Thank you to the member for that question. I also don’t understand why the opposition is opposed to building more houses, to get more attainable housing online. There’s not an event or a time that goes by in the riding that I humbly represent where housing as an issue doesn’t come up, whether it’s someone who says, “I’m worried about my kids not being able to find a home,” or someone in their family who has been saving up.

This government, from day one, has become innovative in terms of how we build housing. Just recently I had Minister Clark in the riding of Barrie-Innisfil, where we announced a modular build, which is a really exciting way to get some affordable houses built and get online quite quickly. But we learned these models from other jurisdictions, so if other jurisdictions are doing things well, why not use evidence-based policy in order to improve the way we build here in Ontario and how we, of course, support the governance of the municipalities?

We’re using every tool we possibly can in order to, again, bring about attainable housing, including things like garden suites and secondary units. We need to continue to build on that progress, and that’s exactly what we’re doing in this bill.

Speaker, what we’re doing today is taking that fine-balance approach, allowing for more attainable housing to be built, but also doing it in a very wise way to still enjoy the amenities that we do and, of course, all of the lovely parks that we enjoy every day.

Since 2018, every housing bill we’ve introduced has been very fine-tuned on the issue of what do we do to ensure that people have attainable housing. I talked to a lady—her name is Cindy—in Innisfil, and she’s very excited about our transit-oriented community development in Innisfil because she knows that that has the potential to create all kinds of attainable housing.

I’m happy to be able to rise this morning and speak to the importance of building housing across the good province of Ontario. We know that we have such a challenge. We’ve heard time and time again the concerns that we have across this province, this country, in seeking out and finding attainable housing. It is something that is so important, very near and dear, and something that I trust that the members opposite recognize the importance of—attainable housing—but, more importantly than anything, it’s about actually doing something to accomplish that goal.

We’re moving forward in that fashion, and I’m wondering, to the member opposite, if they could please help us understand what they have against us working towards building more attainable housing in the province of Ontario.

It’s apparent that this government has a deep fear of democracy because, with every bill that has come before this House, the government has attempted to undermine core democratic processes, shifting power and resources away from ordinary working people and their elected representatives to those with deep connections to the Conservative Party.

I have a question though, because in Thunder Bay we have two shovel-ready not-for-profit projects. My question is: Is there anything in either of these bills that would provide the necessary financial support so that these projects could go ahead? Because they could be building in April, and the province is missing in action.

I just want to ask the member: Right now, our new city council in London is going to be meeting at noon today to add to the growing list of names of the critics of this government’s Bill 23, building homes faster. The new mayor has called a meeting today, of course, because he says he’s worried about the proposed reduction in development charges which are applied to new builds for paying for the city’s infrastructure. The member alluded to that a minute ago. Can she expand on how other municipalities are coming out as critics against this bill because of the lack of planning and foresight when it comes to what cities face today?

I didn’t even know you were here. Not in my backyard—NIMBY. He’s got a new one now. He’s got a new one, and I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been sharing it every day. BANANA: build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. That is exactly what is happening.

So when you want to know why there’s a lack of supply, there’s a lack of supply because we’ve got all of this NIMBYism that is happening, all of that activity. I look in my hometown of North Bay, and there’s one project—we had the civic hospital and St. Joseph’s General Hospital. They were both demolished and we built a brand new, billion-dollar hospital in North Bay. On the civic hospital site—now, I was mayor at the time these buildings were demolished. I was mayor from 2003 to 2010. So these buildings were demolished. Since then, there’s nothing built on the civic site. At least on the St. Joseph’s site, there’s a new long-term-care facility that’s under way, but on the civic site it’s just been blocked and blocked. It’s an entire city block. The hospital is gone, but there’s not one thing built on that because it continues to be blocked. For a decade, it has continued to be blocked.

That is exactly the issue. We’ve got that “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone.” That is exactly what’s happening. As a result of it, I can drive to the Commanda, which is in the southwest end of my riding, I can drive to Powassan—the little town of Powassan, 3,200 people; their first house to hit $500,000 in Powassan. That’s what’s happening when you can’t build anything, anywhere, near anyone. That’s what’s happening. In Port Loring, they’re having bidding wars for houses. That’s absolutely unheard of north of the French River. That is just absolutely unheard of, and that’s what’s been happening, Speaker. Because there is a lack of supply, it’s driving the prices out of reach of families, and so we, through Bill 39, intend to resolve that.

