I’m proud to rise today to speak to our opposition day motion to ensure that every Ontarian has a safe and affordable home that they can afford, that is their own.

In Ontario today, we have a housing affordability crisis. In Toronto, we have over 10,000 people who are homeless; they’ve got no homes. They’re sleeping on couches. They are living in parks, in encampments. They are trying to access overcrowded shelters that are full most nights, and they have nowhere else to go.

When it comes to the rental market, we are seeing rents that are at record levels. That might be very good for investors, but it is horrible for Ontarians who cannot afford to pay the rent and pay for their bills and pay for food, especially at a time when we have an inflationary crisis that is, in particular, affecting our housing sector and our food sector. It is scary.

We also have a situation where the dream of home ownership has gone up in smoke.

This government has been in power for four years and a bit now. They’ve had four and a half years to address the housing affordability crisis. Have home prices gone up or down? They’ve gone up. Have rental prices gone up or down? They’ve gone up.

There is the classic saying—the Canadian dream—that if you work hard, you will be able to afford a home that you will one day own. In Ontario today, if you work hard, you will be lucky to find an apartment that you can afford to rent. That is how bad it has gotten.

We now have Alberta putting advertisements in the Toronto subway system, encouraging Ontarians to move to a cheaper province and to take their skill set with them. These are teachers, nurses, paramedics, librarians, tradespeople, baggage handlers. They’re leaving. We now have a net exodus of people moving away from Ontario to other provinces, and it is mostly because this province has become too unaffordable. The reason why it has become so unaffordable is because it is too expensive to find a home to rent and it is too expensive to find a home to own. Why would you stay in a city where you can no longer afford or ever afford a down payment? Why would you stay in a city where you now pay more in rent than someone pays in a mortgage if they bought a home 10 or more years ago; today, people who are renting pay more. Why would you stay in a city where you spend 50% of your paycheque paying off an investor’s mortgage and the chance of you having your own mortgage to pay off has gone up in smoke?

That is this government’s legacy and the Liberal government’s legacy. It is not just the federal government’s responsibility. It is the provincial government’s responsibility as well.

What I find so challenging is that this government says, “Yes, we have a housing crisis”—they have a hard time saying the word “affordable,” but they acknowledge that there is a housing crisis, and then they introduce a bill like Bill 23, which outlines their myth of a road map to get us out of this housing affordability crisis. When I look at Bill 23, I am honestly shocked at its impact on renters, on municipal budgets, on affordable housing, on the greenbelt, on the farmland, and I want to go through this with the time that I have.

This government, with Bill 23, is cutting funding to affordable housing. You’re going to make it so that developers do not have to pay their housing services fee of $1,000 per unit, which goes to affordable housing programs and shelters. That’s what Bill 23 does.

This government, with Bill 23, is cutting the definition of affordable housing. So if a developer builds a home that is quasi-affordable, at 80% of market rent or 80% of the sale price, then they get to have their development fees eliminated. But when we look at the definition of affordable, we see that a one-bedroom condo in downtown Toronto for $440,000 is affordable, according to this government. That is not affordable. You need to earn over $130,000 a year for that to be affordable. That is a shame.

This government is doing nothing in Bill 23 to lower rent—nothing. This government is doing nothing to bring in real rent control so renters are protected from eviction and can build their lives because they’re protected from eviction in a community. They’re doing nothing about it. In fact, what they’re doing is making it worse.

With Bill 23, this government is going to make it easier for developers to set their sights on purpose-built rentals and say, “Well, that area is already zoned for height, so we are going to demolish that purpose-built rental and build a luxury condo.” Those renters who used to have the right to return to that building once construction is complete will no longer be able to do that, which means that all these affordable private market rentals that exist in the city of Toronto, in my riding—health care workers live in these buildings; seniors live in these buildings—are gone. And luxury condos that retail for $3,000 a month in rent, if the owner chooses to rent them out, won’t even be protected with rent control.

That’s your idea of achieving housing affordability in Ontario today. Well, it’s not going to achieve its goal. It’s that simple.

We are calling for a better vision, and I’m going to summarize it now.

Yes, we have a housing supply crisis. We need to build 1.5 million homes to meet demand for current Ontarians who are living in their parents’ basements or are living two families to a purpose-built rental because they can’t afford to branch out on their own. Yes, we need to build homes for future Ontarians as well—no question. But we shouldn’t be building 600-square-foot condos and 3,000-square-foot McMansion monster homes, because they’re not affordable or too small. We need to build homes that meet the needs of Ontarians. We need to build homes for the people who intend to buy them and then live in them, so that they can raise children in them, have pets in them, retire in them, but we’re not doing that. This government is more interested in helping developers and speculators than it is in helping everyday Ontarians find the home that they need. That is a shame.

We are calling for measures to bring forward zoning reform.

We are calling for measures to increase the number of people who are working in the trades, through increased immigration and recruiting people from high schools, so we can ramp up construction.

We are calling for government investment in the housing sector by establishing an entity called “Housing Ontario” to build housing at cost—250,000 homes over 10 years. This isn’t pie in the sky. The city of Toronto is already doing it. They have the Housing Now program where they’re building non-market and for-profit homes on public land at cost in order to provide homes for people. Some of them are affordable. Some of them are rentals. Some of them are condos. They’re doing it. Why aren’t we? We have over 6,000 properties available to access where we can build housing. Why aren’t we doing that? We’re not, but we should be.

We need to augment that—because it’s not just about supply; it’s also about affordability—with real rent control on all units, new and old. We need to bring in vacancy control so there’s a cap on how much the rent can be raised once a tenant leaves, because that will provide protection and stability for renters.

We need to build supportive housing and affordable housing, because there are so many people in Ontario who will never be served by the private market. They need the helping hand of government to provide them with a supportive home and an affordable home so they can rebuild their lives and live good lives.

That’s what we are calling for.

I urge you to support this motion, because this is the true path towards addressing our housing affordability crisis so everyone in Ontario can have a safe and affordable home.