I rise to speak to Bill 97, the government’s latest housing bill. And I want to begin by saying we are in a housing crisis. It’s getting worse, not better. It’s unacceptable that it now takes a young person 22 years to save to buy a home; that it takes the average minimum-wage worker in the city of Toronto to work 80 hours to afford a one-bedroom apartment; that there are no affordable apartments in many cities across the province, including the one I represent, that a minimum-wage worker can actually find to rent; and 185,000 families on a wait-list to access social housing.

So we have a housing crisis, but sprawl will not solve that crisis, because sprawl is too financially expensive to solve the crisis. This government started their sprawl agenda by opening the greenbelt for development, breaking an explicit promise not to do it. They made changes to the Planning Act, dismantling environmental protections to facilitate sprawl, but now, Bill 97 completely opens the floodgates to it by eliminating the provincial policy statement requirement that municipalities prioritize infill development before resorting to expansion of urban boundaries into farms and forests. Think about that, Speaker.

The bill makes it easier to expand boundaries at any time, instead of a more coordinated approach to land use planning, like places in Waterloo have done, with the support of farmers to make sure that we protect the local farmland that contributes so much to the economy. The bill gets rid of some of the key hard density targets previously included in planning documents. It consolidates the provincial policy statement and the growth plan, just assuming that a one-size-fits-all solution works for the whole province, which just isn’t the case—the challenges in the GTA are much different than in Windsor, Ottawa or Thunder Bay—and it further empowers the minister to override environmental protections in planning policy through the use of ministerial zoning orders on steroids.

So Speaker, people and municipalities simply cannot afford this bill. I don’t see how the government can consider themselves fiscally responsible in any way and support this sprawl agenda. Studies show that it costs two and a half times more to service a home for a municipality through sprawl development versus through building within existing urban boundaries. It’s $3,462 to service a home for sprawl; $1,416 within existing urban boundaries. A study in Ottawa showed that it’s costing the people of Ottawa an extra $465 per taxpayer to service sprawl development in the region versus non-sprawl development. As a matter of fact, homes built within just even gentle density actually save taxpayers money. Not only do they pay for themselves, they also generate an additional $606 per taxpayer to be used to serve city services, to fund them.

Municipalities can’t afford this bill. So it’s actually going to delay housing, because they’re not going to have the money and the resources to be able to build the sewer mains, the water mains, the roads, the hydro lines, all the things that it takes to actually make a home livable. People can’t afford it. Young families can’t afford to be forced to drive until they qualify for a mortgage. People want to live in affordable communities where they can afford to buy a home close to where they work, in places where they can live, work and play.

That’s why we need solutions that get past this expensive sprawl agenda that gets us beyond this false choice between tall and sprawl, solutions that allow us to build the housing supply we need while protecting the farmland that feeds us, that contributes $50 billion to the provincial economy and employs over 800,000 Ontarians; solutions that allow us to build homes without paving over the wetlands that clean our drinking water, protect us from flooding, and the forests and the green spaces where so many people love to spend time with their families but that also protect us from extreme weather events.

That’s exactly why I’ve put forward solutions like Bill 44 and Bill 45, which would allow us to build 1.5 million homes within existing urban boundaries in ways that are actually affordable for municipalities—the kinds of homes that are actually affordable for people. That’s why we’ve put forward solutions to get speculation out of the housing market so that homes can be for people and not speculators, and it’s why we’ve been calling on this government to actually start investing in non-profit and co-op housing.

At one time in Canada, we would build 20,000 co-op houses a year. Now, we hardly build any. Those are the deeply affordable homes within existing communities that provide the gentle density and missing middle that allow us to build affordable connected communities that people actually want to live in, not the sprawl that people cannot afford.

I cannot support a bill that’s going to make the housing crisis worse. We already have enough land set aside for development, according to the government’s own hand-picked Housing Affordability Task Force, to build two million homes—not just the 1.5 million, but two million homes. And if we do it within our existing urban boundaries—instead of imposing sprawl on municipalities, which this bill does—it will be more affordable for municipalities.

I don’t understand; I thought Conservative members understood fiscal responsibility and understood why it is so important to efficiently build within existing urban boundaries.

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