My question is for the Associate Minister of Housing.

Recently, our government introduced a new housing action plan: Bill 97, the Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act. Introducing this legislation means we’ve fulfilled a promise we made to Ontarians: bringing forward a housing action plan every year to help address the housing crisis Ontario is currently facing.

While this is positive news, constituents in my riding have raised questions and concerns regarding what actions our government can take to protect them as tenants. They’ve heard reports about questionable evictions due to renovations, demolitions and conversions that happen in housing units and apartments.

Can the associate minister please explain what additional protections will take effect to support tenants if our latest housing bill is passed?

Renters and landlords want a stop to antiquated and, yes, confusing regulations.

Our government must ensure that rules surrounding rental housing are fair, reasonable, and enforced in a timely manner.

As we enter the summer months, and with rising temperatures, individuals and families who live as tenants have raised questions about what rights they have to install air conditioning units.

Can the associate minister please explain how the proposed housing bill will address tenants’ rights to install air conditioning units?

I really want to thank the great member from Whitby.

Speaker, nobody should be forced to move out of their homes. Ontarians work hard to pay their bills to keep a roof over their heads, so it is our job to ensure nobody is treated unfairly, which is why our latest bill, if passed, will give tenants and landlords the opportunity to resolve cases at the Landlord and Tenant Board up to six months after a renovation has been completed, to prevent unlawful evictions, and to work together to create a repayment agreement when a tenant falls behind on their rent.

We’re also proposing to double the maximum fines to $100,000 for individuals and $500,000 for corporations to help prevent and deter bad faith evictions.

We will continue to listen to and protect tenants and landlords to ensure everyone who is looking for a place to live can find one that meets their needs and their budget.

Yes, my colleague is right—on days when temperatures go above 30 degrees, having an air conditioning unit can be essential, especially for those who have underlying medical conditions relating to warm weather.

Our proposed legislation, if passed, will provide a clear road map for tenants who wish to install an air conditioner in their apartments. For example, they must give written notice to the landlord, and they can be charged a seasonal fee based on the electricity usage.

Our proposed changes reinforce existing laws and would provide tenants with additional supports so that they can assure that they have a safe and comfortable place to live.

We’re fixing the Landlord and Tenant Board—a need we hear about so often from both landlords and tenants alike.

I call on the opposition to stop standing up for the status quo, start standing up for Ontarians, and vote with us on Bill 97.

I’m delighted to speak to the Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act, because there’s so much of this bill that I see reflected in my home community. I’d say that my journey starts in Walkerville. Walkerville is an incredibly vibrant and picturesque part of my riding. It was built as a company town by Hiram Walker and Sons Ltd. It’s the home of Canadian Club whisky.

Interjections.

But in so many ways, Walkerville—I call it a gold standard for urban planning. It’s a place where people really want to be, and so the vibrancy and the longevity of Walkerville is, in many ways, facilitated by not just Bill 97, but previously Bill 23.

I want to highlight my friend Sarah Cipkar. I first met Sarah when I worked for the city of Windsor. I led the environmental assessment process for a project called the Central Box. Sarah, to her credit, was thinking of how my presentation, the municipal presentation, was not serving our various immigrant communities very well. I didn’t have translators, I didn’t have facilitators, and she took it on herself to create her own at the YMCA, which I attended. I was surrounded by a number of translators as I described the technical merits of the environmental assessment. But what Sarah has done with her career is phenomenal. She created Cipkar Development, which creates additional dwelling units in places like Walkerville which have back alleys and which have additional space where there’s a density, but we have the capacity to improve.

Another feature that exists in Walkerville is an absence of driveways on many of the streets. The services are provided through the alleys, and so street parking is vitally important, in particular parallel parking. I know that’s how I failed my first driving test, but it’s certainly important in some neighbourhoods like Walkerville, where parallel parking is the norm.

