This is the first time I’ve had had the opportunity to stand and speak freely since my re-election, so I’d like to take the time to thank the constituents of Hamilton Mountain for giving me the opportunity to, once again, serve your interests here in the people’s House, the Ontario Legislature, and the many people who helped on my campaign, ensuring my re-election. I’m eternally grateful to all of those people who truly put their sweat, blood and tears on the line, talking to the people of Hamilton Mountain, and making sure that I had the ability to stand here and to represent them. Thank you.

Speaker, speaking of being out and knocking on doors and talking to constituents, the number one issue that I heard, for sure, was affordability; it was the cost of housing. It was, “Where are my kids going to live? Where are my grandchildren going to live?”

Young people not being able to afford to buy a home, people not being able to afford to pay the rent in places that they were staying, renovictions happening on a regular basis so that landlords could bump up the rent—those are the types of things that we can control.

Good legislation could be brought forward to this House to help those matters, to stop the renovictions, to make sure that there is real rent control in place so that they cannot flip a home or an apartment into the hundreds of dollars, pushing people onto the streets, pushing people into the unscrupulous, awful conditions that we’re hearing on a regular basis.

There was an article in the Spectator, I believe it was two days ago, talking about McMaster students not being able to afford to eat. They were struggling just to be able to find a place to live. One quote from a young person talked about having a room the size of a closet that was just big enough for a single bed, at an enormous cost to that young person, and the maybe $50 a week that they were going to have to be able to eat for that week. I’m quite sure that when we’re sending our young people to university, and we’re looking at them to be the next leaders in our communities, to be the next doctors, to be the next lawyers, to be the next engineers—why are we doing that to them, with such a struggle? They can’t afford the housing, they can’t afford to eat, they’re barely getting by, and we’re expecting them to be the next leaders of our communities.

When we talk about housing, we should be talking about the issues that actually could be addressed. This bill that has been put forward, Bill 3, which was an absolute priority for this government—we have a major health care crisis happening in our province, and the number one bill that this government brings forward is powers to give the strong-mayors powers. The title says “Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act,” but if you look through this bill, which I just did as we were sitting here talking—I’ve looked through it and cannot find the word “housing” at all, except in the title. That is not how we address the housing crisis in this province. This should not be the priority for this government coming back into the 43rd Parliament. This is not the message that I know the members across heard while they were knocking on doors—if they knocked on doors, if they talked to their constituents. This is not the message that was sent back to this Legislature. We’re not even quite sure why this is the first bill being brought back.

My colleagues who have spent time at AMO the last few days come back with the messages that the mayors they talked to—nobody wants this. Nobody wants these super powers.

Quite frankly, as I read through it and try to understand what this bill is doing, it seems quite dangerous. It seems so dangerous to give one person the power of hiring and firing the executive people like the city managers, the directors of departments. Who are those people going to be beholden to? What kind of answers and solutions do you expect out of those people if they’re beholden to a single mayor? To me, that does not make any sense whatsoever. And then to put it under the cloud of affordable housing, of ensuring that you’re fixing a housing crisis, something that people are so desperate for—they’re so desperate for help in housing, and you provide a bill that gives one person super powers.

How is it that this is the first act of business from this government in the 43rd Parliament? Is it coincidental that one of the first acts of this same Premier in 2018 was to change the Municipal Elections Act then, in the middle of an election? What is it that this Premier—what’s it going to take for him to give up on the past, on his past life at the city of Toronto and all of his hurt feelings for himself and his family during that time? What’s it going to take for him to stop imposing his power over our Municipal Elections Act during an election? That’s the question. That’s the question that people of this province want to know. They want to know why this is a priority when we have a health care crisis. They want to know why this government is talking about housing, when that’s a pure crisis, but the only thing that they’re doing is talking about it. They’re putting nothing in legislation to actually correct the issue of housing. Nothing. Do builders have issues? Are there problems with the Planning Act? Absolutely. There is no denying that. But giving mayors powers of hiring and firing over their executives—that doesn’t fix the Planning Act. Nothing in there fixes the Planning Act.

Is there stuff in here that helps encourage council to do better by the Planning Act, to do better by ensuring that we have multi-residential homes, that we have rent control? Is there anything to support a council to do those things? No, there is not. What this bill actually does is take power away from councillors, who know their area the best and who were elected by their communities, to the beholding of one person who has all the power. That’s not how we fix the housing crisis in this province—and I’m sure all of you know that, but that seems to be the case anyway.

I want to share—one of my constituents sent a voice mail, and my office transcribed it. He says, “This is horrible and forgoes democratic principles. It is terrible. It should be illegal.” He doesn’t know what I can do but “hopes that the opposition is strongly against this.”

He goes on to say, “We should not even elect a city council if the mayor has so much power.” This is what’s coming back from our average constituents. I have no idea who this gentleman is, but he felt empowered enough to make sure that I understood that his feeling on this was that it’s wrong.

People’s priorities in our communities, as you all know, if you knocked on a door, are health care and affordability. It wasn’t about mayors’ powers. There was nothing talked about that included the mayors’ powers. And quite frankly, none of you talked about the mayors’ powers either during the campaign, nor did the Premier while he was running. Nobody talked about this. This was a surprise legislation after the campaign. Nowhere during the campaign did it talk about the strong-mayor powers to ensure that this would be the number one issue coming back to the Legislature in the 43rd Parliament.