The member opposite has spoken very passionately about low-income families and the challenges they face with rent, with access to justice—his opinions about that. I’m curious: It’s become patently obvious that the carbon taxes have had an incredible impact on prices across the board—not just on energy, but also on other necessities of life. I would like to know, what price per tonne does the member opposite feel is an appropriate tax to put on those families for whom he is so concerned?

I met earlier today with one of the legislative interns that is doing a paper on polarization in political debate and politics at large, and I’ve been sitting here listening to the various speakers talk about this bill and that word, “polarization,” has gone through my mind multiple times. One of the questions he had asked me was where I thought it came from and what was feeding it. One of my answers was media and social media. In a party system, there will always be an aspect of winning and losing, and it’s traditional, unfortunately, in humanity that we are easier to unite around what we dislike and distrust more so than we are easy to unite around what we like and want.

So I don’t have a background in zoning, in municipal government, in urban planning. I have no idea what Facebook algorithm brought this up years ago, but there’s an organization—it’s American, but a lot of their principles apply to Canada as well—called Strong Towns. Strong Towns calls itself sort of roughly an advocate for urban prosperity. A lot of that is through urban density, so I fully admit the organization itself definitely has more of a pro-transit, anti-car stance, however, which I think is less possible in our area. But a lot of what they wrote about really interested me, enough so that despite the fact that, as I said, I have no idea how the algorithm decided I would be interested in Strong Towns, they were right, and I did become very interested in Strong Towns.

One of the things that they talk about is how the concept of the traditional downtown didn’t need to die, but even having died, it is impossible to bring it back to life again. Places that attain a certain level of urban density, almost by virtue of that density, tend to attain a certain level of urban prosperity as well. And what I keep hearing about this bill in the criticism of this bill is this very sort of polarizing description of it being “sprawl and tall” versus, in some way, an urbanization infill or densification bill. The more I look at it and the more I look at the housing bills that have come before it, I am still failing to understand how this bill prevents or complicates any of the urban densification or infill that we also need to have happen. What I see here is a bill that is written in the context of a national emergency, and I think that is one of the most important things that we need to consider here when we get into this polarizing debate about sprawl versus urban.

I remember—I think it was 2021 when the Scotiabank article came out that put Canada last among G7 countries for homes per Canadian. It was something like, I don’t know, 420 or something homes per 1,000 Canadians, with, frankly, eye-watering amounts of homes needing to be built in order to bring us up even to the average of G7 countries and certainly to a point where we would be comfortable.

As a member of this government, when we were first elected, obviously we ran on a platform of building and of building homes. We already knew that we were coming into this second term with the housing crisis continued. Particularly in COVID, we saw a shift, actually, from urban living to more of a suburban sprawl-rural living, which also changed some of the requirements. But ultimately, we were still behind the clock as far as providing homes required.

It doesn’t matter what party you’re in; if you’ve talked to your stakeholders, you will have been told by countless people that they have a labour shortage, that they need more people to work. And then on top of that, we received the information from the federal government about the immigration targets that they are looking for and how many people are going to be coming to Canada, to Ontario, and to southern Ontario specifically.

It would be lovely if we could put our heads together and come up with ways to attract some of these new arrivals to places other than southern Ontario that are looking for workers. Frankly, I don’t think that’s impossible. But right now, here is where they will undeniably arrive. I feel that our housing bills and this housing bill are being written in an attitude of recognizing that we are years behind and that we are in a state of emergency when it comes to providing housing.

I’m from Waterloo region. The Waterloo region plan was sort of amended in a way. They had written several versions, and one was their worst-case scenario of maximum arrivals to the region, which is essentially what the province took, what the government took. We’ve kept this countryside line intact, which doesn’t mean anything to many people here, but it’s very important in Waterloo region.

What I see happening here with the bills we’ve had before, with accessory dwelling units, with starting to target exclusionary zoning, with the language in this bill talking about focusing on downtown areas, transit areas, that type of thing—I am not seeing a bill that is hostile to urban development. In fact, when I speak to urban home builders, I don’t receive criticism for these bills. In fact, I receive a lot of praise and appreciation and, frankly, feed-back on what they would love to see in our subsequent bills in order to make urban development even easier.

Interestingly, when you talk about urban prosperity, places that are nice places to live tend to attract labourers and attract people that want to be there simply by virtue of being nice places to live. The member from Cambridge will recognize this, but one of our local urban home builders who’s quite innovative wrote a book about happy cities. He described a road in Cambridge, Hespeler Road, as being one of the signs of Cambridge’s unhappiness. It’s a six-lane road full of parking lots and strip malls right next to the 401 that he described as being a place where you would simply drive to as the most efficient place in order to shop and then drive back home again with no community aspect.

