My question is to the Premier.

Without any consultation, Premier Ford announced plans to tear down the current Ontario Science Centre building and build a smaller, new building at Ontario Place, where large parts of the site are also being privatized with no consultation or transparency.

The Ontario Science Centre is an important architectural landmark and a vital place for the communities of Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon Park. Tearing it down is a bad idea.

The Premier says that the plan is to build housing on the site.

Has the public land where the Ontario Science Centre sits—land that belongs to the city of Toronto—already been promised to a developer? If so, who?

This petition is titled “National Chronic Pain Society petition,” and it reads, “To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas one in four Ontarians over the age of 15 suffer from chronic pain, with 73% reporting that the pain interferes with their daily lives and more than half reporting issues with depression and suicidal thoughts; and

“Whereas pain is the most common reason to seek health care, with chronic pain making up approximately 16% of emergency room visits and 38% of frequent visits, adding to the already lengthy wait times and delaying treatment;

“Whereas the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) is proposing to limit the number of nerve block injections a pain sufferer can receive to 16 per year, regardless of the severity of the patient’s condition or the number of injections needed, and seemingly without any consultations with patients or health care workers; and

“Whereas the most common treatment for pain provided by family doctors and hospitals is opioids, despite the current national crisis leading to an estimated 20 opioid-related deaths in Canada every day during the COVID-19 pandemic;

“We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

“Prevent OHIP from applying a one-size-fits-all solution to the issue of chronic pain, and allow for consultations with health care workers ... to determine the best way” forward “to treat chronic pain....”

I support this petition. I will affix my signature to it.

I’d like to thank Dr. Sally Palmer for sending me this petition. It’s titled “To Raise Social Assistance Rates” and it reads, “To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas Ontario’s social assistance rates are well below Canada’s official Market Basket Measure poverty line and far from adequate to cover the rising costs of food and rent: $733 for individuals on OW and soon $1,227 for ODSP;

“Whereas an open letter to the Premier and two cabinet ministers, signed by over 230 organizations, recommends that social assistance rates be doubled for both Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP);

“Whereas the recent small budget increase of 5% for ODSP still leaves” many “well below the poverty line, both they and those receiving the frozen OW rates are struggling to live in this time of alarming inflation;

“Whereas the government of Canada recognized in its CERB program that a ‘basic income’ of $2,000 per month was the standard support required by individuals who lost their employment during the pandemic;

“We, the undersigned citizens of Ontario, petition the Legislative Assembly” of Ontario “to double social assistance rates for OW and ODSP.”

I fully support this petition. I will affix my signature to it.

First, I want to talk about the title of this bill, Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act. The president of OECTA thought that maybe the title of the bill should be “the failed Conservative government keeps on failing students act.” The official opposition critic, the MPP for Ottawa West–Nepean, suggested a different title: “the micromanaging school boards as a distraction from the underfunding of schools act.” I think both of these names are better suited for this legislation than Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act.

Now, members of this House know that yesterday I had a group of students, participants in the Girls Government program, here at Queen’s Park. They attended question period. They met with you, Speaker. They met with the Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions—thank you very much for your time—and they watched question period. Through their learnings and from their day at Queen’s Park, they had a number of questions from what they observed. One of the questions that a student had was, why is it that the government was claiming that the opposition voted against certain measures that sound good? That was the question.

I explained to all of the students that oftentimes there are a number of tactics that the government side, in particular—the Conservatives—employ to make it seem like they’re actually doing something about an issue that needs to be addressed, but not really. A good example is naming pieces of legislation, naming bills, with titles that make it look like they’re doing something really meaningful and bringing in change, but the content of that bill, or the actions that the government is taking through the legislation, may not be what is required, may be a plan or an approach that doesn’t work, or falls far short of what needs to be done.

So I think that this bill, with this title—Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act—is actually a very clear example of what the student was asking and the example that I gave, which is the legislation, the content of the bill, doesn’t match the title. The title should be instead what I suggested earlier from our education critic and the OECTA president’s suggestions.

Now, this bill: Does this legislation really lead to better schools and student outcomes? No, not really. Because what do we need for better schools and student outcomes? We need better funding. We need proper funding of our schools. We need proper funding of students. This bill not only doesn’t do that; this bill doesn’t fix a systemic issue, a root issue, which is that the funding formula that doesn’t work.

