suffer as a result.

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.

Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise in this august chamber on behalf of the constituents of Don Valley East and on behalf of the people of Ontario, particularly on an issue that is a crisis to so many us, and that is of course on housing.

Just earlier this morning, the member from York Centre spoke about visionary plans, but there’s nothing visionary about rewriting plans over and over and over—because, in fact, this is the third time this government has rewritten urban development policy since October 2022. So you’ll forgive me for believing that sometimes it feels like they’re just making it up as they go along. That’s not intended to be a dig at this government; it’s an expression of concern from the people of Ontario and, of course, for myself included.

When this bill was first announced, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing spoke of flexibility and boosting housing supply. Translated, what he really was saying is that he wants to be able to do whatever he wants. Madam Speaker, Ontario needs housing—we all know that—but Bill 97 fails to consider its agricultural, economic and environmental consequences, nor its consequences for tenants and for residents.

On the matter of agricultural and environmental issues, sweeping, unchecked urban sprawl is an asset to nobody, especially when this government neglects basic city services like hospitals and schools. But this government, sadly, is not interested in feedback. After all, they’re stripping away power from municipalities, the local jurisdictions who know their communities best and know how the negative consequences of Bill 97 could unfold.

Madam Speaker, the consequences may be significant. Had the government bothered to meaningfully consult with stakeholders, they would know that. Here’s one stakeholder: The Ontario Federation of Agriculture, representing over 80% of Ontario’s farmers, has voiced opposition to the bill, as schedule 6 will severely reduce the already diminished amount of agricultural land in our province. This government just wants to plop multi-lot residential areas in prime rural farmland and walk away saying it built a few houses. This simply is not good enough.

This government hasn’t considered the environmental implications of what it is proposing. The changes, for example, made under schedule 6 will tear into green space and exponentially increase our carbon emissions. And without public transport, hospitals, schools, employment areas—residents will need to drive to get where they’re going, emitting even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

From an economic perspective, cities designate lands as employment lands, places for industry and economic development. This legislation circumvents these rules so that developers can build on those very lands. This will contribute to forcing new residents to commute long distances for basic services and for infrastructure, because it’s an attempt at a housing plan without an accompanying infrastructure plan. This government forgets that livable housing doesn’t just mean access to a roof and four walls. Access to a grocery store, a school, a hospital: These are all critical to the success of a community as well and are not provided under this bill.

Bill 97 also removes the rule for municipalities that stipulates they must prove the need to expand before they push their municipal urban boundaries outward. Municipalities could rezone land without requiring evidence or studies. This bill seeks to do away with the municipal comprehensive review. This is, as you know, the review every five years that municipalities undertake about lands which should be employment lands and which lands should no longer be those. The land needs assessment is also being done away with—a valuable assessment that looks at populations to determine employment lands. All of this means fewer local jobs, more commuting, more pollution.

On the topic of affordable housing—because this is not just an environmental issue or even a complete disregard towards protecting agricultural lands—this bill offers little to no substantial policies to address or promote affordable housing. For example, schedule 2 doesn’t just diminish the authority of municipalities, which is a point I will get back to, but it also opens up many avenues to avoid the development of affordable housing units and fair treatment for tenants. The new regulatory control over demolition and conversion of rental units could easily give the province the power to weaken or even eliminate rental replacement bylaws.

Rental replacement bylaws play an integral role in ensuring tenants who are forced out of their homes due to demolition or conversion are properly supported, either through financial compensation or replacement homes. In a report done by the city of Toronto which highlighted concerns of Bill 97, it stated, “From 2018 to 2022, the city approved nearly 2,500 replacement units at below-market rents (i.e., meeting the city’s definition of affordable or mid-range rents). Without the ability to regulate replacement rents, this existing stock of housing affordable to low- and moderate-income households would have been lost.”

This government loves to talk about the housing crisis as though it is only an issue of lack of supply. While that certainly is one of the issues, affordable housing must be and remain a key priority. Nothing in this bill suggests that policies would be put in place to help ensure and guarantee that homebuyers are given affordable options or that tenants are protected against price gouging or given fair rights.

