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—

I was thrilled to hear the member’s comments that he thinks that 1.5 million homes is not enough, and I’m glad to hear he wants to build more. Certainly we’re not prohibiting people from building more, but we know that this is the minimum that we have to achieve in order to bring the cost of housing down.

I wanted to ask him in terms of—everyone is going to have different needs. I was talking to the finance minister earlier; we got census data that came out this past week saying that our landed immigrant population in 2021 is 23%, and that’s going to go up to 34% by 2041. We have an aging senior population, and they’re looking to downsize as well.

So we have a lot of this missing middle that we’re trying to address in this bill: laneway suites—we talked about it—the gentle density. Why are we prohibiting people? If me and my husband want to build an addition to our home so that our family can live with us and take care of our kids, why not? Many families have grown up this way, and it allows affordability for everyone. Right now, it’s prohibitive. There’s extra fees. There’s red tape. It takes years for seniors to move in their family members. So why are you preventing those seniors from living a great lifestyle with the rest of their family?

One thing I haven’t heard him address is our young people, our young population, many of whom are living with their parents or in a secondary suite, thanks to the previous bill we introduced. These individuals who are young, who are trying to get into the housing market, they’re relying on more supply to help them get into the housing market. I want to ask the member opposite if he is going to prohibit them from such a dream, or—

I appreciate the question from the member opposite.

We do agree that we need more workers, which is why under the plan signed with the federal government—a better deal, with $3 billion more on the table, because our government had the political wisdom to stand up to the Trudeau government to get the best deal for the students and parents we represent. And if we followed the advice of the New Democrats and Liberals specifically, we would have let a third of operators in the member’s riding be precluded from participation, denying moms and dads in this province the right to affordable child care, after it rose by 400% under the former Liberal government.

We know, as Conservatives, we can do better. We can make life affordable. We can hire more workers and increase their wages, as we are doing every year over the course of this agreement—a minimum standard, $1 increase every year—to make it more competitive to retain these workers and finally increase the access and the affordability for the people we represent.

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.

I listened intently to the member opposite. I think it’s quite good that we all agree that we’re in a housing crisis. I think that’s one thing we can all agree on. Maybe we disagree on how we solve the problem.

We know Ontario is growing at a phenomenal pace. Under the previous Liberal government, we had 300,000 manufacturing jobs leave the province. We’re now getting manufacturing jobs back in the province. We are short 400,000 workers in this province right now.

We know over the next decade the population of Ontario is going to expand by at least two million, a lot of those people in the GTA, so we’re going to need homes for those people. We’re going to need homes, whether they’re immigrants, newcomers, young people that want to get in the housing market.

I think Bill 23 is making a major effort to enhance housing affordability in this province. So my question to the member is, would you agree with the member from Toronto–St. Paul’s, who said, “More houses is not necessarily the answer”—that’s in Hansard, here in the House. Do you agree with that quote?

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?