Strong mayors—that’s what this bill is talking about this morning.

I want to mention, Speaker, though you, to the government, to my other colleagues in this chamber this morning, something that has been said at committee, I said it at committee; other people said it at committee—I’ll pull up my reading glasses here, because my 50-year-old eyes sometimes fail me: No one asked anybody in our city, in Ottawa, about this bill.

I just want to say rhetorically, off the top, for our collective benefit, would we ever think a piece of legislation is adequate for third reading in this place—a place built by our grandparents, by generations of people who wanted to build a better life for people in this province—if we didn’t actually take a piece of legislation that directly impacted a community for review first?

The mayor of Ottawa, Jim Watson, has said publicly that he found out about this bill in the media—in the media, Speaker.

I’ve asked business improvement associations at home; I’ve asked community groups at home; I’ve asked advocates of all different kinds at home, all of whom are concerned with issues I hear this government is concerned about: affordable housing; the need to make sure our transit systems work well; the need to make sure that, in particular, our neighbours who are suffering right now in mental health crisis and the opioid crisis—which is ripping a hole through many aspects of our community right now. I hear the government talk about these issues a lot; I commend them for doing so. They’re talking about this bill, in particular, around housing as being important.

But I would ask the government, through you, Speaker, would we ever want to introduce a piece of legislation that would impact a particular municipality or community without talking to them first? I would hope we could get across our party lines and agree that, no, of course we wouldn’t. But that is happening right now. We are at third reading. A bill is being pushed quickly through this chamber—within the rules, I’ll acknowledge, but very quickly compared to how previous Parliaments in this place have worked—and the community I represent has not been consulted.

What is the model for this bill? As I understand it from my friends in government, when I heard this bill being debated in committee with MPP Burch and others, the idea is the mayoralty model in Chicago, the strong-mayor model, which would basically empower a mayor to create their own staff infrastructure to be able to implement budgets. Decisions which have previously been collective hiring decisions—for the head of transit, for the head of auditing processes and budgets—would now solely rest within the mayor’s office. If someone was contacted from Ottawa—the mayor, myself, any of our business or community leaders, labour organizations—if they were asked about this bill, the Chicago bill, which would rest these powers in the office of the mayor, I think the first thing we might have told the government is why this particular model did not work with our light rail transit system in our city, a $2-billion investment in a train that has not worked—not worked through our northern climate; wheels that appeared correct flattened over time; stations that smell of sewer gas; doors that jam and don’t open.

How did we get to this particular issue, and what’s the link to Bill 3 and this particular situation? Non-consultation. A sole-source contract with the Rideau Transit Group. I see a government member shaking their head. Perhaps in debate you can enlighten me as to how I’m wrong.

We worked with you. I say, from my perspective, standing here, from my community, as the MPP for Ottawa Centre, I encouraged you for two years to declare a public inquiry into this failed light rail transit system—failed and failing. After two years of advocacy, not just from me but from people back home, the government agreed to a public inquiry into the system, something we could not convince the mayor of our city to do. The mayor of our city would not declare a judicial inquiry into the light rail transit system despite repeated advocacy locally, but we got this government to agree to it. I congratulated the government at the time for doing it, and we are going to see the fruits of that work relatively soon. But why did we have to do that in the first place? We had to do it in the first place—and this is what I’m learning through disclosure in that inquiry process—because some people, apparently very close to the current mayor’s office, were creating a transit system, the details of which were not disclosed to the public.

Let me tell you about the gravity of that situation. Councillor Catherine McKenney, who represents the Somerset ward—if you’ve been to our beautiful city of Ottawa, that is the downtown core of our city—asked to see a copy of the $5-million-a-month maintenance contract for our LRT system—just the maintenance contract. Under the current public-private partnership agreement signed between the city of Ottawa, the province and the federal government and the Rideau Transit Group, the only way Councillor McKenney could review that contract was in the city solicitor’s office, with the city solicitor looking over her shoulder, without the right to take written notes, without the right to use any digital device to record what was being read. That’s the level of non-transparency we got with stage 1 of the LRT in Ottawa, under a procurement model that, I’m going to tell you, Speaker, and tell my friends in government this morning, resembles very closely what you’re doing with this legislation and how you’ve proposed it and rolled it out.

We desperately need transit in our city. I’m going to talk about housing in my 20 minutes; I’m going to talk about adequate incomes, too; but we desperately need transit in our city that works. There was so much hope and promise when people saw the LRT coming. People in our city were excited to get out of their cars and get on the train. We have a fantastic—as you know, Speaker; I know you’ve been to our city many times—bus system, a dedicated bus-lane system that works well in our city. This was meant to complement that and to do our part in climate action, but we have a system that time and again has often failed to operate.

Thanks to the inquiry we worked really hard for, we’re going to find out exactly what has gone wrong. Given what has been disclosed to date—and I hope the government will agree with me on this—the way in which this LRT system was rolled out was a major problem. Any time you have a non-transparent situation in which elected representatives cannot scrutinize a major infrastructure project to make sure it works correctly, you’re bound for trouble.

Let’s go back to the city of Chicago model that’s inspiring Bill 3. What are people in Chicago saying right now about their experience with this model? I’m hearing a lot of criticism. I’m hearing a lot of people who would actually much rather a collaborative approach to leadership, which is probably why, interestingly enough, our current mayor, Jim Watson, has asked all candidates presenting themselves for office for mayor of the city of Ottawa to promise not to use the powers presented in this bill—not to use veto powers, not to use single-capacity hiring contracts for key positions in our city, either financial or otherwise.

Why would the mayor do that? I think the mayor is doing that, quite frankly—and Mayor Watson has been outspoken on this himself. He and I haven’t always agreed on everything. That’s politics. That’s life. He’s saying very clearly that Ottawa, our city, is at a crossroads right now. We have to make huge investments in major infrastructure to make sure we actually have a city that we are proud of, that we leave to our children and our grandchildren, that will work for our small businesses, that will help people live good and dignified lives. He’s actually bypassing the government at this point. He’s asking the people running for office—presumably because no one in the government has picked up the phone to call him about this—“Please don’t use this legislation.” So, colleagues, if you weren’t inspired to shop this piece of legislation by people in the city of Ottawa, I hope that alarming fact gives you pause for not wanting to rush this through.