The government recently brought in the 2023 budget, and in the government’s budget, the funding for education doesn’t even keep up with the inflation. Everybody knows the cost of everything is up, and when budgets don’t keep up with inflation, it amounts to a cut. With this government, we have seen education budgets be cut year after year.

Now, on the government side, particularly through the Ministry of Education, the spin is that this is the largest education budget ever in the province’s history, forgetting to mention that a good percentage of that funding is for child care for the national child care program that is being funded by the federal government. So the largest budget that the government is claiming includes federal dollars, because child care falls under the Ministry of Education.

As well, we all know that the impact of the pandemic continues and that means higher needs in terms of learning for students and other supports, such as mental health. Now, during the pandemic, many school boards, including right here in Toronto, the Toronto District School Board, had to spend money from their reserves to pay for costs that were associated in order to follow the directives given by this province. The government forced our school boards, the TDSB, to tap into their reserves. And so, what has that led to? That has led to the complete depletion of reserves of the TDSB.

I’m going to quote from a letter that was sent by the chair of the TDSB and the director to the Minister of Education. It reads, “TDSB now faces a deficit of approximately $61 million for the 2023-24 school year according to the broad’s preliminary operating financial position. We have depleted any working reserves and used reserves put away for other purposes. If the pandemic costs incurred by the board were reimbursed by the ministry, the TDSB would have additional funding to support its current financial shortfall without having to reduce programs and services for students.”

Did the government reimburse the TDSB? No. Instead, the government’s response was that they were not going to bail out school boards—Speaker, “bail out.” That term is so inappropriate because it’s as if to say that the boards were mismanaging funds when we know not only was there not enough funding provided by the province but that the province is quite prescriptive when it comes to how boards need to spend the funding that they receive. The minister and the government know very clearly that boards are not allowed to run deficits. So now, without this reimbursement, with a deficit of $61 million and the government’s refusal to fund properly our schools and students, it is going to result in more cuts to staff, more cuts to programs, larger class sizes, unable to address the violence that we’re seeing increase in our schools, no support for students with special needs, no mental health supports—in fact, the Girls’ Government group yesterday came here to Queen’s Park asking for more mental health supports in our schools—and so on.

This bill, inappropriately titled Better Schools and Student Outcomes, does really nothing meaningful in order to support our students, in order to support the teachers, the education workers, the school community and families.

I hope that I get an opportunity—I don’t have much time left—to present our solutions and also talk about the direction that this government is heading in with this bill, because, really, in a nutshell, it is a power grab. It’s a power grab that allows the province to override local democratically elected school boards.

I can see where the government is heading with this, and it raises serious questions. I want to ask the government: Is your intention to appoint people to run our school boards? Is that where this is ultimately leading?

Speaker, I cannot stress enough in the remaining seconds that I have, if we want better schools and student outcomes, fund our schools and students properly.

I’d like to thank the member for his question. Don’t get me wrong; capital projects are absolutely important and needed, especially where there are communities that need schools. However, there’s also no money allocated in the budget for school repairs. Now, I can tell you, speaking as a representative from Toronto, we have many schools that are old, over 100 years old. The school repair backlog in this province is at over $16 billion. We have kids who go to school who need to wear a coat in the winter to learn. We have schools where kids can’t drink the water from the fountains because it has lead. We have kids who go to school and can’t use the washrooms because the door locks are broken. This is the state of many, many schools, and we need the government to invest in repairing the infrastructure so that kids are not learning in crumbling schools.

Thank you to my colleague from Niagara Falls for his question. I have to say, the member has been such a strong advocate for the students, the teachers and education workers and the school community of Niagara Falls, so thank you for your work on that.

To answer his question, absolutely not. When kids go hungry, they are not going to be able to learn but they’re not going to be able to do anything, because that is all that the student physically—and it has an impact mentally as well. It’s going to overtake them, in terms of the need for the students. It’s so important, and we have to take a number of different measures, from ensuring that school nutrition programs are well funded and run and in place in every school for every student that needs them, but also that the families are not living in poverty, that they’re not being—not only where the cost of living is increasing, but prices of basic things like groceries are being gouged. Rents are through the roof. On so many fronts, it has been so difficult to keep a roof over your head, to feed your children, and now, with the government taking away student nutrition funding, you are not going to get better outcomes—

I rise today to speak to Bill 97, Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act. This is the government’s fourth housing legislation in four years. That means four out of four times the government has failed to address the affordable housing crisis meaningfully and it’s taking, once again, the wrong approach to addressing housing supply issues. Now, this bill makes changes on two key fronts: on development policy and on tenant protections. I’ll talk about the development policy first and then get to tenant protections.

