Unlike the Premier, who claims that the finance minister is a close personal friend who is in almost daily contact, I’m not a friend of Mr. Trudeau’s and I don’t have his phone number—although I’m happy to talk to him next time I see him.

I wasn’t here for the 15 years of the previous government. I was on Ottawa city council, and when I was on council we were building homes faster than any pace before that. My signature is on subdivision plans and com-munity-design plans for the construction of thousands of new homes which I was happy to oversee as councillor for Cumberland, one of the fastest-growing parts of Ottawa. And I’m sure the city of Ottawa will continue those efforts to expand housing.

If they were truly listening to municipalities, they would provide the financial assistance to bridge the challenges that cities are going to face financially as a result of losing development charges; they would provide the transit funding bridge to address the enormous impacts that COVID-19 has continued to have on transit systems. Those are the kinds of things they would do if they were listening to municipalities.

So, no, I don’t really see anything getting more affordable for families. Things are only getting tougher and tougher and tougher, and what we’ve seen from this government are policies that will make that worse and a budget that really ignores middle-class families right across the province.

To either one of my colleagues here—I’m just wondering if you feel that these policies that we’re looking at in all these different bills are going far enough for this goal of 1.5 million homes in 10 years? Three units per property, not looking at main streets but instead looking at the greenbelt—what do you think of actually having the backbone to push further and get four units per property, build up main streets, especially along the subway corridor? Why not just upzone main streets to six storeys and really get behind that 1.5 million goal and build in urban centres where the services are, where people want to live?

Thank you to my Liberal colleagues for their comments.

My question is to the member from Orléans. It was very interesting listening to his comments.

I’d just like to highlight they had 15 years to address housing in this province and did nothing, Speaker.

We’re listening to municipalities. That’s why we’re tabling a fourth housing supply action bill, and we’re going to table more. We were very clear with the electors in Ontario during the election that we would table a housing supply action bill every year of our four-year mandate, if we got one. Guess what? We got one. So there will be more, because we’re listening to municipalities.

He was talking about non-profit housing and rentals. I was wondering if the member from Orléans would be willing to call his friend Justin Trudeau and tell him to take an ask that they remove HST from large purpose-built rentals, as this government under Premier Ford is asking the federal government to do.

Questions?

Question?

What I am aware of is, the last time the NDP was in power, they sent public servants home without pay for two weeks a year.

Liberals have a strong track record of investing in education, investing in health care, and, as I said, investing in home construction across the province.

If the NDP want to go back in time and recall Bob Rae and the infamous government of the 1990s, I’m sure both the government—and, I know over here, we would love to have that conversation over the next couple of years.

One of the major challenges with Bill 23 was the definition of “attainable housing,” the yet-to-be-defined “attainable housing,” and the risk that that provides.

Most cities and most suburban or outlying cities that are building new subdivisions are building with densities that are much higher than in the past. Many of those homes are townhomes, executive townhomes etc., which would be considered attainable housing by many definitions.

If cities lose development charges for 50% or 60% of new builds, that’s going to create a financial crisis within cities.

That was one of the major problems with Bill 23 and the yet-to-be-defined definition of “attainable housing.”

I have a question for my friend from Orléans.

I couldn’t help but notice the assertion there that we hate developers here in the New Democratic caucus. It will come as a surprise to my uncles in the development industry, I will say. But what I can say we don’t like are developers who build improper homes.

So my question to the member, because that isn’t something focused in this bill—Cardinal Creek is a community in the member’s constituency that has had serious problems with improperly built homes, with zero help from Tarion and zero help so far from this government. Do you have a message for them, some vision for them, about how we can make sure that when people make that risk of buying that home, that it’s a properly built home?

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.

Thank you to my colleague for the question.

Yes, the latest budget showed that this government’s plan to build 1.5 million new homes is not working. They’re only at half the target. Their plan seems to be, as I say, all about tall or sprawl.

In my riding of Don Valley West, we continue to see applications for 35-storey condo buildings get approved at the OLT, despite the objections of the city, because the infrastructure isn’t there.

