Speaker, if we believe there’s a housing crisis, shouldn’t we be thinking hard and planning for smart growth?

I’m worried about this line from the proposed new provincial planning statement, from the Environmental Registry: “Municipalities would be allowed to create new settlement areas and would not be required to demonstrate the need for expansion.”

This government is continuing to encourage thoughtless sprawl and not thinking about affordability, whether it’s in the cost of new infrastructure required or the longer-term costs of living in urban sprawl. For example, the goal to “shorten commute journeys and decrease transportation congestion” is left out of the new provincial planning statement.

Why does this government want to bake in an older, more expensive and unsustainable way of providing housing?

The government is encouraging the business model of buying up land and then trying to influence elected officials to expand settlement areas onto their land, thereby delivering the hope for windfall profits.

Speaker, if you thought developers buying greenbelt land just before it was taken out and given to development smelled bad, allowing thoughtless urban expansion could create a province-wide greenbelt-palooza that makes that stag and doe look like a tea party.

Thank you to the member of the opposition offering backbone injections to get us to speed on this. My question is, where was that courage when 12 years of Liberal government did not see that crisis coming?

Today, what we live in is a result of bad planning, not seeing the crisis, not seeing it coming, not planning for it, not trying to mitigate the shortage which we are in now, which should be taken care of via the planning you were talking about, the urban planning you’re talking about, the city planning you’re talking about, which we didn’t see happening for 12 years.

Now my question is, are you going to join us to try to solve that issue before it’s too late?