Why don’t we take Bill 3—I’ll help you. I know how to do town halls. We have a fantastic community in Ottawa that loves to do community organizing. We’ll go across the city—urban, suburban, rural—and talk to people about whether this strong-mayor model will actually help the city, and, as I said off the top, what did our experience with light rail transit teach us about what happens when you have a process that is not transparent, that is not consultative enough?

Let’s talk about housing, because I know the government believes this piece of legislation is going to help build more housing. If you go across Ottawa Centre right now and look at the cranes that are up and look at the projects that are being built, they generally have one thing in common: They are beautiful, tall, glass buildings that are going to be great housing for people who want to downsize from a family home they might have had for 30 or 40 years, to live downtown, to live on transit. It sounds good, right? It checks all the boxes—except we need to look at the price, except when you look at the price of some of the offerings by developers like Claridge or Minto or Trinity Group, highly successful developers who are working very quickly to get projects up and out to market. None of these projects have affordable housing components to them, and that is what we desperately need. In our city, we desperately need more affordable housing—just as I’ve heard the government say everywhere. But, Speaker, I ask the government, through you, if it continues that kind of construction—because I don’t see anything in Bill 3 around inclusionary zoning to ensure that structures that get built—a percentage, as other jurisdictions have done—will be affordable.

What kind of housing are we going to see moved more expeditiously through the mayor’s office after Bill 3? I suspect it will be more of the same, which is great for my parents; it’s great for other people who have a family home that they want to—believe me, my partner and I would love to have our parents move to Ottawa to help us with the kids, have a condo downtown. Sure, it works for me, but will it work for my friend Candyrose?

Let me tell you about Candyrose, Speaker. Candyrose is someone I’ve known in Ottawa’s urban Indigenous community for a long time. She’s a fantastic person. She’s active in the arts in our city and has been part of many theatre performances, many different cultural outreach efforts to try to bring people who come to our city from many contexts of trauma into a new community so they can feel part of our city. That’s Candyrose’s contribution to our city.

Candyrose lives on the Ontario Disability Support Program. Her income is $841 a month. On that $841 a month, Candyrose has to find housing, has to feed herself, has to get around the city. I think we can all agree that that is an undignified situation—not solely responsible by this government, but generations of governments in this place that have set up a situation of legislated poverty.

What has Candyrose done? Just like thousands of social assistance recipients in our city, despite that challenging context, she goes out every day to contribute. It may not show up in gross domestic product, but every day Candyrose goes out there to contribute.

I’m not sure what other members in this House are experiencing, but I recently saw Candyrose at the Labour Day march. She walked up to me—and it had been about a year since I’d seen her in person, pandemic conditions being what they are. I think my friend Candyrose may have lost about 25% of her body weight, for real. I was shocked at the optics of seeing my friend marching with me, talking to me about how much she’s suffering, how much more food costs, how difficult it is to live a dignified life, how she’s even potentially going to lose her own assisted housing through mental health supports, because she just can’t survive. Then I think about what Bill 3 would do for her. Maybe the government would tell me, “What it would do, Joel, is centralize in the office of the mayor immediate payments to people like Candyrose.” It’s kind of the philosopher-king approach to politics: We rest all hope in the office of one person to break up NIMBYism, to break up political gridlocks, and the money will flow straight from the office of the mayor to people like Candyrose, people who are suffering in our city right now. But I suspect that’s not going to happen.

What I think would make it more likely to happen is if I could work with this government to set up actual community conversations back home about this bill, so they could hear directly from Candyrose—not through me—and directly from people who are suffering right now on our streets.

If anybody in this chamber went to the AMO conference recently, you would have walked in our streets and you would have seen people living out in the open and suffering.

At the moment, in the city of Ottawa, we spend $25 million on police calls with respect to homelessness issues—$25 million. And our budget for affordable housing in the city of Ottawa is just over $15 million.

If you talk to any police officer in our city, they will tell you the same thing: There’s one reality for people who are housed, there’s one reality for people who can safely work during the pandemic from home, and there’s another reality for people who live with any kind of trauma, who’ve had any manner of bad luck, who find themselves on the streets with limited to no support.

And here’s the big irony—and former Senator Hugh Segal has spoken about this very eloquently: The big irony is that it costs Ontario a lot more for these folks to suffer in front of our eyes than it would for us to marshal the courage to go in the direction of Scandinavian countries that have said, “There will be a minimum income in this country. We are not prepared to watch people suffer any longer.” Do you know the great thing, Speaker? Every time we have tried it in this great country in which we both live, it has worked.

Almost 50 years ago, in the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, an experiment called Mincome was tried, where every family in that province was guaranteed an income, in those days, of $19,000 a year. There’s a terrific book—I’m not allowed to use props, so I’ll just talk about it—called Utopia for Realists, written by Rutger Bregman, a major intellectual coming out of the Netherlands. Mr. Bregman has documented, from Professor Forget, who has looked at the boxes of documents from that experiment, that spousal abuse dropped, hospital visits dropped, birth rates increased, prosperity reigned. It was more affordable for the province of Manitoba to guarantee a basic income than to watch people suffer.

Feed Ontario, the organization that comes here to lobby us on behalf of food banks in the province, has told us that the cost of poverty in Ontario is $33 billion a year. That’s approaching what we spend on education in the province—if you look at costs to the health care system, the costs to policing and incarceration.

So what I would ask us to consider with this bill, if you were take it on the road—take me up on my offer. Bring it back home. Let me help you. I’m here to help, not just to criticize. Take it on the road.

Bill 3, Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act—it’s interesting that you did mention the mayor not being consulted.

Well, they did ask—not this government, but the local media asked the three biggest mayors in Niagara what they thought of the bill. They do not support Bill 3, Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act. Niagara Falls mayor Jim Diodati said no. St. Catharines mayor Walter Sendzik said no. Welland mayor Frank Campion said no. They do not support the bill.

Why do you think the Conservative government is bullying your mayor with no consultation and forcing this bill on the citizens of Ottawa?

My question to the member is—I know you want the albatross around your neck of the 15 years gone, but we can’t do anything about that. That is just fact and history. We know the job is not getting done. We need to build more homes. Notwithstanding our 100,000 record-breaking starts last year, we need to get the job done. If not the mayors, who will then have accountability? Would you rather the province do it? If it’s not one of those two groups, who do you expect to get this job done?

I always like listening to my buddy over there. But I’ll correct him on one thing: I actually have a very good rapport with developers—and not all NDP don’t talk to developers.