This bill, Bill 97, provides some good clarity with respect to parking improvements or parking regulations that are required, because previously it was not quite clear whether you could insist on that parking spot on the very first unit. Now, with the changes here, it means you don’t have to add unnecessary parking. Walkerville has parking on the street, and that’s the character of it, and while certainly you need to provide services for the people of the neighbourhood and access for them, parking doesn’t have to dominate the yard under this change. So I think this is a great part of the bill.

I also want to call attention to recent developments in Walkerville near Ottawa Street. There was formerly a church located there. Ottawa Street is what’s branded by the local BIA as being “uptown.” I think it’s a good adage, because there are a lot of great stores, great restaurants on Ottawa Street. This church had reached the end of life. It no longer met building code requirements, and so it came down and was demolished. Initially, there was a proposal to build three homes on the property. Instead, what came back was a proposal to build a 23-unit apartment building. I won’t get into the merits of three single-family units versus a 23-unit apartment building, but needless to say, there were many in the community who were against the proposal.

To their credit, Windsor city council did support, as they have for a number of recent housing projects. We do need those units in our community as much as possible, and Windsor was ahead of the curve in many ways. They had a community-approved plan for intensification for the downtown especially so that we could use the infill lands.

But what Windsor has reported with some—in one of our previous bills, prior to my election, the More Homes for Everyone Act, there were some accountability measures brought in. Some relief was asked for, because truly, you need to get people on board. You need to hire people and train people in order to process the applications. Bill 97 responds to this challenge, delivers. It means that the refunds of—I call it a noncompliant timeline for processing. They would only apply after July 1.

It’s proposed further that the minister have the ability to be nimble in granting some exceptions on this point and exempt municipalities from having to follow through with the fee refund if there was some particular factor that warrants it.

Also, what’s part of this is an opportunity to reduce the complications when we are creating residential buildings of 10 units or less. Right now, in planning, you can go to site plan control in many municipalities which allows the municipality to regulate landscaping, architectural materials and ask for on-site improvements to reflect the character of the neighbourhood.

Just having been on the other side of that process, this is something that does slow down development. There are reasons for it. Obviously, the site plan control existed for a reason. But if our goal is building housing, buildings that are 10 units or less are really not imposing in the manner of a larger building, and it’s important to make sure that those can come online.

I say that’s the story of generally Bill 97 as a whole, because our goal is to build more housing and on a faster basis. We are finding there are roadblocks. When we strive for the moon and really have tough targets, it means that we lose the opportunity to get some low-hanging fruit. So I really appreciate some of the changes that are here, and that includes having the minister’s intervention.

Before the last election, in my riding we had the NextStar Energy battery plant. It truly required an MZO. When I heard the criticism from various party leaders about the use of the MZO to secure this major economic development opportunity for our community, what else could I do? I was grateful to be the candidate representing the government, because this development is vital. The news came out today about Volkswagen in St. Thomas. That’s going to be transformative for St. Thomas, but the NextStar project is transformative for Windsor. We need the minister to have that ability to make discretionary decisions when it fits, so I appreciate that part of it.

I also wanted to review a little bit about the employment area protections; I know it’s important, and I see my time is running very, very low. But we want to make sure that employment areas are protected because many municipalities are running into problems with the factories not finding an opportunity to locate. But housing is still quite important. We are, as part of this, introducing the provisions that limit appeals of municipal refusals and non-decisions.

All that being said, I also wanted to—maybe I’ll close out by mentioning my hometown of Tecumseh. It has some rural areas in it. I was on the committee of adjustment for eight years. We constantly got lot severance and variance applications in rural areas. There was this interesting dynamic that was created where you could sever off a matrimonial home or a family home, and you would rezone the rest so that you wouldn’t use up the farmland. But someone else could actually come in and then do that, so the family couldn’t do it but someone else could. So the changes that are here in Bill 97 provide more flexibility for rural areas and to allow for families that hope and that opportunity to continue to serve and work the lands that they grew up on.

I’m really glad to hear that the member acknowledges that we have a massive housing supply crisis.

I chose Ontario as my home when I immigrated to Canada. I chose to be here.

I just have a very short question: Based on what we put forward in Bill 97, will the member be supporting Bill 97, helping tenants and helping people purchase their homes?

