Withdraw, Speaker.

Ontario is expected to grow by more than two million people in the next 10 years—or in the next 15 years. As well, we know that the federal government will be expanding the number of new Canadians coming to our province. We need to ensure that we have a plan that not only builds the volume of homes that we need, but we also need the right types of homes.

So we’re going to continue to put forward amendments, legislation, regulation that gets us closer to that 1.5-million target.

The NDP has laid out their housing policy pretty clearly. They stand with higher fees that add up to $116,900 on the cost of a home in the greater Golden Horseshoe. That’s what—

Interjections.

They will always stand up for higher fees. They will always stand up for delay which adds cost at the end of the day. We’re going to stand with young families, with new Canadians and with seniors who want to realize the dream of home ownership. That’s who we stand up for.

Interjections.

We’re going to continue to stand up for those taxpayers who want to realize the dream of home ownership. The NDP—it’s really Ontari-no that they stand up for.

The member can disagree with her former colleague at Toronto city council, but we are going to ensure that those mayors in Toronto and Ottawa and the work we’ll do in those six regions—that we’ll be able to get shovels in the ground.

We’ve got an ambitious plan, Speaker, one that will put a plan in place to build 1.5 million homes over the next 10 years. A third of the growth in the next decade will take place in Toronto and Ottawa. We need to ensure that those mayors have the tools. This bill does just that.

Speaker, through you to the member—

We’re being very responsive to the Housing Affordability Task Force report. We are taking many of the suggestions and putting them in force against—

At the end of the day, the consultation on the greenbelt deals with an addition; we’re going to be adding a net gain of about 2,000 acres to the greenbelt. We’ll continue to look at other options around the Housing Affordability Task Force.

We made a commitment. Under the leadership of Premier Ford, we said to Ontarians we would table a housing supply action plan each and every year of a re-elected government. That’s a commitment, Speaker, that we’re going to act on.

Speaker, I made my intention crystal clear to the city of Hamilton. I actually wrote an op-ed cautioning the city against the frozen boundary because, at the same time, their own planning staff made recommendations on properties that should be developed, and they ignored them. Over and over again, Hamilton city hall wanted to have it both ways. They didn’t want to intensify within the city, and they didn’t want to extend the boundary.

We’re facing an incredible rising cost of housing because of these delays. Hamilton has some big challenges with housing affordability. We needed to ensure that this official plan set up the community for success so they were able to meet the growth targets we were projecting. Putting your head in the sand and not recognizing that things needed to change is not an option, and we adjusted the official plan accordingly.

Interjections.

It’s expected that the city of Hamilton’s population is going to grow by more than 800,000 people by 2051. Again, according to the city of Hamilton’s own planners, the existing urban boundaries could not keep pace with that projected growth. We cannot deal with the status quo. That is the biggest problem in municipal politics right now when it comes to housing. The status quo doesn’t work. We need to do more. We need to build more, and we need to ensure that we work with the new mayors, like Andrea Horwath in Hamilton, to ensure that she has the tools to be successful.

In addition, the government, in the middle of the pandemic, placed a number of rental protections forward. The Attorney General did a great job in ensuring that evictions were paused during the pandemic. We interceded this year on those properties that were rent-controlled to invoke the cap to provide further protection.

As well, since the pandemic began, we’ve provided municipalities over $1.2 billion to support our most vulnerable, including encouraging them to create robust rent banks to ensure that our most vulnerable are protected.

We’ll continue to work towards it. I just wish that, when we place these measures forward, the member opposite—

Having a roof over your head is exactly why the government, in 2018, dealt with this exemption, so that we could have the type of climate that we experienced in 2021.

The fact of the matter is, Speaker, we had the most rental construction in over 30 years, and that’s something that helps all tenants in the province. We’re going to continue to work with our partners to increase the supply of housing. That’s why, in Bill 23, the deepest development charge discounts for purpose-built rental are family and affordable rentals. We want to encourage—we want to keep building upon the success of the rent control exemption by providing further incentive to build that type of rental housing that I think we can all agree we need again right across this province.