You made a statement around your bill with mayors. We’ve got a problem in Niagara that—I don’t believe we have anybody who supports your bill. If it was a good bill and they’re out campaigning, I would think they’d be out there saying, “Hey, we need this bill done.” I’m not getting that. They’re not calling me.

But what I do know is, Niagara Falls, which you guys know—a lot of you guys visited my riding during the campaign, because it’s so lovely down there. Mayor Jim Diodati said no to the bill. The Welland mayor said no to the bill. You said, “Well, they’re running campaigns.” I have a mayor in St. Catharines—a very talented, very young mayor. I’m actually disappointed he’s not running again. He’s not running for the position, but he was very clear, on his way out—he’s saying he doesn’t support the bill.

The mayor from Ottawa doesn’t support the bill.

My question is pretty easy, I know, for you, but some of your members might not know the answer. Can you give me a list of all the mayors who were consulted on this bill before it was brought to this House?

Our government was re-elected with a strong mandate to help more Ontarians find a home that meets their needs and their budget.

During the election, when I was knocking on doors, many of my residents were saying that their sons, their daughters, who are still living at home in their thirties, need to buy a home. They feel that it is out of reach for them.

When we look at the majority that our government received from the voters, not only in my riding but across this province, the people did vote for our plan to build 1.5 million new homes over the next 10 years.

My question is, how will these changes in the strong-mayors act build off the previous success that our government has had in addressing the housing supply crisis?

My question is to Minister Clark.

I would first like to correct the record from yesterday. The claim that my amendments to Bill 3 were five hours late is completely false. The minister, as a seasoned veteran at Queen’s Park, should know that there is no hard deadline at committee. Please correct accordingly.

Mr. Speaker, on to my question: For a bill entitled Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act, I find it unusual that the text of the bill fails to mention housing even once. The aforementioned proposed amendments I provided that focused on housing were deemed out of scope and principle at committee, yet the government continues to insist this bill is going to aid our housing crisis.

Can the minister please provide a concrete example of how this bill will be putting shovels in the ground and be specific about what types of housing will be built as a result?

My first amendment asked that the amount of new housing built within each city every year is proportionally sufficient to meet the goal of building 1.5 million new units of housing in Ontario by 2031. It also included the need for a progress report by the head of council to assess how well they have met that goal, including reasoning for why they have or have not met it and a plan for subsequent years. This amendment was deemed out of scope and principle.

Will the government be tracking and regularly reporting back about the building of new home units in these cities, in alignment with the 1.5 million homes? And if so, what system will you use?

It’s an honour to rise in this House to speak on behalf of the great people of Toronto Centre and specifically to this bill, Bill 3, which will give the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa more political power than the 48 other municipal councillors combined in the two cities.

It should be no surprise to those in the House that, given my history of championing local government, urbanism and my love for the city of Toronto, I have many thoughts to share about this bill. I want to start by calling a spade a spade. This bill has nothing to do with housing and everything to do with a revenge plot. The Premier has clearly not gotten over his anger at Torontonians for refusing to make him their mayor in 2014. The counsel I would suggest that the Premier seek to process his residual anger is that from a therapist and not legislative counsel. This bill again demonstrates the Premier’s disregard for Toronto’s democracy and Toronto’s city council. It’s simply a power grab.

We can have a conversation about the merits of a strong-mayor system—that I would welcome—but that is not what the government is proposing through Bill 3. But the Premier doesn’t want to hear from Torontonians; or, even worse, he’ll do exactly the opposite of what they want. Case in point: After a multi-year consultation with Toronto residents, in 2016 Toronto city council adopted an independent report to amend the ward boundary review to achieve voter parity. Even the Ontario Municipal Board sided with city council. In 2018, the Premier ignored Toronto residents to collapse our democratically determined districts into double-sized mega wards. Now a city of nearly three million residents has 25 councillors, which is nearly the same number of councillors as the city of Ottawa, which only has one million residents.

Toronto is the fourth-largest government in North America, with an annual operating budget of $15 billion, the most diverse city on the planet, where nearly three million residents speak over 200 languages, and the Premier wants to centralize power into the hands of one man.

The Premier is not interested in making life better for people in Toronto; he is, however, interested in perpetuating a political system that only allows people who are almost always rich, almost always white, almost always male and almost always incumbents to run and win political office. When 52% of Torontonians belong to a visible minority group and yet only 20% of city councillors do, there is something tragically wrong with that. I’m going to dig into this flaw a little bit further in the legislation, as someone who has had the experience of running both in a municipal city election as well as now running for a political party in the provincial system.

Running for municipal office, as many of the colleagues here will know, is an individual endeavour. It is not going to be accessible to all residents. There are many systemic barriers to overcome, and this discourages diverse voices who deserve to see themselves represented from running because they are not able to. As a councillor, you have to build an organization team from scratch. You have to network and strategize your path to victory almost by yourself. And then you better have the financial means to be able to put your life on hold for the next five to eight months, let alone to fundraise for a political campaign.

Nothing about the demands I describe are structurally favourable for the leaders our city truly and honestly needs. Our city is full of these leaders who are Black, Indigenous, women, people of colour, queer, two-spirited, trans, low income, people living with disabilities and working-class people. They should have a chance to run for political office. A strong-mayor system will actually deter that.

If we were discussing a bill that actually did anything to strengthen Toronto’s democracy, it would actually allow cities to implement ranked ballots, repeal Bill 5 and empower Toronto’s democratically elected government to have a say in the size of their council and the size of their municipal wards. It should enact proportional representation provincially so that cities could also have predictability and long-term plans that persist through changes in government through their provincial counterparts. It should also limit this government’s ability to enact MZOs that undermine public faith in the planning process.

But if this government was actually proposing a bill to get more housing built, I can offer you some advice on that. After all, I was appointed by Mayor Tory and I served eight years on the planning and growth management committee and another additional four—eight altogether—on the planning and housing committee, when I only resigned on May 3 to run in the provincial election.

During those eight years on the planning and growth management and planning and housing committees, I sat directly across from Toronto’s chief planner, the housing secretariat, the director of urban design, the general manager of heritage planning, the director of transportation planning, the director of strategic initiatives, policy and planning, and others. This was led by our chief planner with our professional planning division of 477 full-time employees, staff who oversaw one of the fastest-growing cities in the world.

The Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing likes to patronize Toronto from his town seat in Brockville. He often boasts that Toronto’s mired in red tape and repeatedly insults city council for their inefficiency. The minister seems to conveniently ignore that in the first quarter of 2022, Toronto had 252 cranes working on construction projects, far outdistancing even the second-place city in the crane index, Los Angeles, which had 51. Seattle was next with 37 cranes; Calgary had 31; and Washington, DC, had 26. Toronto has led in the crane index count every year since 2015.

Meeting provincial growth targets has not been a challenge for the planning and housing committee; nor has it been a challenge for city council. I was constantly, and we were constantly, reminded of this by Toronto’s chief planner, whom I had the distinct honour of working with. Toronto’s chief planner, Gregg Lintern, wrote in his recent Development Pipeline 2021 report:

“The city continues to be an exceptionally attractive” place “for development in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). There are more residential units and more non-residential GFA proposed in the current Development Pipeline than in any other Pipeline over the last five years. Given the scale of this proposed development, comprehensive planning frameworks that link infrastructure” to comprehensive planning that allows us to manage the city’s growth is what we need to determine how we improve the quality of life. The pandemic has not deterred development activity in Toronto.

The city of Toronto’s population growth is firmly on track with the forecast supporting A Place to Grow: Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe. As the city’s urban growth centres develop, they are progressing towards or exceeding the province’s density targets set out in the 2020 growth plan as amended by this House.

In Toronto, our professional city planners know this government’s strong mayors bill posing as a housing bill is an absolute farce. Councillors and city planners representing avenues, urban growth centres, especially in midtown, North York and downtown have individually approved more housing than all the MPPs in this House combined together—mathematical fact.

Here’s the receipt from the 2021 housing report from our chief planner: In total, over 503,000 residential units were proposed in projects with development activity from 2016 to 2020. Of this, only 93,000 were actually built. There are more than 162 residential units that have been approved but not built. Again, 246,000 units still under active review, which means that there are about 409,000 residential units that are either under review or active, indicating a continuation of strong development activity in Toronto. In the coming years, what we will see is that the residential units, if all realized over time, will increase the total number of dwellings in the city by over one third.

The next point I have to share with this chamber, Speaker, is that having a strong-mayor system sounds vaguely like a positive thing. What this bill’s title and framing are is fundamentally misleading and unfair. So allow me to frame it more simply based on the recent experience that we’ve had in the city.

What happens when your strong mayor refuses to take basic steps—

Withdraw. Thank you, Speaker.

Allow me to reframe this debate for you since we’re talking about the strong mayor. I want to share with you a recent experience that the cities have. You can call it any city.

What happens when your strong mayor refuses to take basic steps to march in the Pride parade to support the 2SLGBTQ community? What happens when your strong mayor has a history of police having to investigate domestic violence, including pressing charges? What happens when your strong mayor was documented handing out $20 bills in social housing to win favour? What happens when your mayor is the kind of person who says, “If you are not doing needles and you are not gay, you won’t get AIDS probably”? What happens when your strong mayor always votes against funding HIV/AIDS programs? What happens when your strong mayor rips out bike lanes and blames cyclists for cars hitting them? What happens when your strong mayor promotes digging a private toll tunnel under the Toronto Gardiner Expressway to avoid hitting cyclists?

What happens when your strong mayor charges into his own deputy mayor during a city council meeting, causing her to live with chronic pain until the day she died? What happens when your strong mayor tries to buy and privatize the abutting public parkland next to his house to enlarge his backyard? What happens when your strong mayor tries to take over the waterfront by dropping a mega mall and Ferris wheel without support from the local residents or city council? What happens when your mayor says a home for the developmentally disabled youth in Etobicoke had ruined the community? What happens when your mayor calls women reporters “bitches”?

This Premier wants to impose a strong-mayor system in Toronto to support his provincial priorities—

This Premier wants to impose a strong-mayor system in Toronto to support his provincial priorities, yet we have no idea what the provincial priorities are. The mandate letters aren’t even made public, and you expect us to just accept this carte blanche. But given our recent experience in Toronto, I would say no thanks.

Speaker, mayors are human, and everyone makes mistakes. I know that we can expand ourselves and go beyond that. But some are corrupt and some are incompetent.

City councils as a whole are far more accountable because we can allow the checks and balances to take place. There will be far more accountability with a strong local government when we deliver good and open government for the residents of Toronto and for Ottawa. A strong-mayor system opens the door for corruption and costly mistakes. These are not my words or my assumption; this was already said by the integrity commissioner. That is a price that I don’t think Torontonians are ready to make. It’s certainly a price that’s too expensive; we can’t afford it.

Recently, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing mocked me for promoting a red-light development system to stop development. What he conveniently omitted was that it was a red-light system to hinder bad development and a green-light system to advance good development. He forgot to say that.

He conveniently forgot to tell the whole story, which was widely reported in the Toronto media at that time. But the Toronto city planners will remember this story because in 2019, after this government first took office, the minister unilaterally tore up the city of Toronto’s downtown secondary plan. We had been working on this document for a number of years and it was going to guide our urban growth for the next 25 years.

The planning document was clearly studied and consultations took place with residents and home builders alike. This government’s 224 changes, surgical changes to Toronto’s downtown secondary plan, included eliminating and reducing infrastructure such as daycares and other community facilities as a condition of development. With a stroke of their pen, they enriched developer donors without binding them to building sustainable, responsible buildings in complete neighbourhoods—what every urbanist is asking for.

As a response to this ripping up of our secondary plan, downtown councillors, with the support of our city planners, created a “red light, green light” system to evaluate which development proposals got prioritized, which ones were going to be advanced. We were determined to make sure that even if you tore up, even if this House tore up our secondary plan, we were going to do everything we could to hang on to it because we worked so darn hard at it.

In Ontario, land use planning has always been an important part of the work expected from the local representative. In 2012, I worked with city council to free Toronto from the Ontario Municipal Board in getting the Liberal government to reform and modernize the quasi-judicial, unelected, unaccountable board.

The very next year, after this government was elected, they tossed all those consultations and all that work out the window, into the garbage bin, and then they brought back the OMB, bigger, stronger and uglier than ever before, with a brand new name: the Ontario Land Tribunal.