Really, the changes do protect renters here. I look at the additional 40 adjudicators who are being hired for the landlord and tenant tribunal. I’m sure the member for Windsor West is getting the same calls that I am about landlord/tenant issues in that there is a significant backlog that was created—or largely amplified during the pandemic. So this is quite a more meaningful investment at this moment in time. It doubles the number of full-time adjudicators at the Landlord and Tenant Board. We need decisions. A lot of renters are losing out—and landlords, for that matter, for bad tenants. So this is a key investment that will help renters. I thank you for the question.

My question to the member across the way is around protections for tenants. One of the issues that I hear about most frequently in my constituency office is from tenants who are pressured by their landlords. They feel that they have to move out. The landlords use unethical means to get them to move out, because the landlords know that once that tenant is gone, they can increase the rent to whatever they want.

I also hear from tenants who are living in buildings that were constructed after November 2018. There’s absolutely no rent control on those units. So why, if this government was genuinely interested in protecting tenants, did they not do something to scrap vacancy decontrol and to remove the exemption of the rent control for post-2018 builds?

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 want to thank the member for a very compelling speech. I appreciate it very much. I always learn a lot when I’m able to hear from you.

I know, given your neighbourhood, you undoubtedly run into more rental circumstances than I would—I’ve got lots of apartment buildings. I know that we as a government have introduced more penalties for bad landlords and taken action to prevent evictions. This bill has measures that will help to provide better protections to tenants in the province, and I’m wondering if you intend to support the measures that are provided in the bill to strengthen the consequences against bad landlords.

I’d like to thank the member from Parkdale–High Park for her presentation on Bill 97, Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act.

We look at the title of this, and it talks about protecting tenants, but I do believe that there are quite a number of pieces missing which actually protect tenants. My question to the member is: If this government truly wanted to support tenants, what would they do?

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—

In my riding of Essex, we have some very good landlords and some very good tenants, and these very good landlords and very good tenants have contacted me because they have disputes that they need to have settled. In order to settle these disputes, they need to go to the Landlord and Tenant Board, and there have been delays that have piled up at that board due to the pandemic. I’m sure that the member who just spoke also has good landlords and good tenants in his riding who are having disputes that need adjudication at the Landlord and Tenant Board. So my question to my friend is, what is this government doing to help adjudicate those disputes and get them through the system?

I would like to thank the member from Mississauga–Malton for his presentation. I’d also like to remind the member that the Conservative government got rid of rent control on new rental buildings first occupied after November 2018. I have heard from many tenants, as I’m sure the member from Mississauga–Malton has as well.

My question is two: What do you say to your constituents who face these massive rental increases, and how do you justify removing protections from your constituents?

It’s a pleasure and honour to rise in the House to speak on behalf of the good people of Toronto Centre.

Here today, we’re debating government Bill 97, Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act. Like already pointed out by some of my colleagues, the title of the bill doesn’t always line up with the true intention of the content of the bill, which I think is rather misleading. But we are accustomed to that here, especially as every bill has a nice, benevolent-sounding title, but what the bill does is oftentimes something very different, perhaps less benevolent.

This bill does not do anything to prevent the demolition or the destruction of rent-controlled, serviceable buildings that are currently in the city of Toronto or anywhere else in your communities or right across Ontario.

It actually creates a lot of confusion regarding the rental replacement program, especially for some cities that may have a stronger bylaw than what the province is proposing. So it looks like we’re actually going to be perhaps weakening what is municipally provided rental replacement, and of course, that’s the wrong way. We want to lift all boats, not sink them.

Neighbourhoods like St. James Town in my community—it’s one of the most dense in the country, and now, there is encouraging legislation on the table which is before us, which is what we’re debating today, that will actually incentivize the owners, the corporation, to go tear down these older buildings that are protected under rent control.

This bill doesn’t do anything to encourage and actually foster the completion or the design of family-sized units, which is what people really, actually want, especially if we’re going to intensify to protect the ecologically sensitive greenbelt.