We look at last year’s 100,000 housing starts. I think that was the highest since 1987, far greater than the 30-year annual average of 67,500. But that was just the start. We need to have this bill in place so that we continue to work hard so that all Ontarians, both newcomers and long-time residents, can actually, for the first time, have the dream of home ownership become a reality.

So we’re taking steps to fix the problem. It’s bureaucracy. It’s the red tape. All of that stands in the way of the much-needed housing.

Speaker, I’ve talked about the fast-increasing demand. I’ve told this Legislature all about the $16-billion investment in the auto sector that’s created tens upon tens of thousands of new jobs. The 2,700 people that went to work in Oshawa this morning for the first time in a long time since that plant was reopened, the 2,500 people who are coming to Windsor after the thousands—it’ll likely be 10,000 people that work in that building there. All of these people need a place to live.

We will continue to make sure that we expand the strong-mayors powers to the municipalities that are shovel-ready, municipalities that are committed to growth and municipalities that are committed to cutting red tape. We want them to look at what we’ve done as a province.

We listened to Sergio Marchionne tell Premier Wynne that you’ve got to become competitive, you’ve got to cut costs, you’ve got to cut red tape, and that’s what will help us. Because I can tell you, Speaker, by the emails and texts that I send the Premier every night, that fast-increasing demand? That’s not going to slow down. That is not slowing down in the province of Ontario.

They look at us. I was in Germany and Austria and Japan and Korea earlier this year; every one of those countries, every business that we visited, said to us, “In this turmoil, in this tumultuous world that we’re facing right now, we look at Ontario as a sea of calm.” They can’t wait to get here, not only to work here but to open companies here.

I’m going to India on Friday, and I will meet with about a dozen companies, and they have all told us the same thing: “We just need to hear from you the facts. We believe Ontario is safe for our workers, safe for our families, safe for our executives. We believe that about Ontario. We want to hear that from you. And we believe that our investments will be secure. Ontario is stable. They promised low costs; they promised low energy rates; they promised to reduce the red tape”—all promises that we’ve kept. They need to hear that from us, every single company in every single country; they’re ready to invest here.

We think there will be great news out of the trip to Germany. We think there will be spectacular news out of the trip to Korea and Japan. We’re looking for really solid results coming out of India as well. We’re there to thank Tata for the 5,000 employees that they’re hiring here. We’re there to thank HCL and Infosys for the 500 employees each of them hired in Mississauga.

These are thousands of people, Speaker. It’s not slowing down. The demand will not slow down in Ontario. Now we need to work on the supply.

All of these investments, by the way, created jobs and have new workers in them. I think of you voting against the expansion of the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corp. dollars—a portion of that $8 million went to J.S. Redpath in North Bay, one of the mining companies that we expect to help us dig the lithium out of the ground in northern Ontario. All of these provided 500,000 workers in the province of Ontario.

First of all, I want to comment on your housing comments, because you always talk about, “That’s the rationale,” and the government always talks about, “The rationale for Bill 39 is we need to build housing.” We’ve been building housing in the province of Ontario since 1867 in a democracy. Nowhere the government said, “Hey you have to overturn or override democratic principles in order to build housing.” Yours is the first government to do that.

What bill would I support from this government? I would support a bill that actually built not-for-profit supportive housing to bring an end to homelessness. We’ve got 16,000 people on the streets of this province who do not have a home. I would support a bill—I see I’m out of time. I will go on about what other bills I would support in the next answer.

I’m really hoping the government will reconsider Bill 39.

When you said that you’re supporting local decision-making, the exact opposite is true. You’re overriding local decision-making. We just had an election in Ontario. We elected 25 city councillors. They are supposed to govern this city by majority vote. You’re saying, “No, that’s not necessary. It’s only going to be one third.” So eight of those city councillors are going to be able to make decisions, and it’s the same process, the same principle that you’re applying and you’re disenfranchising the voters in Niagara, in Peel and York. It’s an absolute assault on the democratic rights of the people of this province.

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.