I’m sure the member from Brantford–Brant will get an opportunity to ask a question to the minister here shortly, but I wanted to pick up where the minister left off, talking about development charges.

One of the things we’ve heard, that we’ve seen in the news is, “Oh, my gosh, the sky is falling. Municipalities aren’t going to have the revenue they used to have if they’re out there building affordable housing and/or purpose-built rentals.” I’ve had some conversations with municipalities, and I’d like to remind them that they’re sitting on about $8 billion of reserves when it comes to development charges—I know in my region of Waterloo alone, if you take all the municipalities, it’s hundreds of millions.

So I’m wondering if the minister could touch on what some of the discounts look like for building affordable housing and how municipalities are going to be able to leverage some of the reserves they already have.

Just to go back a little bit here, I had an interesting conversation with some members from the township of Woolwich, which is in my riding. They didn’t even know they were sitting on $6.5 million of DC charges. I can tell you for sure that in Waterloo region, not all charges are allocated and accounted for.

But I just want to go back to the member from Oshawa’s comments that she just made. If it’s okay to have an organization—you can call it a “community builder;” you can call it a “developer;” you can call it whatever you want, but if they’re coming in and they actually want to make a difference in your community and they want to build purpose-built rentals or they want to build true affordable housing, it’s okay to take money from that project, but a municipality needs to be made whole. That’s the logic I’m hearing here. To me, that is anti-building-anything in this province. To me, it just doesn’t make sense.