- Member of Parliament
- Member of the Board of Internal Economy
Deputy House leader of the government
- Liberal
- Kingston and the Islands
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $112,228.33
- Government Page
- Apr/18/24 1:56:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, affordable housing has a huge spectrum. It can be anything from somebody's rent that is geared to their income right up to helping people get into home ownership. Affordable housing is everything between those two points. Of course, we cannot focus on just one side or the other side. We have to ensure we are helping the entire spectrum of affordable housing.
We have introduced a number of programs, like our national housing plan. We have introduced measures to assist younger individuals getting into home ownership. At the same time, we are building housing. I can name 12 projects in my riding alone, like on Cliff Crescent, Princess Street, Curtis Crescent and Wright Crescent. I will name the rest, if I have time. The point is that this federal government has been there to build housing.
I was mayor in Kingston and a city councillor during the time that Stephen Harper was the prime minister. Members do not have to take my word for it that the Conservatives built nothing; there was an Order Paper question that I tried to table today. It asked what the Leader of the Opposition did when he was housing minister. He was not building housing.
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- Apr/18/24 1:50:44 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the good news for the member is that I will be asking to unanimously table something as well. The whip and the people in the Conservative lobby better send some people in now, and tell them to say no. I am giving them a heads-up.
The member for Winnipeg North specifically rose on a point of order to call to the attention of the Chair that the Leader of the Opposition was misleading the House. Then the Leader of the Opposition stood up and said the following, basically what we just heard a Conservative member say. He said, “from the Statistics Canada website, which shows that 92,782 apartment units were built.” The Leader of the Opposition acknowledged the fact, when he stood up again later, that he was not actually talking about the affordable homes his government built, he was talking about the total number of apartment starts, all but six that came from private development.
I would probably say that the private sector was building these homes in spite of the previous government, not in line with it objectives. That is a reality of what is going on. Here is the irony behind all of it. The Leader of the Opposition was the housing minister from February until October 2015. I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Let us say that he was the housing minister for all of 2015.
The reason why we know, and where we are getting the number six from when we keep saying that he only built six affordable homes, is from an OPQ. For the people in the gallery and at home, an OPQ is an Order Paper question that can be tabled by a member to get a response from the government.
The OP question, and this was under the previous government, was about the number of units built in 2015. The response was only a total of six. Six total affordable housing units were built in 2015. With the consent of the House, I would respectfully request to table this so the public can see the Order Paper question I am referencing.
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Mr. Speaker, the federal government and the Prime Minister has been trying to work with municipalities. We have had the Minister of Housing going across the entire country, talking to mayors and to councils to work out deals on how the federal government can support building housing throughout our country and yet we see the Leader of the Opposition trying to bully mayors, calling them incompetent and subjecting them to ridicule through his platforms at every opportunity he gets. Which approach does the member think is better and more constructive at getting houses built across the country in a way that will benefit Canadians?
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Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill S-222. I too, as other speakers have, support this legislation.
One thing I have not heard much of today that I would like to talk about in the short period of time I have is why it makes sense to transition to using more wood products. If we look at the residential buildings built in Ontario recently, we are seeing many more being built taller out of wood. Obviously Ontario has its own building code, but it is informed to a large degree by the national building code. Until recently, within the last decade or so, wood buildings could only be four storeys as the maximum, but now we are seeing that increase quite a bit. Six, seven, eight storeys in different parts of Ontario are permitted to be built out of wood.
We are seeing this shift back towards more wood-based construction not just because of the environmental impacts associated with that and how environmentally unfriendly concrete can be, even though concrete has come a long way in the last couple of decades in terms of its carbon footprint. One of the other things we are seeing is the manner in which we can protect people from fires. Quite frankly, decades ago, when wood was being used a lot, there were not a lot of mitigating measures in place to prevent fires from spreading in structures that had an incredible amount of wood. That is probably why most building codes moved away from using wood towards concrete, particularly in large residential and commercial applications.
However, now there are more fire-suppression tools being used, better ways of suppressing a fire by using certain types of drywall, installing different measures to ensure there is proper egress from buildings in the event of a fire, as well as ensuring that if a fire does occur, there is an opportunity to allow people a certain amount of time to escape before being impacted by—
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- Jun/7/22 8:50:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a revolutionary way of building infrastructure. I think of the third crossing of the Cataraqui River, which is a 1.4-kilometre-long bridge that is three and a half years into production, to be done later this fall in my riding of Kingston. It was the exact same idea, although not funded through this particular bank. It was a partnership between all three levels of government and the contractor.
They would come together and they risk-managed together. They developed the project together. They will build the project together. They will deal with changes in the supply and availability of steel or concrete, for example, and they will deal with it all together. It is, quite frankly, a revolutionary way, in my opinion, having been in that position, of working on large-scale infrastructure projects where municipalities, in particular, are very hesitant to go it on their own, because they might not have the experience in it or they might not have the ability to deal with cost overruns, for example. It truly is, at least in my community, making a big difference.
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