This government does not stand for good planning or even good development. They don’t even hide the fact that they reward their wealthy developers and land speculator donors. This government prints MZOs like it’s money for rich donors, paves over wetlands for developers, and illegally tears down heritage buildings, like the foundry buildings in the west Donlands, for mystery buyers. They stopped the construction of North York housing for the homeless. The government doesn’t care about housing, but only about those who are enriched and who can keep them in power.

If the Premier truly cared about housing—I want to make this case—he would:

—meet with the co-op housing federation’s requests for seed grant funding;

—empower cities to investigate rule-breaking Airbnbs so that we can actually get our bylaws back under order. We could put 6,500 family homes right into the market today with a stroke of your pen;

—investigate and crack down on money laundering in the housing sector and land speculation;

—introduce rent control and vacancy decontrol legislation to rein in spiraling rental costs;

—fund the construction of new affordable housing so that the most precariously housed among us will be stabilized;

—create incentives to build the right kind of housing, not small bachelors for speculators but the right kind of housing that’s large, family sized, with three, four, five bedrooms. This House would even invest in creating rent-to-own programs for communities like mine in Regent Park, and family-sized and rent-geared-to-income units; and

—mandate universal design and accessible housing standards so that people who use mobility devices will have access to every single unit without being asked to languish on a wait-list.

If this government truly supported housing, you would actually support Mayor Tory’s HousingTO, a $24-billion plan to build 40,000 homes over the next 10 years, which requires a financial commitment from three orders of government, approximately $7.1 billion each—that’s billion with a B.

If this government actually wants to build housing, then you need to spend the money that you’ve been hoarding and not the millions that you sprinkle around, that you re-announce and re-announce and re-announce. We’ve all heard those stories before and we’ve seen those press releases at the city of Toronto.

In fact, every three to six months, city council will reiterate its request to this government for the outstanding $7 billion of capital and operating funding that we need in order for the mayor to meet his housing targets.

If this government was serious about housing, then they would issue the city-initiated MZO that the city council has been asking for for two years at 175 Cummer Avenue in North York, but instead the MPP and the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing has put the brakes on that, asking for more consultation. So we now have 69 units of new, prefabricated housing that could be homes, sitting in a parking lot while people are sleeping in encampments, while we carry out bogus consultation.

Residents know that talk is cheap. This government talks a good deal about housing, but when it comes to building housing and paying the bill for housing, to get shovels in the ground, very little is taking place. Residents are expected to pay their rent on time; we expect the government to pay their bills on time.

For all those reasons—and I could go on, but I’m not going to because I’m getting a little worked up. And to be quite honest, so are the residents of Toronto and so are the members of city council and so is our planning department, because we have all worked so hard to build one of the most globally competitive and dynamic cities in Canada, if not around the world, where we’re world leaders on innovation, green tech and sustainable technology. We are a major employment cluster, a major producer of the GDP, yet we get treated like this. Torontonians deserve better. City council deserves better.

We are looking for a partnership in this government to build housing for Ontarians. This bill doesn’t do any of that, and that is why I cannot support it.

I’m pleased to have the opportunity to ask a question of the member from Toronto Centre. I appreciated their presentation.

I was at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference and heard from various big city mayors, who shared with us that the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing didn’t have the answers to the questions that they had. Apparently, they asked questions like, “What if municipal priorities are at odds with provincial priorities?” or “Do they need a population threshold?” or “What will the consultation process with the mayors be?” And they kept being told that there would be a portal and an email.

So my question is: Is that good enough? Does the member know of the answers to those questions? Because the mayors that we heard from didn’t ask for this and had a lot of questions.

Thank you for the question. I do not know the answer to that. I really wish that I did. Unfortunately, I don’t think anybody really knows the answer to that, which is why the mayors at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario were asking the minister, “Can you answer a basic question: How is this going to work?” My understanding is that not only was the room quiet, but the minister—and oftentimes the Premier—didn’t even show up. So no answers were provided—lots of questions. We’re still looking for it. I don’t want to wait to see the regs. I think that information should come out now.

However, you do ask a good question about whether or not I would support the bill. I told you I would if it had anything to do with housing, and there’s not a stitch of language in here that actually produces more housing, and definitely nothing on deeply affordable housing.

Who stands to lose is literally everyone else, including the three million residents of Toronto, who now have to go to the one mayor as opposed to working with their city councillor, who becomes a little bit rudderless, and perhaps disempowered. But you’re not disempowering city councillors, you’re actually disenfranchising the voters. So who is this bill disadvantaging? It’s Torontonians.

Thank you to the member from Beaches–East York. I was just going to ask her a similar question I’ve asked already: When you look at this bill, the title talks about housing; the bill does not. Who do you think will benefit from the passage of this bill, and who do you think could be hurt by the passage of the Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act?

I’m very pleased to speak again here on this bill that we’re discussing today. This is the so-called strong-mayors bill.

I’ve got to say, it’s been interesting this afternoon listening to some of the debate in here. I really appreciated the comments from the member from Toronto Centre about their experience as a city councillor in some really difficult times, I would say, for the city of Toronto, and the reality of actually how planning changes are made, where the real issues are and of course about the need for truly affordable housing.

Madam Speaker, the last time I spoke in second reading, I covered a lot of areas and I want to go back to some of them today. I think that the overall theme of my comments last time is something I want to reiterate here today: We have a government that continues consistently to show absolute disdain for local democracy by unilaterally interfering with municipal politics, in both cases, in the middle of municipal elections with absolutely zero consultation, and this will, in fact, have the impact of disenfranchising voters.

I also want to reflect for a moment on the fact that this government said nothing about this idea, this legislation, this policy, during the last provincial election, so that all of us who were elected here would have had an opportunity, had that been in the platform to at least have the conversation with voters about whether this is something they really wanted to adopt, that they thought was necessary, but that never could happen because this government didn’t even run on it. They just secreted it away. In fact, there was nothing from this government that was spoken about during the Housing Affordability Task Force that this government actually brought about—nothing along the lines of this need or this necessity or this policy being reviewed.

I want to say that that really is extraordinary because there were some ideas that came forward that were good ideas that came out of that task force—not everything I would agree with, but there were some things there. The government had an opportunity, surely, to come out of that and put forward some real solutions that would work for Ontario in our cities, for so many people in this province, and they chose not to. Instead they chose this bill that only mentions housing once in the title. It doesn’t actually address housing at all. Once again, Ontarians are left thinking, “What is this legislation really about? Why would this government want to hand over such enormous and extraordinary powers to mayors in at least two of our largest cities and potentially more?”

