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.

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.

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?

Thank you very much to the member across for the question. The challenge that we have is that there are some municipalities that have already strong and stronger rental replacement bylaws, and what the government is proposing in this bill actually is less than what some municipalities have. The city of Toronto has had a rental replacement bylaw empowered by the previous governments so that we can develop our own, so we can meet the needs of Torontonians. This bill actually is going to undo that or looks like it’s going to muddy those waters.

As you try to lift the boats around other municipalities in Ontario, you’re actually sinking the tenant protections in Toronto. That’s certainly something that needs to be clarified and fixed at committee, and I really urge you to do that because it’s going to make a huge difference in the communities that I serve and, I suspect, in the communities that you serve as well.

Businesses and BIAs and the most prominent downtown business owners are all calling on the government—this government, in particular—to lead. They know that municipalities can’t do it themselves, which is why the biggest cities in Ontario have called on this government to convene a meeting with the Premier to specifically address homelessness, mental health and addictions. And as far as I know, that meeting with the Premier has never taken place.

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?