Listen, I know that the member opposite doesn’t support the $6.5 million that the government is spending to effectively double the amount of adjudicators and also add those very important staff administrative positions to the tribunal. In my speech, I mentioned the Attorney General; he’s looked at this measure very much in detail. We believe, as a government, that having that significant influx of dollars in the Landlord and Tenant Board to effectively double adjudication services with staff support is going to go a long way toward creating that balance. To have a tribunal, it’s all about the balance in terms of the process.

I appreciate that there are a number of voices, both on the tenant side and from the landlord side, that are a little apprehensive because the measures have not been fully implemented, but I have great faith in the Attorney General in making sure that those improvements will result in a fair system.

My question is to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing. We are working with tenants across the city of Toronto whose purpose-built rentals are slated to be demolished. They’re terrified because they’re worried they’re never going to be able to get back into their homes once the construction of the new, bigger building is complete.

This government is looking at creating new rental replacement laws, and this is my question: When I look at the Residential Tenancies Act, there’s no guaranteed right of return for a tenant who’s evicted because of demolition. There’s no guaranteed right of return. In this government’s new rental replacement bylaw, are you going to allow cities to guarantee a tenant’s right to return to their home?

Well, the government has been clear, Speaker. Despite the mischaracterizations by the NDP about our consultation on rental replacement, we’ve listened to our municipal partners, and we’ve also been straight-up with Ontarians. At the end of the day, when the process is completed, the tenant should still be allowed to move back into an apartment at the same rental rate, with the similar features to the unit they had vacated.

It’s a process we’ll continue to collaborate on with municipalities. They’ve been very helpful throughout this process. They’ve given us some great suggestions and great advice, and it’s been some of that advice, through consultation, that’s helped inform the government on the path moving forward.

Again, the opposition is always going to see a ghost around every corner when it comes to government policy. We’re going to continue to stand up with our municipal partners and listen to them.

Thank you to the member for Newmarket–Aurora.

In committee, we did vote in support of measures to require a landlord to get a report in order to justify an eviction of a tenant in the case of a renoviction. We also voted in support of the increase in fines for people or corporations that violate the Residential Tenancies Act; in fact, we proposed higher fines.

The challenge is that the moves that this government is making to address the renoviction crisis and the illegal eviction crisis—evidence is clearly showing us that they are too weak to work.

I urge this government to look at the evidence, do evidence-based decision-making, and move forward with measures that are actually going to stop the illegal eviction crisis that we have, because what we have right now is not working.

We did introduce amendments into Bill 97 in order to strengthen renter protections. Every affordable private-market home that we have, we should be keeping. There is nothing more important and there’s nothing more wise that we can do right now to make housing affordable than bring in vacancy control and real rent control. When we’re talking about being proactive, those kinds of rent control measures, those kinds of rent protection measures are really going to make Ontario a desirable place to live. It means we’re going to stop the net migration out of this province to other more affordable provinces, which is a real concern. Those people take all their talents with them. It means we become a more affordable and desirable place. It’s a pity the government chose not to accept those amendments.

We very much support and agree with the target of building 1.5 million homes to meet the needs of Ontarians today and to meet our immigration targets in the future. Many more people want to call Ontario home. It’s why we introduced an amendment—

Madam Speaker, I generously invited the NDP to demonstrate how they were going to get to $125 billion. The member from Waterloo has demonstrated how she would get to $3 billion. Okay, you’ve got $122 billion to go, and that gets you one sixth of the way to 1.5 million homes. Great—she did a great job and demonstrated how she would get to $3 billion.

Interjection.

What this legislation does is that it requires an application being made by a landlord to be supported by evidence, which evidence has to be delivered to the tenant at the time the notice of termination is delivered. That’s very useful for tenants. In fact, I can tell you that when I represented tenants at the Landlord and Tenant Board, I routinely represented good tenants and good landlords and routinely defeated applications of termination, on a routine basis. So the assertion made by the NDP that somehow this legislation isn’t working for tenants is flatly wrong.

Well, so many things have come up, it’s hard to know where to start. I’ve heard from the member from Essex that things are grand in the landlord-tenant tribunals, but that’s of course in direct contrast to the Ombudsman’s report, which says, “The Ombudsman received more than 4,000 complaints from people on both sides of the landlord-tenant relationship. Many described the financial and mental harm they suffered while ‘trapped in the queue,’ waiting for their applications to be heard.”