On my final point about the diminishment of municipal power, what seems very apparent in this bill is that this government is intent to suggest that municipalities are ill-equipped to understand and address the unique needs of their own region. It also seems to suggest that every municipality in Ontario is facing identical issues when it comes to housing, even though this is simply not true. The housing crisis looks very different in northern regions of Ontario versus more urban regions. The unique needs of each region cannot be solved by a one-size-fits-all approach. Yet this is exactly what Bill 97 is proposing by diminishing the authority of municipalities completely and giving that complete control to the ministry.

For example, changes in schedule 1 of the bill allow the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing to appoint his own inspectors necessary for the enforcement of this act. This required appealing subsection 4(4) of the Building Code Act, which once stipulated that inspectors would be appointed under part III of the Public Service of Ontario Act, the Public Service Commission in charge of appointing public servants. Their mandate is to ensure “non-partisan”—non-partisan—“recruitment and employment of public servants that PSC or its delegates appoint to employment by the crown.” Can the minister make that guarantee? Can the people of Ontario expect that of this government? If the past is any indication of the future, then the answer, unfortunately, is no. This matters, because this government has promised to build Ontarians 1.5 million homes by 2030, and they’re afraid of delivering on that. As it is, they’re behind schedule. It’s worrisome that the minister can now appoint his own inspectors who could easily be directed to fast-track the inspection process in order to expedite the number of homes built. Building homes is good; building them recklessly is not.

When I see that the minister has been given the power to “make regulations prescribing anything that is referred to in section 14” when section 14 has within it 14 major subsections, I’m concerned. In fact, it gives me flashbacks to Bill 60. As a result, a concerning pattern of unaccountability is established in this bill.

In closing, this bill would make sweeping changes to how municipalities grow. It could force 444 Ontario municipalities to grow the same way. Municipalities in northern Ontario would be subject to the same rules as municipalities in southwestern Ontario, despite having completely different needs. That is not acceptable. This is not a one-size-fits-all province, and we can’t govern like that.

For once, this government is actually being transparent. They have shown that Bill 97 is their chosen mechanism for throwing out every rule and protection meant to ensure that growth in Ontario is fiscally and environmentally responsible. Just because the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing has a promise to deliver on for the Premier doesn’t mean he has carte blanche to get us there.

I want to acknowledge the challenges and hardships my constituents in Don Valley East have endured over the past year. Health care has become more difficult than ever before, with fewer family doctors, longer wait times, and cancelled surgeries. The growing spectre of privatization, which has made it more difficult to seek medical attention via virtual care, is the first of many examples of how this government hasn’t delivered for my constituents or for patients. Virtual care must be equitable and accessible, but as designed, it reveals the government’s profiteering agenda.

Make no mistake about it: Privatization is like a drop of poison in a well, and it contaminates the entire water supply.

Another problem: Our environment and greenbelt are under attack by Bill 23. We all need housing, but it needs to be safe and sustainable. It mustn’t raise taxes for the benefit of developers. Bill 23 will lead to the same kind of uncontrolled, runaway development that is being proposed in my riding along Wynford Drive—13 high-rise condos in that tiny space, and no community input? My constituents must be consulted and amendments made, and runaway legislation like Bill 23 must be fixed.

But there are things to look forward to. On December 13, Ismailis around the world will celebrate the birthday of their spiritual leader and one of the world’s foremost champions of pluralism and community service, His Highness the Aga Khan. To the Ismaili community and His Highness, I wish to say happy birthday and Salgirah Khushiali Mubarak.

To the constituents of Don Valley East and the people of Ontario, I wish to share my very best wishes, from my family to yours, for happy holidays, a merry Christmas and a joyous new year.

To the members of Ontario’s Jewish community, I wish you a happy and healthy Hanukkah, and I join you in celebrating the miracle of Jewish resilience in the face of oppression. Eat some latkes for me.