Before I get into some of my comments, I want to take a moment to appeal, as some of my colleagues have done previously, to the members of this Legislature who were elected to the government side in this last election in June. Some of this will be new to you, but it ain’t new to us. I think some of you have perhaps heard already from some of your constituents with concerns about how the government lacks transparency and accountability, how they refuse to share their mandate letters again. Maybe you thought to yourself, “This wasn’t exactly what I signed up for. I would like to have to be able to respond to my constituents. I would like to be more beholden to my constituents and less beholden to a Premier who just wants to dictate the way everything has to be”—based on what I think are just generally—I’m just saying; I don’t know—maybe past personal issues with their successes as a municipal representative. I don’t know. But why are we all being weighted down with that?

I’ve got to say that when I was elected in 2018, I really thought this was an opportunity to make Ontario better, and, at the end of the day, that’s what we all want. I think we were all elected to try to make life better for people. That’s what this is about, and I really do believe that that better is possible, but we don’t get there unless we listen to each other. Majorities come and majorities go, and many would say that our political system does not actually serve the people of this province very effectively because it’s this first-past-the-post system that so many people would love to see changed; there are much more effective ways to run government and elections. But the way that it operates right now even, there still should be opportunity to try to make things better, and one of the ways we do that as legislators is to actually look carefully at legislation, listen to each other, listen to critiques of legislation, make that legislation stronger, amend that legislation—learn. That’s what we were elected to do: to pass good laws.

So I would ask again, because I know that the government put this piece of legislation through some committee hearings—very limited, unfortunately, again—and there really was no prior consultation at all. Let’s be clear. But there’s other legislation we haven’t seen any consultation around, like the budget or the very egregious Bill 7 that just passed in this House. And again, just because you may not like what you’re going to hear, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen and hear it and, hopefully, take into consideration what people, especially experts in these fields, have to say.

That’s one of the things I want to talk about today, Speaker. I want to talk a little bit about some of the comments that came up in the committee hearings. I wasn’t there, but I’ve been reading through Hansard and looking at some of the comments that came from committee from many of the experts who appeared—experts from academics to elected officials to planners. There were a lot of experts there. One thing that really struck me is a comment that a lot of the municipal associations said, which is—basically, I’ll sum up it with, “Why isn’t the government exercising powers they already have? What is this really about?”

In fact, I want to also mention that the five living past mayors of the city of Toronto—there are Tories, there are Liberals, there are New Democrats, there are independents—have all said they’re opposed to this legislation and to this idea of a strong-mayor system, and I think that should say something, because they’ve all been in these boots and they don’t think it’s a healthy approach to governing.

I wanted to go through a few of the things that other people said, because one of the comments that I thought was particularly interesting was from Mayor Sendzik of St. Catharines, who had written in some really interesting comments, especially about the official planning process. One of the things that he said is: “The idea that giving more powers to mayors will magically lead to more housing is too simplistic. If this is all it takes to address the housing crisis, why not give mayors more powers to end homelessness and tackle mental health issues and addictions? Add in more powers to end climate change and mayors will become superheroes.”

I think he said that sarcastically.

“But that is what Ontario Premier Doug Ford is attempting to do as a means to solve the housing crisis through his government’s new sweeping legislation.... In essence it follows this line of thinking: We have a housing crisis, therefore if mayors had more powers, the housing crisis would be solved. The press release announcing the legislation even proclaimed it as ‘empowering mayors to build housing faster.’”

Then he goes on to say, “The sweeping set of new powers for mayors includes the abilities to hire ... chief administrative officers and senior staff positions.” It goes on to say that the point here is, there would be the ability, then, as well—let’s just consider it—if a very NIMBY mayor was elected, they could hire people to support that position.

He said, “After eight years as mayor of St. Catharines, I can confidently state I didn’t need special powers to build more housing. In St. Catharines we have approved more housing developments, of all types, over the last eight years than any time in the last 30 years. We achieved this because of a progressive city official plan, approved in 2012.”

Now, Speaker, I want to point out that, as my colleague from Toronto Centre mentioned, this government’s approach to official plans—official plans which are developed after a great deal of consideration and consultation, with experts and planning coming to the table, much discussion and debate. Cities end up with these plans. This government came in in 2018 and immediately tore up one of the official plans of the city of Toronto, and the city of Ottawa has yet to receive, as I understand it, approval for their official plan. So who’s holding up the processes? It’s this government. It’s this government that sets us back every single time. So it’s not about improving the efficiency of the process or moving forward to build more affordable housing quicker. It’s just simply not about that; it can’t be, because if that was the case, this would not be the route you would take.

I want to also mention—just because I’m going to run out of time mentioning everybody who did provide written comments on this—the Association of Municipalities of Ontario was not consulted at all on this legislation. It’s unbelievable. And when they appeared before the committee, they were pretty careful—not everybody is opposed or in favour. There’s a variety of opinions there. But they did ask the government to please engage in a broad consultation with the public and with the professional and political municipal associations. They were obviously very, very frustrated by this decision because they’ve put a lot of time and work into engaging with us as elected representatives, into engaging with this government over really important issues. And to have this kind of thing, then, just come in, have this government just roll right over everything they consider to be a priority has got to be pretty frustrating. I would ask the government to consider, certainly, the concerns that have been raised and what a difference it would have made if they had consulted properly.

I want to talk a little bit about housing and what would fix our housing crisis. Speaker, it’s true that there will be bad mayors. We’ve seen a few. There will be bad mayors. There will be inept mayors. There will be corrupt mayors. There will be mayors who just want to give a green light to their favourite developers.

Thank you very much for the presentation. You mentioned in your presentation NIMBYism. You mentioned in your presentation the need for larger building sizes to support families, and you mentioned in your presentation about a bill that talks about giving powers to the mayors of Ottawa and Toronto, the potential for abuse of that power.

And so, given your concerns about that development and the potential abuse of that power, I’m wondering why New Democrats are supporting a NIMBY city councillor who’s anti-growth and anti-development in the mayor’s race in the city of Ottawa.

I rise to support the third reading of Bill 3, the Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act. I will be sharing time with my colleague Mike Harris.

We all know that Ontario is in a housing crisis. We all acknowledge that, but I don’t know why we do not have that urgency to make sure that this is resolved. Even the members opposite acknowledge that there is a need, but let’s face it, this is not only a need, it is a crisis, yet we are not doing it urgently enough.

