I’m pleased to rise on behalf of the residents of Ottawa West–Nepean to speak in favour of this excellent motion tabled by the member for London North Centre calling for the government to create and fund a public housing agency called Homes Ontario to finance and build 250,000 new affordable and non-market homes on public land over 10 years.

We are in a housing crisis, one that the government’s actions have only been making worse. While they’ve been focused on enriching wealthy land speculators, housing starts were down 18% in the first half of this year in Ottawa. In fact, we saw the lowest number of freehold housing starts in 25 years this year.

The government’s reliance on private developers and market incentives is just not getting the job done, Speaker, and it’s the people of Ontario who are paying the price. Rent is up 11% again this year. A one-bedroom apartment is now going for $2,055 in Ottawa. I hear daily from constituents who cannot find an affordable place to live, and so, so many stories of tenants whose landlords are squeezing them with above-guideline rent increases or trying to force them out so that they can jack up the rent on the next tenant. In one of the most egregious cases, Speaker, an apartment with high turnover because the landlord is refusing to address safety concerns saw rent go from $1,400 a month to $1,900 a month to $2,600 a month, all in the space of six months, earlier this year. This is not sustainable. The people of Ontario cannot afford this.

That’s not even to speak about the many people who have been priced out of our housing market entirely. Ottawa has 535 permanent shelter beds, Speaker, and yet that’s not nearly enough to meet the need. We have people living in hotels and temporary shelters, in some cases for years. We have people sleeping rough in our streets and our parks.

A big crisis requires a big idea to fix, Speaker. It’s time that we start marshalling all the resources that we have at hand to get the government back into the business of building homes and supporting deeply affordable housing, to use public land for homes, not for profit. If access to a home in Ontario depends entirely on someone making a profit, then many people will simply never get a home that meets their needs. So to the government: Please stop focusing on the profits of a few wealthy developers who are friends with your Premier and get to work making sure that everyone in Ontario has an affordable place to call home.

Further debate?

We are experiencing a major affordability crisis, and a big part of it is the housing crisis. We have a record number of people who are unhoused and sleeping on our streets. We are seeing record evictions.

We’re seeing rising mortgage payments. We’re hearing of terms like “negative amortization period,” which I had never heard before—where payments don’t even cover the interest portion, and the remaining unpaid interest is added to the principal amount owing. Imagine that: making payments but owing more. We’re also seeing longer amortization periods—90 years. Imagine that: a lifetime of paying for your home, only to end up not owning it.

We are seeing generations of people feeling like their dream of owning a home is just that: a dream.

We need to build more housing. The Conservative government’s own Housing Affordability Task Force has said we need 1.5 million homes in the next 10 years. Speaker, I want to be very clear: The housing crisis we’re facing right now is both a supply crisis and an affordability crisis. I have always said that the affordable housing crisis is of such a massive scale that if we’re truly going to address the crisis in a meaningful way, the response must be of a similar scale. The scale of the response must meet the scale of the problem.

We need to build more housing, but we also need to build different kinds of housing, because people’s housing needs are different. After World War II, there was a huge need for affordable housing in Canada, especially as veterans were returning home and the population was growing, and then there was the realization that the private market alone was not going to build the kind of housing that was needed for people who were of low and moderate incomes, because it wasn’t profitable. That’s why the CMHC, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., was created with a mandate to improve housing access for everyone.

Shamefully, the federal government—both under Conservatives and Liberals—abandoned that responsibility, and in Ontario, the Harris government abandoned that responsibility. In the 15 years of Liberal government since, they did not reverse course. This is among the many Harris policies that the Liberals maintained.

And here’s the thing: Private developers have said that they alone cannot solve the housing crisis, and yet the Ford Conservative government is leaving it only to private developers to meet the demand and the need. What the NDP is proposing through this motion is that governments resume their responsibility of building non-market, deeply affordable housing based on people’s needs—housing that the market won’t build. We can do that by establishing a new public agency, Homes Ontario. Let’s get it done.

Thank you—with all housing providers, whether that is co-op, non-profit, and, yes, the private sector. I know, when we all work together with our communities, we can achieve great things, because this is the province of Ontario—and I still believe in the Canadian and Ontario dream.

I want to reintroduce the House to reality here.

