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?