I could have done that, took the credit and been everybody’s friend too, Speaker.

Mr. Clark moved third reading of the following bill:

Bill 97, An Act to amend various statutes with respect to housing and development / Projet de loi 97, Loi modifiant diverses lois en ce qui concerne le logement et l’aménagement.

Interjections.

Decades of inaction, combined with layers of red tape and NIMBYism, have created our province’s housing supply crisis. But our government has been working extremely hard, and we’re going to continue to work hard to correct this. We’re doing this for the many Ontarians who have literally been priced out of the market through no fault of their own. And we’re doing this for those Ontarians who rent homes and need some relief.

The legislation before us is designed to support a greater package. The package is our government’s most recent housing supply action plan, which also—and I want to stress this—contains some non-legislative items. I’ll get to those at the end of my proposal. It’s the latest in a series of steps that our government is taking to our ultimate goal of building 1.5 million homes by 2031.

Our plan also aims to make life easier and more affordable for people across our great province. That’s why this action plan looks at, really, four different aspects of housing: rental units, home ownership, cost to build and land supply. If passed, the proposed legislative changes, along with our corresponding housing supply action plan, would make life easier for renters, would strengthen homebuyer protections, would reduce the costs of building a new home and would streamline the rules around land use planning and encourage the development of more housing.

Speaker, since introducing the bill earlier this spring, we’ve received support from across the province from a variety of sectors, and I’ll highlight a few of them this morning. The Ontario Real Estate Association, OREA, commended our government on bringing forward several proposed solutions to address the housing supply and affordability crisis to support future homebuyers, tenants and landlords across the province.

Another stakeholder, the Federation of Rental-housing Providers of Ontario, or FRPO, supports the new Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act and “the measures it introduces to protect residents from illegal evictions and to punish bad actors.”

AMO, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario—a great stakeholder—acknowledges that we have proposed changes that are in direct response to municipal feedback, including flexibility for site plan control and giving municipalities extra time to adjust to changes regarding both site plan and zoning refunds.

Of course, Speaker, we wouldn’t be standing here today without the bold initiatives that our government has taken so far and has already put into place. In May 2019, our government released our first housing supply action plan, More Homes, More Choice. That plan cut red tape and made it quicker and simpler to build the right type of housing in the right places. The aim was to help make housing less expensive to build and to help taxpayers keep more of their hard-earned dollars.

Then, after that, in the spring of 2022, we released our second action plan, More Homes for Everyone. That action plan was based on extensive consultations, including the province’s first-ever Ontario-Municipal housing summit. We received even more feedback from mayors, reeves and wardens of Ontario’s smaller, rural, northern and remote municipalities at our Rural Housing Roundtable. In addition, the Housing Affordability Task Force consulted with municipalities, with experts and with industry. More Homes for Everyone included targeted policies to help speed up approvals and it took steps to gradually refund fees if municipal decisions weren’t made within a legislated time frame.

Speaker, those first two action plans did a lot, but we recognized that there was much more the government needed to do. So last fall, we came out with our third housing supply action plan, More Homes Built Faster. It built on the successful initiatives that the government had previously put forward in both legislation and regulation by taking more actions to ensure that Ontarians across the province can access a home that truly meets their needs and their budgets. In addition, we bolstered our action plans through legislation that the House passed that gave the mayors of Ontario’s two biggest cities, Toronto and Ottawa, more powers to help address local barriers to building more homes.

Speaker, all of these steps—every single one of them—shared one overall goal and that was to build more homes in our province.

Interjection.

Speaker, the action plans and the measures that we’ve taken are having an extremely positive effect in our province. In fact, we’re seeing historic results in increasing housing supply. People in the House have heard me say this many times in the last two years: We’ve reached consecutive 30-year highs in terms of housing starts. In fact, in rental starts, we saw an all-time high for starts last year in 2022, and I’m happy to tell people—

Interjections.