As a resident of Cambridge, I’ve always found Hespeler Road not exactly the most attractive place. But particularly after I discovered Strong Towns, I began to be increasingly frustrated by it, because what I would see—and what I see throughout Ontario—is the result of poor municipal planning and the idea that you would simply toss something up where it was convenient. And so we now have all of this land that is, as the author of that book put it, dedicated to parking lots, to single-storey strip malls etc.

What I see in this bill, when I read about being transit-oriented, about downtown, about looking at areas that we can target, is I see a government that is acting, as I said, in awareness that we are in a state of emergency, but also extremely open to the concept of urbanization, to infill, to densification. I believe the reason that, as I said, we need to act as though we are in an emergency is, first of all, because we are in an emergency. But secondly, as a resident of Waterloo region, when I look around—I’ve been there since I was seven years old. I’ve seen the planning decisions, I’ve seen the sprawl, and I’ve seen the lack of urban development that has occurred, and all of that—that sprawl, that lack of urban development—occurred under the municipality’s watch, under the region’s watch, under the local politicians’ watch, not anything to do with the province. This isn’t the case where they were headed 100 miles an hour in the right direction and the province has somehow interfered.

Rather, what I see, particularly after the most recent municipal election—one of my closest friends ran for city councillor—is municipal politicians are faced with, in comparison to our type of campaign, not being connected to a party. The amount that they can raise and spend is very small. The number of people who come out to vote for them is very, very small. And so, frankly, I don’t love the term “NIMBY,” but a small community of NIMBYs can very, very easily influence a municipal councillor to make decisions that are really only benefiting the current residents of a community and not the future, the yet-to-arrive residents of that community, because, as I said, they may be able to leverage the loudest voice. They may be the ones that are able to organize to come to the community meeting. But really, is that listening to everybody? Is that actually being equal, being forward-thinking? I don’t think it is.

From my perspective, a lot of municipal politicians, in many ways, have had their hands tied for years now by that attitude and by the requirement that they stick by that. We’ve seen it in Toronto, where we’ve had councillors say that supporting a certain project would be political suicide and they, indeed, found out that it was and lost their position in the next election because they went against the small group of people that were able to mobilize in a municipal election.

The way that I look at this is, this bill—for example, take Waterloo region—unlocks a much larger area of land for development than the region’s, perhaps, ideal version would have done. However, that ideal version is, again, based very much on that small group of people who are able to mobilize, who are able to have their voice heard and, frankly, very, very rarely live in an apartment building, based off of at least my data that I’ve received and my somewhat unofficial polling. But again, these bills are not stopping urban development. They’re not stopping infill. They’re not stopping innovation. In fact, I believe that that is the direction we are heading, and we have already shown a clear commitment to innovation, to listening to other voices in the housing debate. I see no reason why that would stop, and this bill, to me, is just another example of that.

At the end of the day, I’m almost 36; I bought my house in 2015. It was a foreclosure. It’s one of those 1950s one-and-a-half-storey bungalows, and it was kind of falling apart. I went in at asking, and I bought it for $187,000—and this is in Cambridge. An identical house—frankly, not nearly as nice as mine—sold during the peak of the real estate prices last year for $860,000, the house across the street. So I am faced every day with the knowledge that even on an MPP’s salary—for those listening, it’s a base salary of $116,000; I’m a parliamentary assistant, so I get another $16,000 on top of that, so $132,000—I wouldn’t be able to afford my own house if I had to buy it now.

I love my house. It’s a detached house. It has a garden. I love the ability to have a garden, and so I don’t feel that I’m in any position to tell somebody who has that same dream that I had of white-picket-fence homeownership that they can’t have it. I also think that we are not currently, because of years of neglect of urban densification of infill projects, in a position where municipalities or regions are ready to be full speed ahead on infill projects. When you look at a place like Hespeler Road, you see competing ownership, competing zoning. It’s a perfect place to intensify and develop, but there are so many strings in order to get through to be able to do that that it’s going to take quite a lot of time. It’s going to take a lot of political will in order to make it happen.

The way I look at it is that we are still in a state of emergency, so if continuing to build the way we have always built is the most efficient and fastest way to get homes built and get them occupied, then that is what we have to do, but there’s absolutely no reason that any of these bills prevent us from working together, from listening to our stakeholders, from listening to those who are in urban homebuilding, from listening to people advocating for missing-middle housing, to make that happen.

