I want to thank the Minister of Finance and his parliamentary assistants for their excellent deliveries and speech.

As the Minister of Finance knows, the seniors’ home tax credit is a very important tax credit to my community. I was joined by Gwen Kavanagh, the chair of the Barrie Canadian Association for Retired Persons, also known as CARP; Bob Schickedanz from the home builders’ association; John Tom, the owner of Superior Home Health Care; as well as Paul Meredith, the vice-president of a seniors’ organization, and all of them said there was an urgent need to extend the tax credit and the importance of making it refundable.

I want to ask the minister, why is it so important for all Ontarians, not just the ones living in Barrie–Innisfil, to extend this tax credit—and the importance of making it refundable?

Thank you, Speaker. My question is for the Premier. But first, I’d like to congratulate you and all members in this Legislature for your election. I look forward to serving the people with each and every one of you.

Inflation is negatively impacting all Ontarians, especially the most vulnerable. It’s impossible for people with disabilities to live on $1,169 per month. An extra $58 will force them to continue to live in legislated poverty. It’s wrong. This is a moral issue. The people of Ontario want to care for the most vulnerable, and I would hope that the members opposite would as well.

Will the Premier do the decent thing and double ODSP rates so that people with disabilities can at least live at the low-income cut-off?

Poverty and rising food prices are driving food bank use to all-time highs. Geopolitics, excessive grocery profits and climate-fuelled droughts are disrupting local food supply chains and pushing food prices through the roof.

There are solutions—things like doubling ODSP rates, protecting local supply chains by permanently protecting prime farmland, legislation to stop price-gouging in concentrated grocery retail markets.

Will the minister commit to implementing any of these solutions to make groceries more affordable for people, especially people living with disabilities?

Thank you to the member opposite, and congratulations on your re-election and serving the people of Ontario.

There’s no daylight between, I think, the member opposite and many of us to make sure that we, in these very difficult times, when people are feeling the pinch—particularly the most vulnerable and people, for example, on disability.

That’s why, through the campaign, we said we were going to increase by an historic amount—5%—the Ontario Disability Support Program. That’s why we are adjusting it for inflation. That’s why we kept that promise after roundly being supported by the voters of Ontario, and we tabled it in the budget bill, Bill 2, the other day. Many Ontarians are feeling the pinch. That’s why that’s just one part of a suite of measures that we’ve taken to support the most vulnerable of Ontario.

I’ll have more to say in the supplementary.

It’s just one of many things that this government is doing, not least of which is the Ontario Community Support Program, which you know also supports for vision care, for dental care, for health care. It helps with meals, helps with prescriptions.

It’s also why we have put in the budget the fifth round of social services relief, under the leadership of the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, for supportive housing, to help the most vulnerable, to help people with disabilities in this province.

We’re doing many things, and we will continue to do many things to help our most vulnerable in society as we work together to make a fair society.

Our government has been working tirelessly to rebuild our economy. We have lowered taxes for lower-income Ontarians, and we have reduced gas and fuel taxes. We negotiated a child care agreement to reduce costs for young families across Ontario. We eliminated licence plate renewal fees and, for the people of Durham, we eliminated the tolls the previous Liberal government put on Highways 412 and 418.

We have continued to focus on building a strong economy by reducing taxes and fees for job creators. We have stabilized electricity rates. We have continued to invest in our auto, mining, infrastructure and construction sectors.

The road ahead is going to be uncertain. Global events in Europe and abroad are in our environment right now, but that’s why we’re making investments to transform our economy and unleash economic prosperity across the province.

Together, let’s build Ontario.

I’d like to thank, certainly, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing for sharing his time with me today.

I’m very proud to rise in the House today as Ontario’s new Associate Minister of Housing to speak to a bill—

Interjections.

The rising cost of housing has had an impact on so many Ontarians. Families are being priced out of the market, seniors on fixed incomes worrying every month how they will be able to pay their mortgage, and too many members of our next generation feel they will never have a place of their own.

Every single day all of us show up to work here to make choices, tough choices, choices that aren’t always easy. Allow me to be crystal clear that this government will always choose the side of hard-working Ontarians. Today the government of Ontario is proposing legislation that will reinforce how committed we are in supporting our municipal partners to deliver on our shared priorities—priorities that matter to the people of Ontario; priorities such as our election promise to build 1.5 million new homes over the next 10 years.

