The Premier has repeatedly claimed that his carve-up of Ontario’s greenbelt is simply about providing the land we need for housing. But a new report released just yesterday found that there is more than enough land to build two million homes without punching massive holes in our greenbelt. So if it’s not about land for housing, what is it about?

Will the Premier admit that this is about paving over protected land so a select few people can make a lot of money?

Speaker, the report that was released yesterday shows what the people of this province already know: We don’t need insider schemes and torching of the greenbelt to build the housing that people need.

We need 1.5 million homes in Ontario, and it’s only getting worse. But I haven’t talked to one municipal leader—not one—one housing advocate or one regular Ontarian who thinks that the problem is that there aren’t enough mega mansions. That is not the problem.

Why won’t this government work with our municipal partners to build affordable homes on the land we already have available?

Planning experts, municipalities and the government’s own task force—despite his creative quoting from that report—have said that land availability is not the problem.

Again, will this government—and I’d love the Premier to be able to answer this question—listen to the experts, use the land we already have available, and reverse the decision to remove 7,400 acres of protected greenbelt land?

Can the Premier explain how, after four years of his leadership, things have only gotten worse?

Thank you, Speaker. Through you to the member for Oshawa: The legislation today further waters down environmental protections. Do we trust that it will be used responsibly?

Earlier today, the Minister of Housing was asked a question about selling off the greenbelt. What happened next was peculiar. He lifted up the housing task force report and asked if the member had read it. He knows that nowhere in that report did their experts recommend selling off the greenbelt—in fact, the opposite. It said that shortage of land isn’t the problem and land is available in areas outside of the greenbelt.

My question: How can we trust a government that is willing to gaslight the Ontario public on greenbelt selling-off, pretending it was a recommendation by housing experts—

The government is proposing legislation that will waive the waiting period for the ministry to review environmental assessments and public comments. Now, that might not be a problem in some situations, but the record of this government on environmental makes me worried.

Let me quote the government’s Housing Affordability Task Force: “Land is available, both inside the existing built-up areas and on undeveloped land outside greenbelts.” And yet the Premier is selling off the greenbelt just so wealthy developers and donors to this government’s party can profit.

Speaker, through you, to the member opposite: Can you explain how we can trust that the ministry won’t weaponize this change so they can ignore public comments, ignore communities and ignore concerns about the environment, and fast-track through projects and enrich their friends?

I’d like to thank the member from Niagara Falls for his excellent question. No, I don’t think that anyone in Ontario at this point trusts the government on the way in which they’ve handled the greenbelt. They’ve talked about this swap where they’re actually adding lands that already had some protections on them. They’d like to pretend that they are doing this thing where it’s an equal exchange, but if we look at the greenbelt as a chain, if you weaken any links of that chain, such as a watershed or something else that is contributing to the filtering of our water, then that entire chain is weak.

What they’re doing to the greenbelt is odious. They’re making sure that it’s going to be easier for these developers to make McMansions, which is not what we need more of. We need more inwards and upwards development, we need affordable housing, we need rent control, we need vacancy decontrol, we need protections for tenants—none of the things that this government is doing, because they do not care about tenants.

They, on the side of the official opposition, said that they were going to change things. They agreed with the Auditor General. And now that they’re on the government benches, we see a completely different change in attitude. They’re upholding many of the things that they criticized the Liberals for, including Infrastructure Ontario, including Tarion. Now they’ve even created yet more government bureaucracy with things like HCRA.

But this attack on the greenbelt is absolutely odious. They’re also taking money away from municipalities when they need it the most. The government should be having a public builder building housing, not expecting private, for-profit agencies to—

The government has a responsibility to ensure that everyone has access to clean drinking water. The fact that there are places in this province which do not have access to that basic human right in the 21st century is unconscionable. It’s completely unacceptable.

There are areas close to my riding that have been under boil-water advisories for 25 years. If that were to happen in any large urban centre, it would be corrected immediately. It would get government attention. But we’ve seen governments, past and present, who simply want to kick the can down the road. They want to finger-point for jurisdictional change, and they simply don’t want to do the right thing. They could get clean drinking water there; they just choose not to.

With the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs, we travelled the province and we heard about the people who are struggling. And yet we see bills like Bill 23, which are just actually—they wrap that bill with the word “housing,” but really what it’s about is McMansions, and it’s about seizing land from the greenbelt.

Instead, what we should make sure is we should have a government that’s actually looking at how Infrastructure Ontario operates. We should have a government that looks at how Tarion operates. When people make the largest purchase of their lives, they deserve to have some—

For many years, we criticized the Liberals for this. But this government is doing it almost on steroids. It is unbelievable what they have achieved with Bill 23, with Bill 7, with so many different things and ways—

I certainly get concerned when this government, any time, talks about the environment. We see their attack on the greenbelt, where reports are now saying that they could build two million homes without touching the greenbelt. We are losing over—this is important. I know they’re not really listening over there; they’re playing on their phones. I guess you can do that in here.

We are losing over 315 acres of farmland every day in the province of Ontario. The cost of our food is going up 12%. My question: Do you trust this government to protect the greenbelt?

I’ll tell you a quick story, because I’ve only got a few seconds left. The Peterborough hospital, which was built with 349 beds that were publicly built—it cost $349 million. And he knows this story. In St. Catharines, when they did the new hospital, almost the exact same size, do you know what it was under a P3? It was $1.1 billion. So you could have taken that $700 million, saved taxpayers’ money and put it back right into the community, right back into health care—