Good morning. Let us pray.

Prières / Prayers.

Mr. Clark moved second reading of the following bill:

Bill 39, An Act to amend the City of Toronto Act, 2006 and the Municipal Act, 2001 and to enact the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve Repeal Act, 2022 / Projet de loi 39, Loi visant à modifier la Loi de 2006 sur la cité de Toronto et la Loi de 2001 sur les municipalités et à édicter la Loi de 2022 abrogeant la Loi sur la Réserve agricole de Duffins-Rouge.

Well, I think that the first time the New Democrats are speaking about Bill 39 will, essentially, again show that they’re voting against increasing housing supply and giving our mayors the tools they need to get the job done—

We’ve indicated—and the Premier has been very transparent that he wanted to expand the strong-mayor powers. We were quite open with the Legislature with our Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act that we were going to focus on Toronto and Ottawa and then move to other municipalities. We believe the six regions of our province are the ideal opportunity to have that conversation, to be able to appoint a facilitator to work collaboratively, but, at the end of the day, have strong mayors with the tools they need to get shovels in the ground faster.

That’s a fantastic question from my friend from Scarborough.

We’ve got young families, newcomers and those all over the province who—really, the dream of home ownership has been lost to them, so far. They want our government to ensure that they have a home that meets their needs and their budget.

While the province is set to grow by more than two million people in the next decade, you know, representing the good people in Scarborough, that many of those newcomers who the federal government has announced are going to come to our country—probably 60% are going to come to the greater Golden Horseshoe. So we need to ensure that those fast-growing communities and regions, and our two biggest cities, Toronto and Ottawa, have the tools they need to get shovels in the ground faster. The Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act did that in Toronto and Ottawa, and this Better Municipal Governance Act will extend it to the GTA. It only makes sense.

Ontarians gave us a clear mandate: that, under the leadership of Premier Ford, we were going to present a housing supply action plan that was going to build 1.5 million homes over the next decade.

Despite the NIMBYism and the BANANAism from the New Democrats opposite, we are going to continue to drive important public policy that’s going to get shovels in the ground, that’s going to eliminate bureaucratic delays that, in the GTA, add about $116,900 to the cost of an average home. On this side of the House, we want to lower those input costs. We want to create affordable home ownership. The BANANAs across can continue to talk the way they have been.

It doesn’t matter what study you want to look at—you can look at CMHC numbers, Scotiabank numbers—they all align with our Housing Affordability Task Force asking for 1.5 million homes over the next 10 years. Then, you take what the member has presented, the issue about us welcoming new Canadians, new Ontarians—we know that out of the 500,000 people the federal government has talked about coming here, about 60% probably are going to come. Regardless of our population, we’re going to accept the lion’s share, and we welcome them. We have to ensure, as the member notes, that we’ve put a plan in place that’s going to actually get shovels in ground.

This plan builds upon the other 90 initiatives the government has done since we’ve been in office. And we’re going to continue to present initiatives every year, under the leadership of Premier Ford.

In Toronto and in Ottawa, voters just elected new councils, including new councillors who were elected to take on the housing crisis that’s facing our cities. These elections happened, actually, while this government was in the process of changing the rules to give mayors these veto powers on unnamed provincial priorities. But now, just as those elected councillors are rolling up their sleeves and getting to work and being sworn in, this government is again moving legislation to further disempower those newly elected councillors.

Madam Speaker, I would like to understand from this government how they think, and how this minister thinks, that moving and shifting power from elected officials to essentially a minority rule in the backrooms of power is going to help Toronto.

I’m happy to stand and give comments on Bill 39. It’s hard to know what to say when you see a government drop a bill like this while the housing bill is still being debated and we’re endeavouring to get people’s opinions across the province.

We have committees going on on Bill 23 right now—and I think the public should know that those committee hearings have been shut down. They’ve been shut down because the standing orders for this House say that you can’t talk about the same topic in two different places in this House. So we have all kinds of folks who have come in for Bill 23 hearings, to have their opinions heard—I don’t even know if all the members on that side of the House know what their own party, what their own government has done here.

We have people from all across the province who have come here to give their opinion in consultations at the committee hearings which are in this building.

We have 10 people from the city of Toronto who are showing up today to give their opinion, which the government asked for. The government chose for them to come here and give their opinion on the housing bill, and they don’t get to present today, and we don’t get to hear what they had to say. We could say that it’s possibly incompetence on the part of the government and perhaps the government House leader, but I tend to think they must have known what they were doing.

We have all these people showing up for committee, and now the committee is being shut down. We have the C.D. Howe Institute, Canadian mental health—a pretty important group that we want to be hearing from. We’re talking about homelessness and housing issues, so you’d think you’d want to hear from them. They’ve taken the time to come here today, and their voice has been shut down. The Toronto board of trade, the federation of rental housing—you’d think we’d want to hear from them.