There’s quite a lot here: “a shortage of qualified adjudicators ... compounded by a lengthy, cumbersome appointment and training process”.

I’d like to say, the problems at the Landlord and Tenant Board fall squarely on the shoulders of this government, because when they came to power in 2018, they decided not to renew any contracts. They had to put their own stamp and their own people in regardless of the fact that they were not trained, and so they left those positions empty for years. We are finally seeing some of those adjudicating positions filled, but it takes a long time to actually acquire the insight to be a good adjudicator. So instead, what we’re seeing is that—everything is online now. Even though, on paper, it might still say, yes, you can get in-person hearing, you can’t.

I know of a case in Thunder Bay where, with the support of, actually, one of the legal clinics—so this person wasn’t necessarily on their own. But the technology failed. Well, the adjudicator decided that was that. That was the end of the hearing. That person is out of luck. They’ve been waiting for years and years to have the opportunity to have their hearing before the Landlord and Tenant Board, and because of the technology and the refusal to have any in-person hearings, it was a bust. That person is out of luck. That is not unusual, and frankly, I’m surprised that the member from Essex was really singing the praises of how things were going for people, both small landowners and also tenants. It’s harming both. I’ve certainly gotten letters from both tenants and landlords saying that they are in crisis because they’re waiting eight months to 12 months to longer to get a hearing.

But I will go back to my original plan here, because there are a few things in the bill that I like. I do like that there’s some movement towards mandating air conditioning. I think it could be stronger. I think that you need to set an upper limit on temperature, and I think you’ve got to get rid of all the wiggle room for getting out of it.

Now, I see that there are guidelines being set for long-term care, with a maximum of 25 degrees Celsius, but really, that needs to apply to tenants everywhere, whether in free-standing apartment buildings, units within people’s homes or in seniors’ residences. For example, my mother lives in a retirement home owned by Revera. Her unit has been over 30 degrees Celsius for weeks. There’s air conditioning there, but it’s not the right date to turn it on, apparently. It was, “So sad, you’re out of luck. Go buy a fan.”

People pay a great deal of money to live in those seniors’ residences. I would like to see it mandated that the air conditioning be turned on the moment it is above 25 degrees in any single unit in the building.

Fines for violations: Well, it’s interesting to see the fines increased, but I would love to do a freedom-of-information inquiry to see how many times landlords have actually had a fine imposed on them for evicting somebody in order to move themselves or a member of their family into the unit, because the fines have not stopped illegal renovictions—far from it.

Part of this is that Bill 97 leaves the entire burden on renters to protest and to bring charges, and frankly, they don’t have the means to do that. In fact, once they’ve been evicted, they have the overwhelming problem of finding a new place to live in an extremely tight market where there is little to no affordable housing available. So they don’t exactly have time on their hands to launch a legal battle with a landlord outside the tribunal system. Of course, we know within the tribunal system, they’re going to be waiting for over half a year at least, so where do they go in the meantime?

The need for meaningful rent control: In 2018, the government basically gave landlords a get-out-of-jail-free card by not including buildings from that period under rent control, so we’re seeing increases of up to 57%. It’s absurd. It’s really hard to fathom that that makes sense in anybody’s world.

Then I looked at something else in here, this mysterious office, the Provincial Land and Development Facilitator, that addresses undisclosed projects requiring undisclosed payments to provide for other undisclosed things. There will be four deputy facilitators added to this office at a cost of just shy of $1 million. That’s $234,000 a year. That’s a lot of money to work in an office that very few people know anything about. The minister will also have new powers over this office of undisclosed purpose, something I think the people of Ontario would love to learn more about. Unfortunately, there is no information about that.

Bill 97, once again, relies almost entirely on deregulation and tax cuts to incentivize the for-profit private market to deliver 1.5 million homes over a decade. This narrow-minded approach is evidently failing, with the recent budget revealing that projected housing starts in Ontario are actually going down instead of up. In contrast, the NDP has 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.

We know that the Liberals had 15 years to help. By the way, it was preceding that that we had wonderful development of co-op housing. We have two really solid co-op housing developments in Thunder Bay. They continue to have affordable rent. They also have rent-geared-to-income, but even for the people who are not getting a subsidized rent, it’s affordable. It’s a very nice place to live and it’s been a very successful model.