Speaker, this bill fails to eliminate exclusionary zoning and allow construction of more affordable housing options—such as duplexes, townhomes, walk-up apartments—everywhere that single detached homes are allowed. This was a key recommendation from the Housing Affordability Task Force report, and it is an idea that the official opposition, the NDP, supports. It was, in fact, part of our housing platform.

The government’s previous housing legislation, Bill 23—the infamous Bill 23—included allowing secondary and tertiary suites as-of-right within existing structures, which we support. But according to the government themselves, they expect that this change will deliver only 50,000 new homes over the next 10 years, which is barely 3% of the 1.5 million homes that are needed. Instead of eliminating exclusionary zoning, Bill 23 preserves restrictive zoning rules like two- or three-storey height limits, maximum floor space indexes or minimum setbacks that effectively prohibit what we call missing middle forms of housing. That bill fell far short of what the Housing Affordability Task Force recommended, and now with this bill, Bill 97, it still does not address the shortcomings.

Instead this bill, once again, relies almost entirely on deregulation and tax cuts to incentivize the for-profit private market to deliver 1.5 million homes over the next decade. Speaker, this narrow-minded approach is failing, and we know it’s failing because the government’s own budget revealed that the projected housing starts in Ontario are going down instead of going up.

Now we in the NDP, the official opposition, have called for a strong public sector role to deliver new affordable and non-market housing that the for-profit private sector can’t or won’t deliver. There is no provision in Bill 97 to facilitate new non-market housing. This bill, combined with some major changes that the government is making to the provincial Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe and the provincial policy statement—what the government is doing is further accelerating farmland loss and unsustainable sprawl.

Speaker, doubling down on sprawl is going to make it so much more expensive for municipalities to provide the basic services that these developments are going to need. From roads and transit to electricity and sewage, all of these services are going to cost more, because it costs more to service low-density single-family-home subdivisions than it costs to provide these services and infrastructure in areas that are already zoned for development.

And since it is much more expensive for municipalities to provide these services, Ontarians are not only going to see property tax hikes—in fact, Speaker, folks all around the province and many municipalities are already getting these higher property tax bills now, but they’re going to see the tax hikes year after year, coupled with service cuts, because it is so expensive to build this infrastructure and to maintain the infrastructure. Low-density suburban sprawl is a costly and backward approach to planning. It is not going to address the housing affordability crisis or the housing supply crisis.

Let me remind the members of the government once again that the government’s own Housing Affordability Task Force said that the 1.5 million homes needed to be built in the next decade can be built within current urban boundaries. There is no need to pave over the greenbelt. There is no need for sprawl. That’s what I want to cover on the development policy changes.

In the remaining time I have, I want to get into tenant protections. Now, the tenant protections in this bill fall so short of what the NDP and tenants in this province are calling for. It’s like the government knows they have to do more to protect tenants and asked themselves what the least is that they can do that will not disrupt the status quo. That’s what the changes are in this bill: the slightest of slight improvements simply to be able to claim that the Conservatives are doing something for tenants.

Speaker, I want to talk about the AC use. That’s in this bill. Last summer, in the midst of the heat wave, tenants in my riding at 130 Jameson Avenue in Parkdale received eviction notices for using their ACs. Many leases forbid the use of ACs. Their corporate landlords at 130 Jameson said that AC use is prohibited under lease agreements, so either the AC goes or the tenants have to go.

The Residential Tenancies Act mandates a minimum temperature of 20 degrees during the winter, but there is no law on maximum temperatures. Municipalities in Ontario are asking the province to mandate maximum temperatures, including the city of Toronto. So given that there is no maximum-temperature legislation for protection of tenants, the tenants organize in order to be able to keep using their ACs because, in the hot summer months, this is a serious health and safety issue.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission was very clear. In fact, they issued a statement, and the opening line of their statement read, “Access to cooling during extreme heat waves is a human rights issue.” Their statement talked about the obligation of housing providers and specifically referenced the case of the tenants at 130 Jameson. They also stated that the current Residential Tenancies Act “leaves many Ontario tenants without protections against extreme heat” because air conditioning is not considered a vital service.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission called on this government to “include air conditioning as a vital service, like the provision of heat ... and to establish a provincial maximum temperature to make sure that ... tenants are protected against threats of eviction” simply for “using “safely installed air conditioning units.” That’s the background. This is what has led to what’s in Bill 97 today around AC use.

