Through you, Mr. Speaker: Thank you to the member opposite for that question. As the member well knows, this government actually acted on the non-resident speculation tax by increasing it from 15% to 20%, and made it province-wide, so that foreign speculators wouldn’t hurt people buying homes in this province.

Now, the member opposite also talks about the vacancy tax, and of course, the vacancy tax is in action right now. In fact, municipalities such as Toronto have the vacancy tax, and other municipalities have asked for the vacancy tax, and we have granted that.

But, Mr. Speaker, what the member opposite is really getting to is that we have a housing supply challenge in this province, and it’s this government that is committed to building 1.5 million houses over the next 10 years, something they didn’t do.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and congratulations on your new role.

I want to thank the member for providing so much information, specifically about his own neighbourhood. I respect and understand that, as we suffer with the same issues in my own area of Thornhill. We know that more and more experts agree—and this is solid information—that supply and demand go hand in hand. The major driver of a housing crisis—it’s pretty simple: When there’s not much going around, the price goes up. Can the member please share with us and the House how this critical policy that you talked about will affect not only Ottawa and Toronto, but future locations?

It was ruled out of scope, not late. It was ruled out of scope, Madam Speaker, for the bill. So, if tracking the supposed results stemming from a piece of legislation is out of scope, then I don’t know what we’re doing. If we’re not going to track the results of what we do, what are we doing at all? It was ruled out of order because even the government knows that this is not a housing bill. It was ruled out of scope because it doesn’t address housing and the amendment was about housing. So even the government knows that this isn’t a housing bill. It’s a municipal governance bill, and one that doesn’t address the most important governance issues facing Ontario municipalities.

Given that this bill is about the city of Toronto and the city of Ottawa, the first thing they should do is to approve Ottawa’s official plan: to bring new lands into the urban boundary, to change policies around intensification and density around transit, to address the missing middle, and to help Ottawa build more and better 15-minute communities for all the residents of the nation’s capital.

I know that the mayor was caught off guard. We were at the Navan Fair a day later, and he told me that he had yet to be called about this bill.

Certainly, if you’re going to make change and work collaboratively with municipalities in Ontario, the easiest thing you can do is pick up the phone and have a chat before you go to a microphone.

Thank you to the member for their presentation.

One of the most incredible things to me about this whole affair is the mayor of Ottawa finding out about it in the media, of all places.

If you’re the mayor of a municipality, and a government comes forward with a piece of legislation in the middle of an election and they don’t even bother to tell the mayor—well, they told one of the mayors, the mayor in Toronto, I assume because of their political stripe.

What kind of opposition is there in Ottawa to this, and how much of that has to do with no one in Ottawa, including the mayor, knowing anything about the legislation until it was presented?