It’s an honour to rise in this House today to participate in second reading debate of Bill 23. I think everyone in this House, and everyone across the province, agrees that we are in a housing crisis. We have a whole generation of young people wondering if they’ll ever be able to afford a home. We have many people across this province struggling to pay the rent and meet their bills.

So I’ve been eagerly awaiting this legislation, eagerly awaiting the provincial government actually taking aggressive action to meet the scale of the crisis, because every day they delay the crisis gets worse. That’s exactly why, a year and a half ago, the Ontario Greens put out a housing affordability strategy that Canada’s largest circulation newspaper called a master class plan in delivering the solutions we need to address the housing crisis, solutions that showed how we could build 1.5 million homes through gentle density and missing middle and mid-rise developments so that we don’t have to pave over the farmland that feeds us and the wetlands that protect us, so that people can actually have an affordable home where they want to live, close to where they want to live, work and play.

We talked about how we could both spark private sector development and also non-profit co-ops and non-profit housing to address deeply affordable housing needs that especially the most vulnerable in our province need.

Speaker, the government delivered some of those solutions in Bill 23. They started to move on getting rid of exclusionary zoning. They’ve come up with some ideas to speed up the approvals process. They’ve made things less expensive for non-profit and co-op housing providers—though I’d say they haven’t provided the financial support that governments used to provide for those housing supporters.

But I want to say, to sum up this bill—the good things aside—it’s underwhelming on supply, it’s missing in action on affordability and it’s dangerous on environmental protections. So I’m hoping the government will work with the opposition at committee to solve these problems with the bill, because the bill is creating a false choice between building housing supply and environmental protections.

Let’s talk about supply. If we really want to get rid of exclusionary zoning in this province, we should not only go to triplexes, we should go to quadplexes. We should also allow for walk-up apartments in residential neighbourhoods. So let’s take exclusionary zoning further. Some municipalities are actually doing that, and let’s work with them to do that across the province. We need to have mid-rise development along the entire major transit corridors and major arterial roads in this province—not just around transit stations, but along the entire strips of those roads, to be able to build the supply we need along the entire transit or major arterial road corridor.

When it comes to affordability—and we’re talking deep affordability, affordability that is 30% of people’s income, not 80% of high market rates—we need the government to step up and support co-op and non-profit housing. We need to remove the caps in this bill for inclusionary zoning and expand exclusionary zoning across our communities. We need to tackle speculation, especially the kinds of speculation that’s buying up rentals for low-income people, tearing them down and then building luxury apartments that middle-class and working people can’t afford.

Speaker, when it comes to environmental protections, this government has been systematically, over the last four years, dismantling environmental protections. They continue with that in this bill by weakening conservation authorities.

Let’s remember: Why were conservation authorities strengthened? In 1954, Hurricane Hazel hit this province: 81 people died in the flooding; 2,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. And the province said, “Never again.” We would learn from that mistake, and that’s why we strengthened conservation authorities. That’s why we said we were not going to build housing in places that it wasn’t safe to build housing. Just ask the folks in Atlantic Canada right now what they’re going through. Conservation authorities—by the way, brought in by a Conservative government—were brought in to protect people’s property, to protect their livelihoods and their lives.

You know, it’s ironic that on the day the Insurance Bureau of Canada issued a statement saying that we have to stop building homes in unsafe places in this country, because the cost of doing that is escalating, because the extreme weather events are escalating, this government put forward a housing bill that actually opens the door to building more housing in unsafe areas. It’s unaffordable for people. It’s unaffordable for government.

A report was just released. The cost of sprawl to municipal government: $3,462 per home. The cost of gentle density: $1,460 for homes. Let’s—

It’s an honour to rise today and give voice to the countless number of my constituents on social assistance who are reaching out to me to share just how desperate it is to live in legislated poverty.

I want to remind the members opposite that somebody on Ontario Works survives on $731 a month. Somebody on Ontario disability support is forced to live on $1,200 a month. I can’t tell you how many of my constituents have reached out to say that even if they can find a place to live, trying to pay rent with such low amounts of money is becoming increasingly impossible. To put food on the table when inflation is more than 11% is impossible.

Tragically, I have constituents reaching out who are considering medical assistance in dying because their state of desperation is so great.