There are lots of opportunities to build that missing middle, to build those six-storey buildings, to build walk-ups and other options for people who don’t want to live in tall condos.

So I think there are lots of other opportunities this government could be taking to increase density in our cities and our towns without going into the greenbelt and causing further environmental harm.

I just want to ask a couple of questions to my colleague who decided to throw something into his presentation. I want to know if he’s aware that the Conservative Party was in official opposition for 15 years. I want to know if he’s aware that the Liberal Party was in government for 15 years.

Are you aware that the Liberals sold off Hydro One, causing hydro rates to skyrocket? Are you aware that the NDP voted against Bill 115? Are you aware that the Liberals and Conservatives voted against anti-scab legislation and increases to minimum wage?

Do you think that the decisions over those 15 years that you guys were together led to the affordability and rent crisis that we’re currently facing today? We are in an affordability crisis in the province of Ontario.

I want to thank the member from Kitchener South–Hespeler. In response to her comment, yes, every single place in Ontario has a Hespeler Road; mine is called Tecumseh Road. One of the great things that I remember from my time on municipal council is our community improvement plan to try and get purpose-built rentals and intensification to turn a downtown that was not vibrant, not walkable and get it to a place where it was once again the pride and joy of the community. Unfortunately, the member was correct: There are a lot of people who don’t like the reduction in traffic lanes or the streetscaping to be added, it being seen as frills and not worthy of incorporation into a complete community.

I wanted to ask the member this: Can you elaborate a little bit on what might exist in our bill to help incentivize the improvement to our supply for purpose-built rentals and to ensure that this intensification and improvement to density does occur in our communities?

Questions?

Thank you to the member for that address. I enjoyed it. I want to just begin on a point of agreement: I agree, we are in a housing emergency. Something I brought up with the infrastructure minister at committee a couple of weeks ago is a revelation that I didn’t know about until preparing for that committee. In a report the Auditor General wrote in 2017, she noted that there were, at that point at least, 812 vacant government of Ontario properties in the province of Ontario—heated, electrified, utilities supplied, vacant. It would seem to me that a great thing to work on at committee with this bill is having an action plan on how we reutilize that vacant housing for housing and other purposes, and I’m wondering if the member agrees.

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.

It is always my pleasure to rise on behalf of the good folks of Hamilton West–Ancaster–Dundas and provide some context to the bill that’s before us today—it is the government’s Bill 97 that the government is saying is called Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants. In the time I have here today, 20 minutes, I’m going to show the many ways that this bill could actually do more to help homeowners and protect tenants than what’s presented today in this bill. As has been said by the member across, this is a national emergency. My question would be, in a national emergency, a housing emergency, a homelessness crisis, is this the bill that you want to put forward? It seems to me that it’s coming up pretty short.

Let me just talk about the context of Hamilton. I’m sure that this will be familiar to so many people in your communities, whether you want to share that or not. Hamilton is struggling with a housing affordability and homelessness crisis. Hamilton is one of the first—actually, maybe not. It’s a community that has been one of the few—I think Niagara is the other community that has declared a state of emergency over homelessness, because the municipality is struggling to keep people safe, to keep people from dying, to provide services. It was voted unanimously by city council just this past week, and they decided to declare a state of emergency related to homelessness, opioid addiction and mental health. There were many presentations, several emotional comments and pleas to the province for help during that debate. The councillor who moved it forward, Brad Clark, actually served in this House as a Conservative minister. It was Brad Clark who moved this motion.

“He spoke of overflowing shelters in the city that regularly turn individuals and families away, and of staff burnout at some of those facilities, where employees are leaving the work because they are unable to help everyone who needs it.”

Clark went on to say, “They didn’t fail, the province failed them.”

He proposed the motion because he was hoping that this would be a strong message—that Hamilton’s council is asking the province for long-term, affordable and supportive housing to help them address this humanitarian crisis.