One of the things that has occurred to me: There’s some talk in this bill about seniors, about building for seniors. We have a lot of seniors who are aging at home in very, very large houses that arguably a younger family could perhaps make better use of, and perhaps they might have considered downsizing, but we really don’t build a good community for them to downsize to. We built a retirement home, an adults-only home somewhere on the outskirts of Waterloo. We don’t create a retirement home that has two or three bedrooms, that’s located in the heart of the city, that’s a place that their children would want to come to. That is not historically what we have built, and therefore how can we expect them to leave their houses?

I believe that what these bills are doing is saying that there are a number of different pathways to creating housing. I do firmly believe that the housing supply crisis—really it is at the most basic level the reason why we do have an absolute crisis: because supply is so incredibly low. But by working together, by trying to take down the polarization of this debate and instead looking at these housing bills, including this one, as increasing opportunities to do things differently—but again, always in the actual, current environment, which is a literal state of emergency as far as housing goes. Are we all going to love everything that we’re going to do? No, but we’re making up for 20 years of inaction.

And this is inaction across Canada, you know. This isn’t a particular party or a particular province; this is something that has been happening for years. If we don’t act now, if we don’t act dramatically, if we don’t act quickly, it is only going to get exponentially worse as time goes on.

Ultimately, I would never take that dream of white-picket-fence homeownership away from somebody, and I’m not going to support anybody who tries to do that, but I do believe that there are a number of other housing options that we can look at, and that these bills make possible—the legislation that we have done before and the legislation that we are doing now. When you read the text of this bill, when we talk about transit-oriented, when we talk about downtown areas, in my head I’m thinking Hespeler Road. And the funny thing about Hespeler Road which, as I said, was called a symbol of Cambridge’s unhappiness by that urban home builder—who actually loves Cambridge very much. There’s a Hespeler Road in practically every city in Ontario.

Again, we absolutely need to, I think, take away this “sprawl and tall” versus “urban and infill” discussion of this bill. This is about building homes. It’s about building homes in the context of a national emergency. It’s about making sure that young people are not locked out of that dream that probably many of us in this chamber have of owning a house—one that I relatively recently went through, and I know that if I was in their position, I wouldn’t be able to have my house. Really, those are my thoughts on this bill.

Obviously, I can’t speak to a specific building, but I do know that the Premier in the past has referred to using government buildings. When we talk about red tape reduction, I think that’s part of it. Red tape has become sort of metaphorical for messy, duplicate laws, but it’s also about just all of the unbelievable extra material that the government carries, that it has accumulated about itself. You know as well as I do that reutilizing or divesting government of those types of assets is not an easy process. It is something that seems like it should be easy; however, it becomes incredibly difficult in the actual execution of it. Again, none of that means that it is impossible, but it goes back to my point about continuing to talk about this openly and with less polarization.

I think what we’ve seen in our legislation is a commitment to taking as balanced an approach as possible to the competing interests of landlord and tenant. Obviously, we see here legislation about preventing and reducing renovictions, the air conditioning legislation.

Ultimately, the existence of private landlords—they provide a key source of rental housing in the market. The more we penalize landlords or force landlords to subsidize housing, the fewer of them will bother to be in the business, and we will end up having far less access to a diverse range of rental properties than we currently have.

While I hear these concerns, it’s really about balancing it, because losing the landlords will not help the housing crisis.

Waterloo region takes its farming history very clear—and again, I come back to that context of national emergency.

I think what’s important here is for communities and municipalities to come together when it comes to identifying the green spaces, the farmland, the wetlands that need to be protected, and at the same time, looking at areas that can be turned over for housing and taking a very critical and practical view of it. I think what this bill is making clear is that that is the goal—to be trying to identify that type of land.

I commented on this briefly, but one of the things that bothers me so much about what I think is literally a missing middle type of housing is that we do not build apartments, high-rise, condo-style living for families, for people with pets, children and hobbies. I refuse to accept that it’s because it’s impossible. We just haven’t done it. There hasn’t been a great deal of incentive for developers and home builders to do so, partly because of development charges and also because of the way that these builds are financed. You need to sell most of them before you can actually build it. Right now, a four-bedroom, family-style apartment is a bit of an unknown quantity on the market, and so it would be harder to sell. But again, that’s where I think that comes in—saying, “Hey, if you’re going urban, if you’re going infill, if you’re building family-style, reducing or waiving the development charges.”

So I think that’s where you need to look at—unconventional types of housing and how we’re encouraging that.