I believe Ontario is better than this. I know we’re better than this. And, Speaker, I know that money doesn’t grow on trees, but we can afford to double social assistance rates in this province to end legislated poverty. We know that poverty costs this province $33 billion in additional health care costs and lost productivity. So let’s spend the money up front to help people live lives of dignity.

Thank you, Speaker. Well done. Thank you to the member for London West for your comments on this bill. You’ve certainly given us a lot of important reflections.

Over the past few months, I’ve been speaking with a lot of people in Ontario living on social assistance. The rates for a single individual are $733 a month. Even after the government’s historic increase to ODSP, people are only getting $1,228 a month. That’s not enough to afford rent in Ontario right now. And now we have a bill that’s redefining affordability based on market rent, rather than what incomes people actually have. I’m wondering if you can expand on the challenge that this represents for people living on social assistance in Ontario.

To my colleague from Durham: In your riding that you’re representing, four years ago the price of a two-bedroom home was $1,299. Today, it is $2,400. It’s gone up a thousand dollars. So that means anybody on ODSP or OW cannot afford to live in your riding. With the 5% that you increased, they’ll still not be able to live in Durham. I just wanted to get that out so you understand what young people are facing in your riding.

But here’s the one that I don’t understand from your government, because it is important to make sure that everybody who lives in the province of Ontario should have a place to live. We shouldn’t have homelessness in one of the richest provinces in the country. There was little to no consultation with the mayors in the province of Ontario and in my riding of Niagara Falls as well. So my question to you: Why?

Thanks to the member from Bruce–Grey–Owen Sound for the question. I’m not sure we do fundamentally agree on the problem because the problem is not just a lack of housing; it’s a lack of housing for people across the income spectrum.

If we are not taking into account the needs of people living on social assistance, if we are not taking into account the needs of seniors living on fixed incomes, if we are not taking into account the needs of people living on minimum wage who are being squeezed by the cost-of-living crisis, then we could be building homes that normal Ontarians still can’t afford.

We need to be building homes that are not-for-profit, that aren’t just putting money into the pockets of developers. We need to be building more supportive housing. We need to be building more community and supportive housing. We need to be building more co-operative housing. We need to be building more affordable housing of all kinds, and I hope the government would take the opportunity to integrate that into this bill.

We’ve already seen over the past 20 years that when the development of housing is left solely up to developers, we’re just not going to see developments of the kind of low-income, affordable, not-for-profit and community housing that we need in this province. That’s why it’s so important that the government step in and take an active role in helping to develop that kind of housing.

That’s why I think the NDP’s proposal for a public agency was such a crucial part of our platform to ensure that we are actually investing in the development of that kind of housing. That could ensure that the lowest—

Thank you for the comments this afternoon. At the bottom end of this—and this is what you’ve talked about—the government is not addressing actual affordability with this. They’ve redefined the problem. They continuously talk about how this is a supply problem, but it’s not just a supply problem; it’s a speculation problem, it’s a lack of supportive housing for people with mental illness and disabilities, and it’s a lack of affordable housing for people on minimum wage or OW or ODSP.

How would the NDP respond to this? How would the NDP actually provide homes so that everybody has a home they can afford?

Thanks to the member for Spadina–Fort York for that great question.

It is absolutely true that this is a problem that is multi-faceted. In addition to the issues you listed, I would also add that it’s an income problem, and that the failure to address social assistance rates and the level of minimum wage means that a significant number of people in Ontario can’t afford housing. This is why we need a multi-faceted response. That’s why I was so proud to run on the NDP’s housing plan, which actually did address the need to build housing across the spectrum, to make it more affordable for people to buy homes, to make it more affordable for people to rent homes—investing in co-ops, not-for-profit and community and supportive housing, but also addressing the income supply of the problem, cracking down on speculation so that people weren’t getting filthy rich—

What I can say is that the outcomes of the government’s efforts speak for themselves. Average rent rose 14% over the past year in Ottawa. The vacancy rate for affordable housing is zero. We’ve got a wait-list of people waiting for community housing that is eight years long. We have 500 families with kids living in hotel rooms for multiple years. I think those efforts speak for themselves.

I absolutely see red flags. As someone who is keeping an eye on other tribunals, I would say that this is part of a pattern of concerning red flags with how the Conservative government approaches tribunals. So this is a part of the bill that definitely deserves very close scrutiny.