This bill, in my opinion, does nothing to support Hamilton’s council in their struggle to provide safe and affordable housing for people. There is, in this bill, very little around municipal rent protections that could possibly now be replaced by weaker rental protections, which again, would contribute to the homelessness crisis that Hamilton is declaring. There’s just—it has been called meek action on illegal evictions, which, as I’ll talk about, are happening in Hamilton at a record pace. And really, what would a government bill be without a little side-swipe against the environment and our loss of agricultural land and sprawl? So I’m going to talk about those things in my time here.

I would just like to add that Hamilton, as best as they can track, has 1,500 homeless folks living on the streets, and to support them, there are 500 shelter beds. They’re not even coming close to being able to address the need, and I know this is true for all of our communities all across Ontario.

We’re also losing affordable housing units at a record pace. I don’t know if that’s true in other communities. But in Hamilton, last year, we lost 16,000 units of affordable housing. This bill does not really do anything to stop that bleeding of affordable housing units. The city of Hamilton has lost 29 affordable housing units for every one created. They can’t keep up with the loss of housing with affordable units that are being created.

And it’s not easy to create affordable housing, social housing. They say the cost of one social housing unit is about $450,000. I notice that the government, in their last bill, talked about $202 million for supportive housing. There are 444 municipalities in Ontario. I know it doesn’t work like this, but if you divided that, each municipality in the province, if they shared that equally, would get about $450,000. So your money that you put in to develop supportive housing equates to one unit of supportive housing all across the province. That is just not going to come anywhere close to meeting the need.

Let’s talk about renters: 30% of all voters in Ontario are renters, and in Hamilton, it has been noted—my colleague the member from Hamilton Mountain has said that the average rents in Hamilton are skyrocketing. An average one-bedroom apartment is $1,800 a month, and a two-bedroom apartment, which is what you would need if you had even the smallest family, is $2,200 a month. That’s a huge amount of money, and that has gone up, skyrocketed, under this government’s watch and under this government’s term.

So despite all of the housing bills that you’re putting forward, housing has never been more expensive—ever—in the history of the province of Ontario. Under your watch, housing and the ability to put a roof over your head have gotten more expensive, not less expensive.

One of the things that we were hoping for from a bill like this would be for there to be real, strong protections for tenants, but that is not the case. They’re not strong protections for tenants.

In Hamilton, one of the big problems that we face in trying to maintain a stock of affordable housing is renovictions and illegal evictions. I know that is something all of us have talked about. In Hamilton, the applications to evict tenants are just piling up at the Landlord and Tenant Board. Last year, it was 103 applications from landlords for renovictions—in 2019, it was 21; in 2020, there were 30; in 2021, there were 60; and last year, there were 103. What’s going on here?

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.

Question?

Two weeks ago, we stood here and wished our Canadian national women’s hockey team the best in the world championship. I didn’t hear anything today, but I want to say congratulations to the Canadian national women’s hockey team at the world championship. They played in the championship game up in Brampton, coming up just a little short. They won a silver medal, getting beat by their archrival, the USA, who won the gold medal. I just want to thank the women on that hockey team for showing the best of women’s sports right here in Ontario, right here in the country of Canada. Thank you to the Canadian women’s hockey team for winning a silver medal.

My question is, why does this government refuse to commit to bringing back vacancy control and protecting affordable housing units in our community?

Thank you to the member for Kitchener South–Hespeler.

She talked about buying her house for $187,000, and it reminded me of when I bought my first house. We went to look at one that was $210,000, and I told my wife, “We’re never going to spend more than $200,000 on a house.” Today, if you found a house for sale for $200,000, you would buy it sight unseen. You wouldn’t care if it had floors. You wouldn’t care if it had wiring. You would just buy it like that—because it’s so expensive. She talked about a house similar to her house for $800,000, in the same neighbourhood, many years later. That’s what I’m seeing in Sudbury, as well—that once-affordable housing no longer exists.

The member talked about partisanship and that polarization of views in the beginning—and I’m asking this question not to be polarizing, but to explain to you the concerns that I have with bills like this.

These bills for housing make it more desirable to build very expensive, $800,000 houses. I don’t see anything in these bills that makes it desirable to build that starter house or affordable housing or geared-to-income or co-op. Where is that in this bill, or where is that in the plan for the Conservative government?