I’ll be sharing my time with the awesome member from Newmarket–Aurora.

During my brief speaking time on this particular topic, I’m going to be doing some contrasting and comparing, and that will be my contribution to this debate. With that in mind, I’ll start by referring to what the NDP refer to as their housing plan, and I’m going to contrast and compare that with the government’s housing plan, which we are now in our fourth stage of. The reason I use the words “fourth stage” is because we’ve already introduced three bills, this is the fourth, and we intend to continue introducing more.

With reference to the NDP plan, this comes from page 18 of the NDP plan, and it says this: The NDP will “establish a new public agency, Housing Ontario, to finance and build 250,000 new affordable and non-market rental homes.” That’s the first thing I want to refer to in this practice of contrasting and comparing, and I’d like to take an opportunity to unpack that. I’m going to concentrate on this word “finance.” The NDP say that they are going to finance 250,000 homes. Let’s keep that in mind. Financing means somehow they’re going to get the money for 250,000 homes, and that means, I presume—I don’t want to put words into the members’ mouths, but they’ll have an opportunity to give their interpretation of their own policy. I presume that means they’re going to try to find that money from taxpayers somewhere, because they want to set up something called Housing Ontario, an agency of the government, and they say they’re going to finance 250,000 homes.

I’m just going to use an example. I’m going to use the example of a very modest home, a $500,000 home—$500,000 is different in the riding of Essex, it’s different in the riding of Toronto Centre, but I will unilaterally just choose the number $500,000. The NDP want to build 250,000 homes at $500,000 apiece. That is $500,000 times 250,000 homes, which is $125 billion—that’s billion with a B. That’s 125 followed by nine zeros. That is essentially 62% of the entire annual provincial budget, which the NDP say they’re going to finance to build 250,000 homes. Remember, that number of 250,000 homes comes not from the government’s plan; that comes from the NDP proposal, and they say they’re going to finance 250,000 homes in their own proposal.

Well, let’s imagine that. You can’t build a home for $500,000 in many of those ridings, but, like I said, I’m going to be generous and I’m going to give them that number. Now, they don’t offer any other explanation as to where they are going to get the $125 billion. I’m making a supposition. I admit, I’m making a supposition. I am assuming they are going to get it out of Ontario taxpayers. I don’t know how they would do that, because, as I said, it’s 62% of the annual budget, but I will graciously give them an opportunity to explain how they propose to do that. I have asked this question of NDP members before; I have not received an explanation—

So the Ontario housing agency proposed by the NDP, I presume that it’s going to be a government-run agency. I have asked this question of several NDP members in the House, just like I’m asking it now: What does your agency look like and how is it going to be run? I did not get any answers to that. What I anticipated what the NDP would say was this—