Yes. It is necessary—non-market and market homes. Thank you.

What is also important is that we need to make sure that the homes that we are building are the kinds of homes that people can afford and the kinds of homes that Ontarians want to live in. So we’re not just building homes for investors; we’re also building homes—we are prioritizing building homes for people who live in Ontario and for people who are planning on moving to Ontario.

The federal government has made the decision to increase immigration rates. That is a good thing. And we need homes for people who are moving to Toronto and moving to Ontario so they can rebuild and build their lives here. It’s extremely important.

We called for in our election platform a commitment to engage in ending exclusionary zoning and moving forward on zoning reform to encourage the construction of missing-middle homes—those duplexes, those triplexes and those townhomes—in existing neighbourhoods.

We call, and we continue to call for, more family-friendly rent-controlled purpose-built rental. When you go to Toronto today and you look at what homes are available, you increasingly see homes that are 600 square feet in size. That’s the average size for a condo in Toronto today. You cannot raise a family and stay sane raising a family in a 600-square-foot condo. It’s not a sustainable or healthy way to live. We need to be building bigger purpose-built rentals and bigger condos—family-friendly apartments—in order to have homes for people that work for families as well. And we have excellent examples of that in University–Rosedale. The Manulife building on Charles Street is an excellent example of a well-made building with purpose-built rentals that families live in because they are larger in size—two-, three-, sometimes even four-bedroom apartments. These are the kinds of measures that will require government regulation to ensure that those kinds of homes are built.

We are also in support of opening up public land to build non-market affordable homes. Ontario has over 6,000 properties that have been identified as being available and worthwhile—like, you could actually build non-market housing on them, and the land is serviceable.

We’re also calling for a public builder to build homes for Ontarians at cost. It makes a lot of sense. It’s been done in other countries. It should be done here.

But it cannot just be about supply. It also needs to be about bringing in better protections for renters and clamping down on speculation.

This government’s track record on improving protections for the 1.4 million households in Ontario that rent has not been strong. This government has made a decision with Bill 184 to make it easier to evict tenants that have fallen behind on their rent, often through no fault of their own. They’ve made it so that they lose their right to return to the Landlord and Tenant Board if they’ve already had a hearing.

This government has also made the awful decision to end rent control on new buildings. The reason why that is very concerning is that it means that when a new renter—maybe they’re new to Ontario or they’ve just moved out of their home—they found a place, they move in and then very quickly they discover that they’re not protected by rent control, which means that they’re not going to have steady, small increases year in and year out of 1.2%—or in this case, for 2023, 2.5%. Their landlord could turn around and raise the rent to however much they want. The challenge with that is that renters cannot prepare for a $500- or $1,000-a-month rent increase, and that is extremely concerning. What it does also mean is that renters can be economically evicted, because they cannot afford the rent increase that could come at any time. That is deeply concerning. It certainly benefits investor landlords, but who it doesn’t benefit—who it hurts—are renters, many of them working Ontarians who are running our cities: our paramedics, our students, our paralegals, the people who work in our supermarkets, our child care workers, our teachers. They’re the people that struggle as a result of that.

It’s been very concerning over the last four years to see this government’s moves to make it even harder to rent in Ontario.

So what we have been calling for, and what we are urging this government to do—and the MPP for Parkdale–High Park introduced a measure today which is related to that—is, instead of allowing rent to exponentially increase, to move forward with rent stabilization, move forward with a plan to bring in vacancy control, so there is a cap on how much rent can be increased when a tenant leaves and a new tenant comes in, and also to bring in better protections for renters so that their home is properly maintained. This government has shown no interest in moving forward with measures that would allow renters to live in safe and affordable homes.

The other measure that we have called for, which this government has been very reluctant to do, is to improve the functioning of the Landlord and Tenant Board.

Interjection.

I’m so pleased you raised that question. I’ve spoken to your former planner in the Waterloo region about what Waterloo is doing right to plan, and they’ve moved forward with really sensible regulation to encourage the construction of homes for students, because that is a real need, and also for baby boomers that want to downsize into smaller units but don’t really want to move into a retirement home and are certainly not ready for a long-term-care home. There’s been a lot of thought there—as well as increasing density along transit zones. There’s a lot of sensible development happening in the Waterloo region.

We certainly need new student housing. Enabling three units within a property will help that. It’s something that we support, and we also need to augment that with better protections for students. What we see with the Residential Tenancies Act is that a lot of student housing is exempt from rent control and Residential Tenancies Act protections. There’s a real need to expand it to ensure that students have the same kind of protections as older people, people who—