This bill doesn’t do anything to address the public sector’s role in the provision of affordable housing. Instead, the government is overly relying on private sector developers, which we know is always going to fail to meet the mark with respect to social housing needs. That is just how the market works: They’re not going to build you non-profit subsidized units. That’s what governments are there to do.

I know, in my communities, that some of the largest, most prominent BIAs as well as the biggest pension funds, which own some of the most significant real estate in downtown Toronto, are asking, every single time, when this government is going to get serious about building public housing. Because they’re seeing the chronic homelessness on the street, and they need to have that addressed, and they are not going to build it for you. You will have to do it yourself.

There are so many other challenges with this bill. I think that it’s been spoken to before, Speaker, but I want to be able to hit the point around sprawl. Bill 97 does a lot of things, including promote very expensive sprawl, which will ultimately hurt the pocketbooks of every single Ontarian. It will cost more in housing to build very large mega-mansions that are over $1 million, $2 million, $3 million on the greenbelt. It’s going to be an environmental fiasco as it pertains to how much you have to clean up afterwards if you’re building this sprawl. Infrastructure costs will go up under this bill. Energy consumption will go up under this bill. Road congestion will go up under this bill. Transportation costs, including social fragmentation—all of that is actually being manufactured by Bill 97.

In my community, in Toronto Centre, we have over 80% of our population actually living in high-rise communities. Some of them are in purpose-built rentals that have been there since the 1960s. They’re in really great shape; what they need are investments, and the government’s bill right now actually de-incentivizes that. Instead, what it does is it actually encourages them to go apply for demolition permits.

I’m facing, and your community will be facing, exactly the same threat. Buildings that have over 250 resident families will be losing their home, as they are at 25 St. Mary’s, because a developer wants to tear it down so they can build, perhaps, two luxury apartment buildings as opposed to servicing the building that’s there. Those are rent-controlled apartments, and they will not be affordable when the new project is complete.

I’m extremely nervous, and I think you should be as well, about what you’re actually going to be doing to communities that right now are struggling to meet the affordability and housing crisis in Toronto, because certainly your bill is not going to help that. We need downtowns and we need all communities right across Ontario to be as diverse as possible. I want to live in communities where we have newcomers, long-time Canadians, students, seniors, people on disability, people of all incomes. That’s what makes a vibrant, dynamic community, and that’s what we need to design and build. But we’re not doing that with this type of legislation, which actually incentivizes only one type of construction, and most of us are not going to be able to afford that.

Diversity is what makes our communities vibrant. It’s actually what makes communities successful. But in this government’s future, you’re not going to be building any of that. We’re going to be seeing more people being squeezed out. Whether they be bus drivers, taxi drivers, receptionists, daycare workers, no one is going to be able to live in this Premier’s Ontario, to be quite honest, Speaker, and it’s going to make things significantly worse.

I’ve talked about St. James Town, a community that is one of the densest in Canada—it’s definitely the densest in Toronto and Ontario. This community is already overcrowded. We have some of the most overcrowded schools, overcrowded and overloaded community centres and libraries, and we need to be able to invest in the social infrastructure so that the neighbourhoods are vibrant, exciting and dynamic, and not actually worse.

That’s what your bill is going to be doing: It’s going to make things much more expensive. Rather than tearing down what is decent, acceptable, already rent-controlled housing stock—you’re actually tearing it down. This neighbourhood has been called by all occasions a world within a block, because it is so diverse.

Residents of my community know that disruption is coming. They see the threat on the horizon. They are following and tracking the government’s housing bills very closely, and they keep asking the question: What’s in it for them, and how is it going to work? They know that they’re asking a lot of questions that they’re not getting answers to, including: Where are they going to go when they’re being displaced? How are they going to afford to stay in the city—and your residents will be asking the same thing, to stay in their communities—and how long do they have to wait before they get to return, if they even come back to a community that they recognize?

All of this is happening under this government’s watch, and it’s not that we don’t know what to do; it’s just that the government is not willing to do it.

