Further questions?

A couple of statistics here I just looked up: In 2011, the number of new housing starts in Ontario, 67,000; in 2012, 76,000; in 2013, 61,000; in 2014, 59,000. The record shows that when the opposition held the balance of power with the former government, there weren’t nearly enough houses built in the province of Ontario. The opposition has cut and pasted a million and a half homes into their housing plans, but their record definitely demonstrates an inability to actually deliver on those things.

I’m wondering if the member from Spadina–Fort York is comfortable saying here in this House that he would look his constituents in the eye and say to them, point blank, “If we were in government, there is no way that your children or new Canadians would ever be able to enjoy the dream of home ownership.”

We all were elected here. There are 124 member in this House who were elected by our constituents to represent our constituents. And there are going to be things that you like that your government is doing; there are going to be things that you don’t like that your government is doing. Then there’s got to be some that you say, “This is absolutely reprehensible. I cannot stand with this. The people of my riding will not allow me to vote for this.”

The egregious attacks on our democratic rights in this province by this government—not just Bill 39 and Bill 28, but also in the previous session, when they changed the rules of the municipal elections in the middle of the election campaign period in 2018, when they decided that they could rule by emergency power without having to come back to the Legislature to grant them that power for up to a year. There have been a number of attacks on our democratic rights, and I’m really, really hoping that the Conservative members of this House will stand up and vote against Bill 39.

Anyways, we can do it. We can build the million and a half houses that we’re going to need, but we also need to build some affordable housing and that’s nowhere in any bill that this government has brought forward. In fact, the last time that affordable housing, that not-for-profit social housing and supportive housing was built in this province was under the last NDP government. We were building 15,000 not-for-profit housing units per year in this province. That’s the last time it was built. So if people want to—

We’ll go to the next question.

Just before we pursue for further debate, I understand that the member for Haliburton–Kawartha Lakes–Brock has a point of order.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker, for the time.

I want to introduce, in the gallery, Chris Rol, who is with the insurance bureau association of Ontario, but was one of the first people who came to work with me in the Legislature in 2003, and I want you all to welcome Chris.

I am very proud to stand today to speak on Bill 39, Better Municipal Governance Act, 2022. I would like to thank and recognize the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing for bringing this bill to the floor, and for his hard work on behalf of all Ontarians.

I was watching the debate before I started, and to my surprise, one of the colleagues opposite was talking about how we can build 1.5 million houses with whatever we have today. Then the question would be why we didn’t do it, why the government before us didn’t do it, if it’s available and can be done. Another colleague was saying there is no guarantee if we go with those bills that we can actually build 1.5 million. I don’t know why there is the uncertainty about building or not building, or meeting or not meeting the numbers. There are no guarantees.

We were in the committee hearings the other day, and one of the colleagues was saying, “What is the guarantee that if we did this and that, we’ll be able to meet the 1.5 million?” The guarantee is just the planning. We don’t know the plans. When a country or a company starts a project of 20 years or 15 years, there is no guarantee that after 15 years they will actually be where they are planning to be. But all the odds and the plans and the timelines and the charts and all the kinds of analysis they do are to make sure that hopefully we will be in that.

What we know now is that as we stand today, we have a crisis. We have a housing crisis. There is enough explanation about the status we are in today, because Canada is scheduled to add 500,000 immigrants every year. If the situation is as such today, what is going to happen in two years when we have a million people added to that equation?

Some 55% of my riding wasn’t born in Canada, so the majority of my riding are new immigrants. I can agree to some extent with the colleague who said that the new immigrants would look for rental units, because they want to look for some affordable units to live in. I can agree with that, but again, where are those rental units today? In Mississauga, I don’t think you can get even one rental apartment available as of today. There are none. Why? Because people who have actually been in their rentals for five or six or 10 years can’t even afford a house, so that they can move on and leave that rental apartment for a newcomer to come in.

So the cycle is stalled. Why? Because the cycle to build a new development takes 10 to 11 years before any house can see the light. So even if we start today with the existing cycle, we are not going to see the results of that change until 2033, according to the cycle. The only way we can get out of that is to break that cycle, to change the cycle, to accelerate the cycle.

During one of the discussions here in committee last week, there was one appeal window of two years. There was a two-year appeal window. How come a developer can put a price or develop something, to get something going, with just one window of appeal that’s two years? This can’t happen.

With accountability comes authority. When we tried to push for the mayors to play their role in promoting and getting the units built—if they don’t have the right authorities, it’s not going to happen. It’s just like math, one plus one; it’s not really a magic thing.