Just now, I heard the member mentioning that we can have not only just the mayor, we can have the councillors involved. That is what we have been doing for years. If we just maintain the status quo, it will not achieve what we need. I will share with you a little bit more how these created a lot of delays. Not only does it make us having this crisis even worse, it also increased the price of housing.

I really feel for the next generation as they struggle to own their first home. It is difficult to get the house they need within the budget they have. They’re basically locked out of this market, and the prices keep rising and rising every year to the point that they cannot afford it.

I have four children, and I’m happy that they all do their best, save their money and get their house. My eldest one also got a house, but then after she got their second child, she was thinking of moving from the condo to find a bigger house so that she can accommodate the growing family. But the market kept on rising. Now she has lost the chance with the money that she got from the condo to even buy a home. She is the only one without a home to call herself having a home. So there is a lot of crisis.

The price of housing is partially because of the delays that we created in getting the houses built. More importantly, a number of immigrants came to Ontario over the past 10 years or even more. There is a need for housing to meet their needs, but more importantly, as I say, we need affordable, co-op housing for low-income families. The members opposite have already mentioned the need many times, and we agree. That’s why we want to use this special, innovative way in order to pass and make sure things go faster.

One of our commitments in our election campaign was to build more affordable housing. In fact, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing has committed to building 1.5 million homes over the next 10 years. Well, it is our government that has traditionally been doing promises made, promises kept. That is why our minister wasted no time in making way to ensure that we get all the things done. That is why our minister, even before this term, had already passed the housing supply action plan to prepare for this new bill that we’re presenting in order to be very innovative to deal with this housing crisis that we’re facing.

To achieve our goal of 1.5 million houses in 10 years, we have to ensure that the construction of new houses can be done effectively, especially reducing the red tape from the municipal governments that has held up the progress, and that’s where the problem is. We have a group of municipal governments, each one having their own way, and they have been stalling everything for years. Every red tape that we have to face caused that housing crisis.

To remove these roadblocks, our minister had met with mayors and various municipal governments to find ways to accomplish our goals. It does not just come out of the air that we want to do this. This has been in the making for a while, discussing with different mayors, discussing with different municipalities.

We need to empower mayors so that they can and will have the power to move things along faster, making decisions for executions instead of being delayed by many internal meetings and analyses. The crisis we are facing just cannot wait. We’re always looking at different ways we can to ensure mayors have the tools they need to support Ontarians. We need to deliver the results. We know that urgent action is needed to address the Ontario housing crisis, as too many families are already struggling with housing and rising costs of daily living. This timely legislation would also allow regulations to be made and the proposed changes to be in place at the beginning of the next council term. It would help to ensure that these mayors are able to drive priorities. They can go through and have these projects go ahead. Not only that: The people who are voting in the mayors will know who is the mayor that can deliver for them and resolve this housing crisis.

These changes, if passed, would help empower mayors to bring forward budgets that could reallocate funding to priority items in Toronto and Ottawa and add to our government’s track record of support for and co-operation with municipalities. We have done wide consultations and evaluations confirming that cutting red tape will speed up the local planning process by giving municipal leaders new tools and powers to help reduce timelines for development, standardize processes and address local barriers, and will directly lead to increasing housing supply. This is the most practical way that we need.

At present, there is very glaring evidence that municipal planning approvals, including approval of zoning and a lot of other things that they have been arguing about, can delay and hinder the building of the plan that is presented to them. The delays, as I mentioned before, not only affect the housing supply, but they also get housing prices higher and higher. It is making it so unaffordable for the next generation. Analysis shows that these barriers add approximately $168,000—or 22%—to the average cost of a single detached home in Toronto. This is not fair. Our younger generation has to bear this cost because of the delay. While taking a 100-unit condominium building in Toronto as an example, the association concluded that the delay in approvals cost home builders almost $2,000 per unit per month. The delay is really costing us a lot.

We have selected Toronto and Ottawa to start this program because forecasts show that more than one third of Ontario’s growth over the next decade will occur in Toronto and Ottawa. More importantly, these cities have shown us that they have shovels all ready. We are going to work hand in hand with our municipal partners and ensure that things get done. We are using practical ways to make sure things get done. We will continue to monitor and evaluate the success in development and gradually apply it to other cities across the province.

While we are empowering the mayors, we are also careful that we have all the checks and balances in place. Mayors, like all members of council, are subject to local codes of conduct, rules and regulations. All municipalities are required to provide access to integrity commissioners. We are doing this in a very careful way.

I’m sure my colleague will have a lot more to add to what I’ve just said, and I hope by now you are convinced that we need to move on this very quickly.

I am glad to be able to ask a question. I appreciated the remarks from the member for Davenport. You talked about what would be better for our communities and that a number of mayors have asked, “What is this really about?” You mentioned that five former mayors of the city of Toronto have said that they oppose this. There would be many ways to strengthen councils, many ways to support councils and communities, but I worry about the harm that could happen. There are lots of ways to support; we talk about that all the time in here. But what if the provincial priorities don’t align with municipal priorities? Who wins if they’re out of step?

Colleagues, I think it’s really important that we understand the context of this bill is another tool in the tool box for mayors, as of now in Toronto and Ottawa, to be able to use these tools should they be deemed necessary.

The opposition and the member from Davenport want to talk about building more homes, and that’s fine. But they have consistently voted against the measures that our government has introduced to do that.

So colleagues, let’s go back. The More Homes, More Choice Act: How did they vote? No. The More Homes for Everyone Act: How did they vote? No. And then now they’re saying, with the strong-mayors bill that we have before us, that they’re going to vote no again.

I would like to know from the member opposite why they consistently vote against bills that have actually been proven and shown to build more homes. We’ve had more purpose-built rental housing starts, we’ve had more housing starts, period, in 30 years. Why do the opposition and that member consistently vote no against—

On that side of the House, they keep saying that the strong mayors, better homes or more homes bill is about housing, but “homes” does not appear anywhere in the legislation itself; it only appears in the title.