So what does the Ford government do? They prohibit the ban of AC in leases, which is helpful, but it still puts the onus on the tenants to install their own ACs to ensure that apartments don’t get dangerously hot in the summer, and they’re allowing rents to be increased for installing the AC. That’s why I say that the measures that the government has put in place for tenants fall so short. It does the absolute bare minimum.

It’s also a contradiction of an explicit ban that’s already in the Residential Tenancies Act on the use of seasonal fees. So I will flag with the government right now: When the bill is before committee, there has to be an amendment to ensure that seasonal fee ban continues on and that there are no extra charges for AC use. Just as the Ontario Human Rights Commission has called for, we need maximum-temperature legislation. This will also be consistent with the long-standing, already set-out principle that all tenants have the right to reasonable enjoyment of their unit. The temperature of the unit that they live in is an absolutely important factor.

Speaker, there are some other measures in it. I do not have time to go over all of them. All I want to say at the end of the day, when it comes to housing and tenants, is that housing is a human right, and so we need to be able to ensure that every Ontarian has decent, affordable housing that they can call their own, something that really meets the needs of the tenant.

I thank the member from Windsor–Tecumseh for his question. One of the measures I didn’t get time to discuss was the increase in fines for bad landlords when they execute what we call unfair renovictions. The thing is this: So far, increasing fines alone has not proven to be effective. We know that because there have been fines that have been issued, and the behaviour has not changed.

There is a very good example that happened, a case that happened right here in Toronto, where tenants were renovicted in bad faith. In an unprecedented manner, a decision was made. The landlords—I forget the name of the corporation right now—received a huge penalty, and then they came into my riding and did the same thing. That did not deter them. We need other measures in place, such as vacancy control, which I hope I will get an opportunity to talk about some more.

We have seen a huge increase in renovictions, a huge increase in own-use evictions, and now the government is weakening rental replacement bylaws that the city has. What it’s going to lead to is more tenants being evicted unfairly. It’s going to lead to skyrocketing rents. And it’s going to lead to more and more people—particularly young people, young families, students—not being able to call Toronto home anymore. They’re going to all be driven out of Toronto. That’s what is going to end up happening.

I thank the member opposite for his question. I apologize; I don’t remember your riding name right now. I don’t have my cheat sheet.

But here’s the thing: If, truly, in good faith, the government wants to bring in legislation that addresses this question, then yes, we can talk about it. We can look at it and examine it more closely at committee. However, this bill, combined with the major changes that the government is making to the provincial policy statement, is expanding sprawl, is paving over farmland. I would imagine—and we are hearing from farmers too that they are worried about farmland loss. This bill is accelerating farmland loss.

So I would say to the member that there are tidbits in this bill which are helpful. As I mentioned, there was another one where AC bans are not in leases anymore. There are tidbits that are helpful, but overall this bill fails to address the issues that we are facing around housing affordability and around housing supply.

The solution, the proposal, is one that actually has been before the House. Last session, the government actually voted it down. It’s a bill that I tabled, called the Rent Stabilization Act. The member from London North Centre was a co-sponsor of this bill. That bill, the Rent Stabilization Act, which has been reintroduced and is before this House this session, will close the biggest loophole in the Residential Tenancies Act, and that’s the vacancy decontrol loophole. It will ensure that rent control is tied to the unit and not to the person, meaning new tenants will pay what the previous tenants paid, rents are not allowed to be increased to whatever amount it is, and it will ensure that housing remains affordable.

Speaker, just a couple of days ago, I shared with members of this House how in the High Park neighbourhood, rent for a one-bedroom increased by 46%—46%. Do you think that that is manageable? No one can live with such unpredictable increases to cost of living. It’s very important we close the vacancy decontrol loophole.

Speaker, I don’t have much time, but I will say this: The government’s own Housing Affordability Task Force has released a report. Start there—

I would like to thank my colleague from Toronto Centre for their excellent presentation. The member makes a very, very important point, that there are businesses across this province—certainly many businesses in my riding—that have called on all of us as legislators to deal with the problem, the crisis of homelessness, and to make sure that people who are unhoused get access to housing and that they have the mental health and other wraparound services that are needed.

My question to the member is, given that the homelessness crisis is getting worse—the municipalities of Hamilton and, I believe, Ottawa have passed motions declaring a state of emergency on the homelessness crisis—what action can the government take today to address this issue?