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.

Well, I don’t know if that would happen, but I anticipated the answer would be some kind of provincially owned corporation, the shares of which would be owned by the taxpayers of Ontario and represented by perhaps a minister of the government, who would hold the shares in trust for the taxpayers of the province of Ontario. That’s the answer I was anticipating, but I didn’t get that answer. I didn’t get any answers.

So, I openly invite the NDP to once again explain to this House: What is their agency going to look like and how will it operate? Now I’m going to add a third question: How will that housing agency, proposed by the NDP, raise $125 billion to build the houses they propose? Those are questions that are legitimately asked. I invite them to answer those questions.

Interjection: How will it be staffed? Property expenses—

The question that my colleague put was: How is NDP plan going to do that? Are they going to hire carpenters, framers? Are they going to pour concrete? Where are they going to acquire these resources? Are they going to compete against the Jones Group? Are they going to compete against Nor-Built Construction? Where is the Ontario housing agency, as proposed by the NDP, going to acquire any of this? How are you going to finance your agency? How are you going to raise $125 billion? Those are good questions.

Now the contrast—the contrast and compare, as I spoke about before: What this government is doing is changing legislation to do exactly what I said previously. We’re going to let people like Jones Group, Nor-Built Construction and Valente do what they already know how to do, but they’re going to do it faster and they’re going to do it without taxpayers’ money. They’re going to do it because we’re going to change things like the definition of area of employment. That’s pretty technical. That’s pretty—I don’t know—legal, pretty academic. A lot of people haven’t spoken about that. I’m going to speak about it because it’s in this bill.

So “area of employment”: that’s a definition that’s in the provincial legislation. If your land falls within “area of employment,” that definition, then there’s certain restrictions on it, and it cannot easily be converted into residential land. That’s very hard to do. In fact, in some cases, it may not be converted into residential land.

Let’s imagine—and I don’t have to imagine because I can give you lots of examples in my area of land which is zoned with the definition “area of employment” that is no longer useful for that purpose. It’s either not commercially viable or not industrially viable, and that designation should be removed and a different designation should be put on that land. I would say residential. If you can remove that designation from the land and convert it to residential land, then you can do what you need to do with that land: Give it its highest and best use, which is build residences on that land. That’s how we can get to 1.5 million homes. That’s not the only way, of course, but that’s one of the ways we can get there.

I go back to the proposal by the NDP. Remember, their proposal only wants to build 250,000 homes at $125 billion. That only gets us one sixth of the way to the target 1.5 million.

That is what I have to offer and contribute to this debate today. I have been very specific about two very specific points.

And on that, Madam Speaker, I thank you.