On this side of the House, we’re saying that this is an attack on our democracy, because in the city of Toronto, for example, where this is going to take effect, we only have one city councillor for 130,000 representatives, and now, this bill is going to strip that councillor of almost all of their power. So we will not have any representation. But in the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Steve Clark—I’ll withdraw the name. In his riding, there are 10 municipalities, 10 mayors and 59 municipally elected representatives in each riding. We have one for 130,000—in the minister’s riding, there are 59 municipal representatives—and our city councillors are being stripped of their power. Do you think that this bill is an attack on our local democracy?

I’m delighted to pick up a little bit where the member from Richmond Hill left off.

It’s really great to be able to be back. I think I’ve spoken to every bill that’s come through the House so far in our first session through the Legislature this summer, which is great to be able to do.

As we get started, Madam Speaker, I think there’s one thing that I want to do, and that’s thank our Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing. I want to, of course, congratulate him on his re-election and his reappointment to a very important role here in the province of Ontario. Quite honestly, I’m glad that he’s back in the driver’s seat with the ministry and bringing positive change that will impact millions of people right out of the gate. And while I’m up here, I want to, of course, express my gratitude to the minister and his staff for their excellent work and diligence on delivering certain projects in my neck of the woods. I want to take a moment just to highlight a couple of those, if you will indulge me.

Back in January, I was extremely pleased to announce that the government of Ontario was providing House of Friendship with $8.5 million in capital funding—a big shout-out to the member from Brampton North, who played an important role in making sure that we were able to deliver that for Waterloo region. House of Friendship, for those who don’t know, has been a Waterloo region institution since 1939. It started as a storefront mission to feed the hungry on King Street downtown and has grown to provide support to thousands of vulnerable residents across our communities in Waterloo region. House of Friendship is a charitable social service agency that delivers addiction treatment, food, housing and community resources throughout Waterloo region. Through the Social Services Relief Fund, House of Friendship was able to purchase and convert a former hotel into a 100-bed emergency housing centre. Their ShelterCare program offers overnight, wrap-around care and accommodations for individuals struggling with homelessness and has a proven track record of getting people assistance when they need it the most.

Madam Speaker, also this year through the social services relief fund, again delivered through the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, our government granted an additional $3.5 million in funding for a total of almost $7 million to help build a 44-unit modular supportive housing complex operated by oneROOF Youth Services for youth who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in Kitchener. Residents of this complex will have access to counselling, employment services, educational opportunities and life-training skills. The minister said, “We are supporting local innovative housing solutions to keep vulnerable youth in our communities safe and housed, which is critical as Ontario enters a period of economic recovery.”

Madam Speaker, I highlight these projects to underscore that the minister responsible for Bill 3, which we’re here talking about today, has always been a steadfast advocate for our growing communities and has never hesitated to prioritize areas of concern like those that I’ve outlined here today. And the minister is not hesitating with Bill 3 either. It is no secret that our major cities are growing all across the province. I’m confident we have all heard that Ontario has been facing a housing crisis for quite some time. So I’m glad to be here today to speak in support of Bill 3, which addresses this central area of concern.

Bill 3 is one such piece of legislation that speaks to significantly and positively impacting millions of people and families all across Ontario. Earlier this summer, our government introduced legislation that would give the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa more responsibility to deliver on shared provincial-municipal priorities, including building 1.5 million homes over the next 10 years here in the province of Ontario; 1.5 million homes is ambitious, but extremely necessary, given the kind of growth we have seen in the province over the last few years. If passed, the Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act intends to give the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa the ability to get shovels in the ground on housing projects that otherwise are taking too long—too long, Madam Speaker—to keep up with demand.

Some of those proposed changes, of course, we’ve heard about include the hiring of a chief administrative officer and municipal department heads, and to create and reorganize departments that will streamline these activities and cut red tape; the ability to appoint chairs and vice-chairs for identified committees and local boards and establish newly identified committees that are tasked with bringing matters for council consideration related to provincial priorities. They will be able to veto bylaws approved by the council if they so choose, and I think that’s an important part. This is one tool out of many tools in the toolbox that this government has introduced that relate to matters of provincial priority and proposing pieces of their municipal budgets.

So, to clarify, Madam Speaker, these proposed measures would still permit city council to propose amendments to the municipal budgets, or, should they feel the need, be able to override a mayor’s veto with a two-thirds majority vote. So there will be checks and balances in place—I think this is very important to understand—which I believe are reasonable and fair and require consensus and co-operation, which is something we should all strive for. I know that’s come up quite a bit over the last few weeks here in the Legislature. I think it’s important we all work together. If passed, these proposed changes in Bill 3 are intended to take effect on November 15, 2022, which would coincide with the start of the new municipal council term.

Bill 3 is a critical tool to get more homes built faster and is one of several initiatives being taken by our government to address the housing shortages in Ontario’s major cities like Toronto and Ottawa. For those wondering what that has to do with me, a member from Waterloo region, this legislation also intends to help communities across Ontario build more attainable homes.

We all know that we need to get more homes built across the province. Ontario is launching a Housing Supply Action Plan Implementation Team to get that done. This team will advise on market housing initiatives, including building on the vision from the Housing Affordability Task Force, the More Homes for Everyone Act and other consultations our government undertook over the last term. We are building on what we have accomplished so far.

I’m very pleased to learn that the government intends to appoint Drew Dilkens, the mayor of Windsor, as chair and Cheryl Fort, the mayor of the township of Hornepayne, in northern Ontario—which I think is also very important, especially for the member from Sault Ste. Marie, who has probably worked very closely with her over the years—as vice-chair of the Housing Supply Action Plan Implementation Team, with more qualified candidates being added to the team prior to their first meeting scheduled for early this fall.

Bill 3 clearly outlines how much Ontario is committed to supporting municipalities and focuses on improving planning policies and cutting red tape to build homes faster. The government is leading by example and encourages other government partners to join us by taking concrete steps to help all Ontarians find a home that meets their needs.

I think that’s really important. We’ve heard a lot about affordable housing here today. Of course, we want to see more affordable housing built here in the province, more attainable homes, more of that missing middle, but it’s also about choice. Madam Speaker, and I can tell you, my team and I knocked on over 25,000 doors during the election, and housing affordability was a major piece that came up, but people wanted to be able to have an option. It wasn’t just about being stuck in a condo or apartment in the city; it was also about building townhomes or building single-family homes, which is very important. There are a lot of young families that want to be able to live in a single-family home, especially in our townships, and pursue that “Canadian dream.”

I’m looking forward to, hopefully, seeing this bill pass third reading very shortly. With that, I move that the question now be put.