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?

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.