I’d like to talk about having the honour of attending Girls Inc. of York Region Spirit of the Girl breakfast last Friday in my riding in Newmarket. Girls Inc. of York Region focuses on supporting the resilience of young girls and women and has served my community for over 40 years. Their research-based programs encourage girls to thrive socially, academically and emotionally in an affirming environment, providing gender-specific support to girls of all backgrounds.

It was my privilege to announce at the breakfast on Friday that our government has funded this meaningful work with two grants totalling over $400,000 through the Ontario Trillium Foundation. This will help expand their innovative after-school programs to three new schools as well as help increase capacity to support girls and young women in York region. Specifically, this funding will enable them to expand staff training, provide a social worker for counselling and wellness checks and expand fundraising efforts.

I am so happy to see Girls Inc. of York Region empowering girls and young women to meet emotional and academic challenges with resilience, especially those who face various barriers. I am proud that our government will help them expand this crucial work. Thank you to Girls Inc. for making sure no girl is left behind.

I have a petition here to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.

“Whereas police provide protection to some of the most vulnerable members of our society; and

“The provincial government has launched the Guns, Gangs and Violence Reduction Strategy; and

“The 2023-2024 budget commits an additional $13.4 million to this strategy;

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

“That the Legislative Assembly of Ontario reject the defund the police position and continue funding police, seizing illegal guns, suppressing gangs and supporting victims of violence through the Guns, Gangs and Violence Reduction Strategy.”

I am more than honoured to sign my name to this petition, and I’ll provide it to Cyndi.

I’d like to thank the member from University–Rosedale for her presentation. I did take note that during her presentation, she did speak about the need for strengthening protections for tenants.

In fact, in the past, our government has brought in measures to strengthen protections for tenants. For example, we increased fines for bad landlords, and we also took action to prevent evictions. The opposition did choose to vote against those measures, which is truly unfortunate.

But this time, we do have an opportunity to work together and support measures that will once again provide better protections for tenants in this province. So my question to the member is, will you join us in supporting these enhanced protections, or will you continue to oppose them?

I’d like thank my colleague from Essex for his dynamic presentation.

I’m honoured to rise today in this chamber, representing the amazing constituents of Newmarket–Aurora, to speak to actions our government is taking to help more and more Ontarians realize their dream of home ownership. The Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act, 2023, is the latest in a series of steps our government is taking to increase housing supply and help more Ontarians find a home they can afford.

I’m going to tell you about some of the housing challenges that I have heard from a variety of people in my riding and beyond. Afterwards, I’m going to address how our plan will help each of those challenges.

First off, and I think we’ve heard this: The cost of homes is a challenge for young people to enter into the market—even for a young couple. Example: both living at home, not paying rent, but earning good salaries of well over 80K, but holding off getting married until they can afford a home. Let’s look at the implications of this scenario. Young couples staying home longer—this delays parents’ consideration of downsizing. Young couples waiting longer to start a family, which then means family planning is delayed—delay of getting into the market means a delay for young people to start building their own personal development and self-reliance.

Secondly: seniors—people retiring—who would like to downsize and stay in their community, but there are no homes applicable to their age. Thus, where are the age-friendly communities that meet the needs of people of all ages?

Thirdly: retired people living in their home and who have an apartment suite, who are landlords, yet having challenges with their tenants. I have heard of this situation far too often—retired, house is paid for, and they turn an in-law suite into a rental to generate income for their retirement, and then all of a sudden it becomes a nightmare.

Fourthly: seniors and retirees who are purchasing new-build homes for retirement purposes and then are faced with a situation where the builder is not building within the agreed-upon time frame. This puts the buyer in a precarious situation, as they need to sell their home but have no home to go to due to challenges faced by the builder.

I note all of these challenges—as it has been explained to me—as these are real challenges that residents of our communities are facing.

So what is the role of government? It is to ensure that we create an environment that addresses this housing crisis by making certain we propose changes that react to market conditions and encourage development of all types of housing and significantly increase our housing supply. We have already introduced a range of measures to increase housing supply, and we can see their growing and positive impact.