Through this legislation, the government of Ontario will empower our municipal partners to get things done, because the people of Ontario expect nothing less. This includes helping to speed up new home constructions so that we can get more homes built quicker and make sure more families can realize the dream of home ownership. A house isn’t just four walls and a roof, it’s a home; a place for families to build their futures and make memories. Our government has the firm conviction that everyone deserves to have one of their own.

Since day one of being in power, our government has been laser-focused on tackling the province’s housing crisis. In 2019, we released our first housing supply action plan. It was called More Homes, More Choice and provided a road map to help address the housing challenges our province was facing at that time. It was a call to action on the need to build more homes to keep up with the rapidly growing population in Ontario. And it was effective. Since the plan was introduced, the province’s actions and close collaboration with municipalities have delivered results. Last year, in 2021, we saw more than 100,000 housing starts in Ontario, and that is the highest since 1987. Last year also saw more than 13,000 rental starts. Again, the most rental starts since 1991.

Despite our progress, we knew it wasn’t enough. Across the province, no matter where you went, one thing seemed to remain the same: Too many Ontarians were still finding the dream of having a place of their own out of reach. We recognized we needed to go further, so we began a three-part consultation with housing sector experts, municipalities and the public to help identify and implement real solutions to address the housing supply crisis.

First, we conducted an online public consultation through which we received more than 2,000 submissions. Second, we brought together municipalities and municipal associations to hear from leaders on the ground about what needed to be done for us to be able to build more homes. We conducted these consultations through the Ontario municipal housing summit and rural housing round table. The third part of government’s thorough consultation was the creation of the Housing Affordability Task Force.

The task force was made up of a diverse range of experts in non-profit housing, Indigenous housing, real estate, home builders, financial markets and municipal governments. We knew that for this task force to put forward the most fulsome recommendations it needed to include every voice and needed to represent all voices across the province.

Through their engagement with stakeholders, including municipalities and advocacy groups, they developed thought-provoking and detailed recommendations in their report. These recommendations ranged from proposed changes to the planning policies to ways to lower costs for development and to aligning efforts between all levels of government to incentivize building more housing.

Along with the dozens of recommendations provided by the task force, they again issued an urgent call to action. They told us that our province does not currently have enough housing to meet the needs of Ontarians, and that if we didn’t act we would not have enough housing to meet the needs of our growing population tomorrow. So we used the task force recommendations, along with other consultation feedback, to get to work and to take bold actions. We used the task force report as a foundation to craft a new housing supply action plan designed to make sure all Ontarians can find a home that meets their needs and their budgets.

We passed More Homes for Everyone, the next step to help boost housing supply in our province. The legislation laid out ways to get rid of the red tape and bureaucratic inefficiencies that are driving up the cost of homes, all while creating more housing options for renters and buyers. More Homes for Everyone delivers real solutions and addresses the province’s housing crisis.

It includes the new community infrastructure and housing accelerator, which is a tool that helps municipalities expedite approvals for housing and community infrastructure such as hospitals and community centres.

It also made changes to the site plan control decisions. Site plan control is a planning tool that municipalities use to manage development on a parcel of land. What we saw, Mr. Speaker, was that too often, politics was getting in the way of good planning. So we made sure that our plan requires local council to delegate site plan control decisions to municipal staff.

We also extended the timeline for municipalities to review the site plan applications before appeals can be launched, from 30 days to 60 days, to make sure municipalities have the time they need to review projects while preventing unnecessary delays.

In the interests of transparency, we now also require municipalities and development charge bylaw to make their annual reporting on these charges available to the public on the municipality’s website.

These are just some of the ways our comprehensive More Homes for Everyone plan is helping us to get shovels in the ground.

But we knew we couldn’t stop there. Housing affordability is one of the greatest challenges of our time and it must be treated as such. How we, as elected officials, choose to tackle this challenge over the coming years will determine whether an entire next generation will be able to own a home, start a family and build our communities to be even stronger. As a result, we must take bold, decisive action to address the housing shortage. We mustn’t be afraid to challenge the status quo, and we must work with every partner willing to help us get shovels in the ground.