This bill didn’t come out of nowhere. This bill is part of a series of bills. This government did the two recommendations based on the housing supply action plan: More Homes, More Choice; then More Homes for Everyone in 2022; then Strong Mayors, Building Homes; and quickly followed by More Homes Built Faster, which we introduced. So it’s building blocks. Each block of those will help us to change something, to pave the way for more housing to get built.

And when we say more housing, I don’t know why the opposition will always refer to housing like the developers and the big houses and the expensive solutions. Again, it’s a connected cycle. As soon as somebody can buy a house, he will leave his apartment, rental apartment, and this rental apartment becomes available for somebody else who is ready to get in there.

With all those changes we are proposing here, if passed, it will allow a better, efficient and more synchronized process for municipalities, to allow a faster response to our shared priority of building 1.5 million new homes over the next 10 years. So there is a decisive action plan made by our government that can get the job done for Ontarians.

Madam Speaker, it’s not news that we are in this crisis because of many years of neglect. Building houses wouldn’t take six months. The current cycle is eleven years, so if we want to address the root cause of that, we need to go back 10 years to see what was the status 10 years ago that caused us to be here today. This is what our government is doing. Our government is looking into what impedes the process, how we ended up here today. It didn’t happen day and night. We didn’t wake up in the morning and find, “Oh, my God, we have 400,000 units missing.” No, it happened across a number of years. And as I mentioned, even in the last mandate, we did two bills to accelerate housing, to try to change the narrative a little bit, to change the cycle, to break the cycle and give the mayors and the municipalities the responsibilities to be able to push that.

Today, I was meeting with some of the co-op associations outside, and they keep saying, “Whenever we talk to the city about a project, they say that this is a provincial issue.” Well, we are pushing this provincial issue now, saying “Okay, municipalities, you have the right, you have the power, go and do your job. Get the job done.” I don’t see why the opposition would be against something like that, when I’m talking about—when I talked about the two-year appeal process, a period of time or a grace period for two years for appeal, the master plan or whatever, some of the opposition were saying, “Yes, we have to give them the chance to study.” So if the chance to study is two years for the appeal process and then they change something and they come back and say, “Another two years for appealing the new ones,” how can a developer plan a road map for a project like that? They have to put some margins, like safety margins, in costs, and being in the process for 10 years would cost them money. This money, at the end of the day, will add to the cost of the unit that gets sold. He would do a project every 10 years. You have to get some money to live, right?

So I think that the speed of the solution, the speed of the process is very important to the whole process. It’s not only that we get things done. We get things done and we need to get things done fast. We get things done now—not in two years, not in the future, today. We need that to get done today.

Let’s talk about competition and let’s talk about math. Since the Conservative government was elected in this province in 2018, the cost of a house has doubled in the province of Ontario—doubled. Since the member is very interested in economics, I would like to think that the scaffolding of the dismal science of economics is math, and I’m wondering if it’s comfortable for the member—whose company I enjoy, for the record—that we have minoritarian rule in this bill, that a third of an elected body can make a decision. I’m wondering if the member is actually comfortable with that. It would be like handing over the levers to the opposition parties. Are you prepared to have a motion, with unanimous consent, to allow us to run the province of Ontario if you very much believe in this bill?

There is a difference in here. There is an action plan versus voting on changing legislation. This is totally different. We’re talking about people’s lives and housing and education and health, and you’re talking about a policy change or a constitutional change. Nevertheless, I think what’s going on now at the federal level is not very far from what we are here now anyway.

We know that the only way to bring pricing down is competition. We have to have more units, we have to have developers who are developing, giving options, giving a price range, giving a better price, better cuts to get their units sold. It’s very simple. I don’t understand; how difficult is that?

Thank you to the member for his work on this file and his speech. It’s always a pleasure to speak with him.

I have a question for him, but it’s really a question for all of the Conservative government members. I want you to imagine a scenario whereby Justin Trudeau introduced a law in Parliament that said that if any province could muster one third of their MLAs or MPPs to put forth a bill that supported the priorities of Justin Trudeau, it should pass in any province. Would you support such an initiative by the Prime Minister to allow any province with one third of their MPPs or MLAs to get a bill to pass so long as Justin Trudeau agreed with it?

Thank you to my wonderful colleague from my neighbour riding for his remarks. Actually, being a professor at a college, I know we always talked about demand and supply, and I know this afternoon we heard from the member from Brampton North about the education that he was trying to give to the opposition members about economics 101, that it’s all about demand and supply.

There is a huge demand for homes. We have residents in our riding who want to actually own a home. We have immigrants who are coming—I, myself, belong to an immigrant family who came with a dream of owning a house in this wonderful country, in this great province. So when we talk about demand and supply, maybe my friend and my colleague can educate some of the members here about economics 101 and how demand and supply actually works. Thank you.