A Statistics Canada study revealed that from 2011 to 2021 Ontario had the fourth-largest decline in home ownership rates amongst provinces and territories in Canada. What does that tell us? Well, it reveals that there were decades of inaction, burdensome red tape, and the “not in my backyard” ideology—that all-so-unfortunate opposition by residents to proposed developments in their local areas—as well as support for strict land use regulations.

I am proud that we are a government who want to provide housing for people of this province—for all the people in this province. With the steps taken to date, housing starts in Ontario reached a level not seen in more than 30 years. Just last year, rental housing starts in our province reached an all-time high. These trends have continued into 2023. For the first quarter of this year, we have had an 11% rise in housing starts compared with this time last year, and purpose-built rental housing starts are currently more than double compared to the same period since last year.

I want to address the four points that I raised from listening to real resident challenges. How does our plan make housing more affordable? Well, we’re streamlining land use planning policies, making policies for land use planning in Ontario easier to follow; providing the tools to support growth in large and fast-growing municipalities near transit stations and other strategic areas; allowing more homes to be build in rural areas; giving municipalities the flexibility to expand settlement area boundaries at any time; and making planning policies simpler and more flexible while balancing the need to protect employment lands, agriculture and the environment.

The second item that I had addressed, the various types of homes required for the various type of Ontarians: Here, I am speaking to age-friendly communities. Our proposed changes would help refocus by maintaining a mix of housing types. This is critical, as all municipalities would be required to provide a range and mix of housing options, such as low- and mid-rise apartments or multi-generational housing, and work with service managers to address the full range of housing options, including housing affordability needs, increasing housing supply and includes building up near transit.

Currently, 29 of Ontario’s largest and fastest-growing municipalities would be required to plan for growth in major transit station areas and other strategic growth areas—for example, downtowns. We’re also addressing minimum density targets that would apply to major transit station areas and strategic growth areas in the large and fastest-growing municipalities.

In addition, we are looking at attainable housing programs, specifically modular housing construction and other innovative options to reduce the cost of building attainable housing and speed up the creation of housing. As part of this work, the government will engage with the housing sector, municipalities and Indigenous communities to consider different opportunities to build housing using modular and other technologies. This is just another step for the development of the attainable housing program, which will leverage crown lands and seek partnerships for development lands across the province.

Now to helping vulnerable Ontarians, funding for homelessness: Starting in 2023-24, Ontario is investing an additional $202 million each year in the Homelessness Prevention Program and the Indigenous Supportive Housing Program. This is an increase of over 40% from 2022-23. These are truly historic investments in homelessness prevention and respond directly to the requests of the municipalities and Indigenous partners.

I was so proud to announce a 76% increase compared to the previous year to the municipality of York region’s HPP. This program gives local supportive housing service managers the flexibility to allocate funding where it is most needed—for example, to capital projects—as well as to make better use of existing resources. It reduces the red tape that service managers encounter and ensures the focus is on delivering support that our most vulnerable rely on every day instead of spending time on administrative tasks and reporting.

Thirdly—and I’ve got to speed up—helping tenants and landlords: To address the concerns raised around tenants who are in arrears of rent, this bill proposes a rent arrears repayment agreement. A tenant enters into agreement with their landlord to pay the rent they owe and avoid eviction. To make it easier for both tenants and landlords, the government is proposing to require use of the Landlord and Tenant Board’s plain language repayment agreement form. This would help ensure all parties better understand their rights and responsibilities and the rental rules that apply should the agreement be breached.

I’m running out of time, Madam Speaker, so I’m going to get to the point here that, in conclusion, the measures outlined in this latest plan will continue laying the groundwork for increased housing supply as market conditions improve. But more needs to be—

Thank you to the member from Waterloo for the question. Well, definitely air conditioning is almost a necessity anymore given the heat, so what I would say there is: What are we doing to help renters? Number one, we have to ensure that we’re building a suite of rental buildings so that they have places to rent. That’s part of our bill, is that we are striving to ensure that there’s more rentals available.

As I noted in my speech, in fact, we have record numbers of rental buildings in these past 30-plus years. The more rentals that we have available, back to the point from one of my colleagues, the more supply that we have with rentals, the lower the price for the renters. Unfortunately, we have been in a situation where we haven’t been building rentals. We are now, and we’re getting it done.