The Liberals, yes, had 15 years after that to do something; they chose not to. For 14 of 15 years in power—supported by the Conservatives, I might add—the Liberal rent control policy was the same as the Harris PC rent control policy before it, shifting enormous power to private landlords and away from tenants, while failing to deliver new purpose-built rental housing.

I have been trying since August, really, to deliver—I have two fantastic housing projects in Thunder Bay that would provide 104 new affordable units. One of them, called Suomi Koti, is for seniors. I actually had the pleasure of touring Suomi Koti when the leader of the official opposition was in Thunder Bay. It’s a 30-year-old facility. You would never know it was 30 years old. It’s been kept immaculately. People love living there. You can even have your own garden. It’s a beautiful, beautiful space. All of this was put together by a volunteer board. Now, for 30 years, they have intended to build a second building. There is a seven-year wait-list to get into Suomi Koti, as there is to get into any of the reasonably priced seniors’ residences. So they’ve been trying. They have done all kinds of things to raise money. They’ve used their own money to hire accountants, to get the designs done. Everything has been done, but unfortunately there is no support available from this government to support what I’m going to call non-market housing. So 20% of that building would be rent-geared-to-income, but the other 80% would be still below commercial rental rates. It’s a very desirable place to live, but there’s no support for this middle-level housing, and if people were able to move into this space—for example, my mother looked at this—it’s impossible. This would have been affordable. Instead, she, like many other people, are using up their life savings, hoping they don’t live too long and run out of money.

Another housing project, also a beautiful one, sponsored by a Biigtigong Nishnaabeg First Nation, is called Giwaa on Court. It involves actually using a historical building, so it would be recovering, repurposing a historical building in the middle of downtown Port Arthur. It’s the old post office. Their plan, again, is affordable housing, 20% rent-geared-to-income, the remaining below commercial, at 80% of commercial rates.

Both of these projects have been ready to go. To me, they’re a gift on a platter to the Conservative government to show that they’re prepared to support mid-level housing, non-profit housing, but there is nothing there. They may in a pinch qualify. I do want to acknowledge that the government has given my region a considerable amount of money to alleviate the homelessness crisis. Okay, but that is a very specific kind of housing, and whether either of these projects will qualify under the terms of that agreement, I don’t know. They don’t know either at this point. When we talk about all of this housing that you’re going to build, and we have two projects that have been ready to go, shovel-ready for months, and there’s no support—and they don’t need a lot of support, but they need enough support in order to qualify for CMHC grants—so, nothing, nada.

Now, I like to think about what is actually going to bring rents down, and I really want to question this whole thing about supply and demand. Supply and demand is really a simplistic, narrow doctrine that we can hear continually about from the government side of the House, and frankly—and I’ve heard this from the Minister of Housing. I know the minister is a smart person, so I’m pretty confident that he knows full well that the vast majority of supply is actually in very few hands and they will control the prices no matter how much unmet demand there is. This doctrine also masks the role of housing speculation and housing financialization that continues to drive up the cost of housing beyond the reach of ordinary Canadians.

Imagine this: If we actually had enough housing that was affordable, so there’s more housing available, guess what? We’re going to see the costs come down, but they’re not going to come down when the supply is at this upper, upper level that so many people can’t afford. And frankly, it’s controlled by far too few people, and then there is also all the speculation that goes into it.

I’m even seeing this in small communities. Where mines are going in, I’m seeing people going in and buying up all the potential rental housing. It’s going to be owned by one person and that person is going to set the rates in that community. That is not that much different from what is happening in other places.

I think it’s time that this myth of supply and demand without context, without depth—

Interjections.

Following up on my previous question about the Landlord and Tenant Board: This government has taken steps to clear up the backlog. We’ve put $6.5 million into the board, and we’re hiring 40 more adjudicators, essentially doubling the number of adjudicators, to clear up the backlog, because we recognize that needs to be done. My question to the member is this: Number one, does she recognize that that needs to be done? And the second part of my question is, while that member and myself disagree on what created the backlog—I say the backlog was created by the pandemic and the inability of people to meet in person, because that’s the way that those adjudications were done, so we had to introduce a new system and that took time. Although she and I might disagree on that, now that we’ve introduced the 40 extra adjudicators—does the member support that specific measure?