I’ve spoken to people who are living in apartments in downtown Toronto right now who are facing that imminent threat. Imagine if it was your child. Imagine if it was your kid who goes to you and says, “Mom and dad, my apartment has just been rezoned. I’m about to lose my rent-controlled apartment. Is there anything you can do as a government member to help?” Imagine what they would learn if you were to tell them this is actually going to be building more affordable housing and they know in their gut that it is not. That’s exactly what this bill does.

Every day, constituents visit my office. They share so many stories of how they’re overcrowded. They talk about the inaccessibility of some of their units. All that means is you invest in the properties that you have. You don’t need to tear it down. You don’t need to scale it and raze it.

The government likes to talk about building 1.5 million homes. The question is, who is going to afford these homes, and how are they going to be living in these vibrant and dynamic neighbourhoods when there’s nothing but homes? Sprawling subdivisions are expensive, and they will continue to be expensive. There’s nothing cheap about them. Even if it means an easy, quick profit for the developer, they are much more difficult and much more expensive to service for municipalities.

We should all agree that housing is a human right, and there are so many people right now, especially in our communities, in your downtowns and my downtowns, that are struggling with that. Government supportive housing is something that my local business community, including the financial district—the commercial business district of Canada is asking for government supports on that. The business community has actually identified this as being their number one priority. Believe it or not, it’s actually that, that they’re asking for more supportive housing than I have heard from activists as well as housing providers.

The business community in Toronto is leading the charge, demanding that the government get back involved with public housing service delivery and making sure that mental health and wraparound addictions supports are there. That’s what their ask is. And certainly, for a government that talks about being business friendly, their request is falling on deaf ears.

You may recall that I had a resident come to the House about five or six weeks ago. Her name is Sarah. She’s been homeless since she brought her newborn infant out of the hospital. She couldn’t return back to the apartment she was living in for reasons that are not her fault. She is plugged into every single housing provider in the city of Toronto, who are all doing the very best they can to help her. Sarah and her newborn daughter are still homeless—still homeless, Speaker.

I wish I could give her a response, I wish I could give her the keys to an apartment, but there is no solution for her. And certainly today, in Bill 97, there’s still no solution. Despite the fact that the government likes to brag that they’re delivering housing, for people like Sarah and so many others I’m aware of, there is no provision of clean, affordable, decent, safe housing for them, and certainly not coming out of Bill 97.

I want to thank the member for Toronto Centre for her remarks. This is, I would say, an area that I don’t see a lot of in my riding. I definitely have buildings, but I haven’t run into the same scale.

I know, just last fall, I believe it was the member for University–Rosedale who mentioned that the government had removed rental replacement bylaws as part of Bill 23. Looking at Bill 97, it doesn’t look like that’s true, because it’s right there. The enhanced protections for tenants are there and it allows the government to expand rules around tenant compensation in our communities. So I’m wondering if you can elaborate on this point. I see a bit of a disconnect.

I want to thank my colleague for the presentation. I had already raised earlier the fact that in this bill, there is not rent control for all residential units. That still is a problem. This government is not moving towards vacancy control to control the costs of when a unit becomes empty and new tenants come in.

But I want to talk about another issue where I had a constituent just last week who came in with some very serious concerns about the maintenance of her rental unit and issues with the landlord. When she calls the rental enforcement unit, there’s an automated message that sends her to the website of the Landlord and Tenant Board, who she cannot get a hold of. So the government is talking about more adjudicators, but if you can’t get through to file a complaint, you can’t actually get to the adjudication process. She has some disabilities that actually make it very difficult for her to go online, something this government is moving more towards and taking the human aspect out of it.

But I’ve also heard from landlords that are experiencing this same terrible cycle of not being able to get through to the Landlord and Tenant Board, not being able to reach someone to actually file a complaint if they do have a problematic tenant. So I’m wondering if my colleague could tell me, do you see anything in this bill that’s actually going to address those issues, whether that’s from the tenants’ side or from the landlords’ side?

I appreciated the comments from my colleague and her perspective on the Toronto housing crisis. I wondered what would be the one thing she would like to see the government do that would actually protect tenants in this province—