The beautiful community of Gogama in my riding is located across the street from a new gold mine. In 2020, the Premier came to the groundbreaking ceremony. He said, “This gold mine will bring economic prosperity and change lives in Gogama.” I agreed, Speaker, but for this to happen, people need a place to live, and businesses a place to set up shop. The good news is that there are plenty of empty lots and empty homes located on paved roads, with streetlights, hydro, telephone, Internet, water and sewage—everything a modern family or business needs. The bad news? None of them are available for sale or rent. Do you know who owns them all, Speaker? The government of Ontario or, as the locals call them, the worst slumlord in this province.

Since 2020, my office has been relentless in trying to motivate this government to put them up for sale, or at least to rent them out. I wrote and delivered letters to the Premier, to the Ministers of Finance, Government and Consumer Services, Infrastructure, and Natural Resources and Forestry. And the answer for the last three years has been crickets.

While over a dozen properties are left to rot in Gogama, they, like many others in our province, are facing a housing crisis. Gogama is missing out on the prosperity the Premier promised. The people of northern Ontario are tired of waiting. This government needs to put these homes and lots up for sale right now.

Thank you very much to the member. Mr. Speaker, this long-term-care home was part of Ontario’s accelerated build pilot program, which was part of our government’s $6.4-billion commitment to build 30,000 new beds and, of course, upgrade 28,000 long-term-care beds in the province of Ontario. Now, the whole concept of the accelerated build program was to leverage hospital-owned land, which is always a challenge in urban settings, to use provincial tools and resources in order to make sure that we can get the approvals necessary and use accelerated construction techniques.

We built a long-term-care home in 13 months in Ajax. We built a long-term-care home in Toronto, Humber Meadows, within 28 months. We have two more long-term-care homes which will open very, very soon. But the most important point of this, Mr. Speaker, is we can’t take eight years to build a long-term-care home in the province of Ontario. We need to do better.

My question is to the Premier. Maria, her husband and their four-year-old daughter have been living at the Christie refugee centre, a shelter, since February. The family found a rental home, applied for funding to help cover the cost of rent and were getting ready to move in when they were told that funding to this rent supplement program had been cut by the Conservative government and the program is no longer available to them.

Premier, what is your plan to help families like Maria’s move out of the shelter system into rental homes so they can build their lives here in Canada?

The city is asking for $20 million in funding from the Ontario Conservative government to help shelter residents move into permanent rental homes so they can rebuild their lives. Can this government say yes to the city of Toronto’s request?