Thank you for that question. This government has been putting students first. We’ve been lowering tuition, investing in research and institutions, and helping to get shovels in the ground to build affordable on-campus rental accommodations.

In addition to on-campus residences, many colleges and universities offer off-campus housing support to students. To help them navigate the rental housing market and their local communities and increase the supply of rental housing, we are proposing to reduce development charges for those units, with deeper discounts of up to 25% for family-sized units.

We’re making progress in building more rental housing. Last year, Ontario saw more than 13,000 rental starts. That’s the most rental starts since 1991. But we know we need to do more to hit our target of 1.5 million new homes over the next 10 years, and this government is committed to continue to do this work.

And let’s not pretend the human race doesn’t leave a footprint, because we do. Every one of us lives in a home, and every one of those homes is sitting on land that could be used for agriculture or for green space, so it becomes a matter of balance. That’s the way I personally look at it. We have to balance and be responsible for our environment—and for this world in its entirety, actually—and we also have to live within it and have the means to live within it.

This bill takes all of that into consideration. We’re building close to transit. We’re building close to our places of work. We’re building close to the services we need. That in itself will help the environment.