Folks in my own riding, the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority—they changed the Conservation Authorities Act in the housing bill. We want to hear from conservation authorities. They’ve come here. They’ve been shut down. The government doesn’t want to hear from them.

The town of Blue Mountain—they probably drove here through the snow for committee hearing meetings, and they’ve been told, “We are not interested in hearing from you.”

A lot of the groups that have shown up today, let’s be clear, were speaking against Bill 23—but one of them wasn’t AMO, the Association of Municipalities Ontario, because they weren’t even invited to the hearings by the government. The government didn’t want to hear, on a municipal affairs and housing bill, from the Association of Municipalities Ontario. Think about that. All these other people were invited, and many of them showed up, many of them probably drove through the snow, and now the government is saying, “Go home. We don’t want to hear from you. We’re not interested in what you have to say. We’ve got this other bill that we are going to drop today—a bill that no one asked for or recommended, that’s going to violate local democracy and the rights of municipalities to act in a democratic way. So you can all go home.” Let’s be clear that that’s what has happened this morning here at the Ontario Legislature. Quite frankly, it’s a disgusting manoeuvre by the government and extremely disrespectful.

In committee hearings last week, my colleague from University–Rosedale attempted to add extra days of hearings because AMO hadn’t been invited and other people wanted to speak. The government very strictly limited the amount of consultation and the number of hearing dates. So we voted and we got it on the record—we made a motion to have another day of hearings so that everyone could speak, and the government voted against it. They didn’t want to hear from more people. Now they don’t even want to hear from the people who showed up. That’s absolutely disgusting and disrespectful.

The government put forward this bill that no one asked for, that no one recommended—no consultation with anyone. They tabled a bill that will allow them to appoint regional chairs in York, Peel and Niagara. Just four years ago, in the middle of a municipal election campaign, this government cancelled regional chair elections in these regions—elections in which citizens were electing their chair at large because they had gone through a process and decided that it was more democratic, and they had gone through all the motions, so they had elections at large planned.

I know, being from Niagara, that we had folks who were actually raising money, were getting ready for a municipal election where they would be a candidate for chair of Niagara region. After they had already put their name forward, after they had already done all that work and started their campaign, this government came along and said, “No, we don’t trust citizens of those regions with free and fair elections.” Now they don’t even trust democratically elected councillors to choose their chair, as they did in the past. Now the Premier is going to hand-pick who he wants to rule in his stead and hand them additional powers to do his bidding.

I think we all realize on this side of the House how absolutely ridiculous it is, at a time when the government is failing education workers and children, when pediatric ICUs are over capacity, when we’re in an affordable housing crisis, that this Premier is focused on municipal governments and autocratic changes to municipal government. And the Premier isn’t just appointing elected positions here—

I’d like to welcome to the House this morning two very distinguished groups. From Thunder Bay in northern Ontario, with the Ontario Native Women’s Association: Coralee McGuire-Cyrette, executive director; Cheryl Bagnall, director of community services; and Andre Morriseau, communications manager. And from Lazio, some people who are here doing documentary work on Ontario and on Toronto: Iolanda Russo and Mikaela Tatangelo. Welcome to our House.

I’m happy and very proud to rise today to acknowledge some esteemed guests who’ve joined our House for Trans Awareness Week and also to support the gender-affirming health care advisory act: Stefanie Pest from the riding of Essex; Heath Salazar and Kristie Kennedy from Toronto–St. Paul’s; Lisa Delcol from University–Rosedale; Monika Gontarska from Scarborough–Guildwood; and Anne Creighton from Toronto–Danforth.

I also want to also acknowledge three members of my esteemed team who are here from Toronto Centre: Vharshaa Punithechelvan, Tara Bijan and Doga Koroglu. Two of them are interns from TMU University, and one of them is from the Toronto Centre riding association.

Welcome, Catherine.

Premier Ford made it crystal clear to Ontarians that the Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act was just the start, that we wanted to ensure that by the time those two new mayors were sworn in in Ontario’s two largest cities, Toronto and Ottawa—he made it crystal clear that that was the start.

The announcement yesterday, in Bill 39, which it’s pretty obvious New Democrats don’t support—just to add to the litany of housing initiatives this government has done; we’ve done over 90 since 2018. And every single time we try to increase housing supply and actually provide an opportunity for a young person to realize the dream of home ownership, New Democrats vote against it. So it’s no surprise that this member and their party, under the leadership of Marit Stiles, is going to not support—

We’re going to stand up for the dream of home ownership.

Speaker, in the supplementary, I will talk about the significance of that minimum of 50,000 homes in relationship to our 1.5 million homes.