We must deliver real, long-term solutions to ensure home ownership is in reach of all Ontarians. We’re going to use the Housing Affordability Task Force recommendation as a long-term road map to help us get there, a road map that will allow us to work with our partners to develop a new housing supply action plan each year over four years. This includes our municipal partners, each with unique circumstances on the ground and in their communities.

We believe taking a long-term integrated approach will give our municipal partners the time and flexibility they need to work with us to be able to achieve our ambitious goals, because solving the housing supply crisis is a long-term mission and it certainly won’t happen overnight. It requires long-term commitment, partnerships at all levels of government and a solid plan, all three of which will happen in spades.

As the minister outlined when speaking to today’s proposed legislation, Ontario is a growing province. It’s a place where good people of all backgrounds come to begin a new life. As Ontario grows, we must help communities across the province to grow as well. That includes building more attainable homes, because addressing the housing supply issues in our communities is a critical issue and we need to have success. The time for talk is over. The time for action, the time for cutting through red tape and the time for getting shovels in the ground and building the dream of home ownership is now.

To help us get there, we committed to establishing a housing supply action plan implementation team this summer. I’m honoured to stand here in this House and give you the details of this team. The team will be a formal advisory body made up of a volunteer chair and up to eight other members representing key sectors. The team will provide expert advice to the government on implementing and recommendations on the Housing Affordability Task Force. They will help us take decisive action to get more homes built and they will make ongoing improvement to our annual housing supply action plans. Mr. Speaker, they’ll be laser-focused on market housing initiatives and will provide confidential advice to the minister on an ongoing basis about measures to increase housing supply and attainability.

I want to be crystal clear: The core mandate of this team is to get the job done. No more talk, no more reports, no more committee to study the findings of a working group to study the findings of a consultation table; this team is an action team. They will examine the commitment we have made under the More Homes for Everyone plan, as well as the vision and objectives of the Housing Affordability Task Force report and help us implement that, and they will be there to react to any emerging housing priorities and issues identified by our government.

We’re going to count on the expertise of this team to weigh in on a wide array of market-housing-related issues over the next four years. This includes helping us assess any initiatives that our government is considering towards increasing market housing supply. The team will also provide feedback on the best way to roll out our planned initiatives.

Speaker, I’m a results guy. Measuring our success and constantly keeping track of our progress is crucial. As I just mentioned to you earlier, the time for talk is over, and the time for action is now. As such, team members will provide advice on how we can measure the success of our plans when it comes to increasing the amount of attainable housing. This team, made up of some of the province’s foremost experts in the housing sector, will be a crucial part in helping us reach our goal of ensuring every Ontarian has a place to call home.

Because of how serious an issue this is, we ensured that the Housing Supply Action Plan Implementation Team has access to every tool necessary to carry out their mandate. That’s why the team will be supported by topic-specific expert ad hoc consultation tables. These additional groups will include other housing experts who will weigh in on very specific topics and provide expert technical advice. They will be formed on an as-needed basis and will be dissolved once the needs of their main team are met.

In order for the Housing Supply Action Plan Implementation Team to provide its best advice to market housing initiatives, our government knew we needed a strong voice to sit at the head of the table. That’s why I’m proud to say that the minister and I will be appointing Mayor Drew Dilkens from the city of Windsor as chair. Mayor Dilkens is a fierce and strong champion for getting homes built. After a successful career as a lawyer, Mayor Dilkens stepped up to serve his community, first as a councillor before being elected as mayor in 2014. He understands the challenges families face accessing the housing market, and is ready to get to work to help our government get shovels in the ground. Undoubtedly, his expertise and passion for solving the housing supply crisis will be a major asset as the team begins its work.

We’re also proud to announce Mayor Cheryl Fort of the town of Hornepayne as the vice-chair.

Interjection.

To the member from Niagara Centre, thank you for your presentation. This legislation, at its core, is quite simple. We need to support efficient local decision-making to help cut through the red tape so that we can build more homes. Why doesn’t the opposition trust Ontarians, our local citizens, to elect their own efficient local leaders?