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?

Water and sewer, exactly—to pay for the kinds of things that people need to live their lives. They pay for, really, everything. They pay for waste collection. They pay for water and sewer. They pay to fix our roads. They pay to build our schools and our parks. And now this government has let developers off the hook to the tune of—I mean, it’s been estimated that it’s about a $5-billion hole in municipalities’ coffers all across the province, and Hamilton is no exception. Hamilton, like other municipalities across the province, has had to raise taxes to compensate for this gift that you have given to developers, because in your magical thinking, you think that this is going to create housing that people can afford. People don’t want a house on the greenbelt, on a floodplain. They don’t want a house on farmland. They want an affordable house that they can live in, and they don’t want to then be saddled with a tax bill that’s tripling because you’ve given developers a free ride. Developers, like all of us, need to pay their fair share.

I’m sort of running out of time here, but let me just say that I think it’s important to note that this bill continues on the trend of this government to concentrate power in the hands of a few ministers and to shut out the democratic process. Democratically elected municipal councils are being bigfooted by this government all across this province, and Hamilton is no exception. You’ve forced Hamilton to sprawl; to grow into the greenbelt. You took 1,400 acres of greenbelt out of protections; for what? To build houses where there are no services? I have a constituent who said, “I’m not looking forward to my taxes to go up so that I can pay for the developers’ costs to build on the greenbelt when my road is falling apart,” and that’s what you’re doing here. It’s unbelievable—not to mention the loss of biodiversity, and we talked about the loss of farmland, which is about 320 acres a day that we’re losing. Your thinking is convoluted, and it’s not helping anyone in the immediate, and it’s in fact making things worse when it comes to the downloading of services that municipal taxpayers will have to pay.

So I find it really disturbing that not only are people outraged by this government’s greenbelt grab, by their lack of concern for the environment, for climate change, but we have a minister, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, who was asked directly, would he commit to no more further encroachments on the greenbelt and on farmland? And he would not commit to that.

So I would say to communities all across Ontario, look forward to losing more of your farmland. Look forward to encroachment on green space. Look forward to—

Interjection: More flooding.

I’m going to end it there, but there are many concerns that we have with this bill. We would have expected that this would be a government that, instead of putting this weak bill forward, would have moved seriously to protect the people of the province of Ontario so that they’re not on their own when it comes to their housing costs in this province.

But you also need to be clear with people that this is not just farmers who are going to be able to subdivide agricultural land; it’s anybody who has bought agricultural land under this government who will be able to subdivide. So yes, this is going to accelerate the loss of agricultural land in this province.

Seniors should be our highest priority. We should be ensuring that they have a roof over their heads. We should be ensuring that they’re not priced out of their homes because of the increase in municipal taxes that should be labelled a Ford tax because it’s what your bills are doing: downloading the costs onto property taxpayers all across the province.

When it comes to supportive housing, in the municipality of Hamilton, there are about 10,000 people waiting for supportive housing. It’s something like a two- to five-year wait-list. People are desperate for housing, and this bill is not helping them with that.