I want to thank the member from London North Centre for bringing forward this bill to create a Homes Ontario agency to actually build housing. The solution to our housing crisis is to build 250,000 units of affordable housing as well as the 1.5 million units of housing that we need to address the supply.

This government believes that the market will solve the problem. While they give the market a little bit of money—they actually gave $5 billion in development charges that they downloaded the cost of onto municipal taxpayers. They also have flown all the way to Las Vegas and made deals on massage tables, to try to build housing. And the result? Housing starts are down in Ontario.

And not only are housing starts down, but when I talk to people in my riding, tech companies—I’m the tech and innovation critic. When I talk to tech companies, they say the biggest competitive disadvantage we have in Ontario is housing costs, because talent want to come to Ontario, but they can’t afford to live here. So we need affordable housing. Speaker, 100,000 people—mainly young people—are leaving this province every year because of housing costs.

The other result of this government’s policies—we have tent encampments in every community across this province. The nickname for them is Fordtown. We have Fordtowns everywhere. When you travel to any city in this province, you’ve got tent encampments. That’s this government’s solution to housing.

But what the NDP want to do is to leverage public land to build not-for-profit housing. We want to build on the Ontario Line stations, like the one in my riding. The government is going to be building condos on top of them. We’re asking that 30% of those condos be affordable. This government is not mentioning anything about affordable housing being built above the Ontario Line stations.

In my riding, we’ve got 18 co-ops, 10 TCHC housing units; we’ve got supportive housing run by agencies like Evangel Hall—all of them date back at least 25 years, because since the Conservatives and the Liberals have been in power in the last 25 years, they have refused to build housing. So we need to build affordable housing in this province.

The housing crisis was created by government policies of the Conservative and Liberal governments, and it can be solved by government policy—like the one brought forward by the NDP today.

It’s a pleasure to always debate housing in this House because we have a housing crisis. I just want to say to those who are watching and to my colleagues on all sides of the House, solving this crisis is going to require the private sector to be engaged in market housing to build the homes we need, and it’s going to require the government to partner with non-profit and co-op housing to build deeply affordable homes.

When we were most successful in Canada in building homes that people could actually afford to own and rent, we had a mix of for-profit and non-profit market and non-market actors engaged in the housing market. Market supply—that’s why I put forward bills to end exclusionary zoning and to make it easier for builders to build homes that people can actually afford in the communities they want to live in, on land already approved for development.

Speaker, we also have to acknowledge that, up until 1995, about 20,000 homes a year in Canada were non-profit, co-op and social housing—deeply affordable homes. That’s exactly why 93% of the deeply affordable rental homes in this province were built before 1995.

Now, the federal government got out of housing in 1995, and the provincial government got out of housing in 1995. The crisis has been getting worse ever since, and now we’re at a breaking point. A new report has shown that we would need a drop in housing prices of more than $500,000 on average for the average millennial to afford a home. It takes 22 years for the typical young person to be able to save enough money for a down payment to buy a home. To afford rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto on minimum wage, you would have to work 80 hours a week. I look at my own riding, in Guelph. The average one-bedroom apartment now is well over $2,000. And so the market is going to solve a lot of our challenges, but it’s not going to solve all of them.

While I don’t know if the numbers add up of what’s been proposed here—but I can tell you, the sentiment of having government re-engaged in non-profit, co-op and social housing is absolutely vital if we’re truly going to build enough deeply affordable homes for people.

And I also want to say that supporting co-op housing is about putting a roof over somebody’s head, but it’s more than that; it’s about building community. It’s about having democratic control over the place where you live. I’d love it. Fife Road co-op in my riding every year invites me to their holiday parties and their summer barbecues, where it’s an opportunity to build an inclusive community of people who are struggling to be able to find an affordable place to call home, who have an affordable place to call home because back before 1995, government was involved in helping build deeply affordable housing.

So it’s going to take non-market and non-profit solutions. The government is going to have to be involved in supporting non-profit co-op and, I would add, permanent supporting housing, with wraparound mental health, addictions, employment and other supports for people, because some people have acute needs. They’re going to need not only a roof on their head, but they’re also going to need those supports on-site to help them maintain their housing. And we will save money, because it will actually take pressure off our health care system. One of the largest drivers, one of the biggest reasons poverty costs our province $33 billion a year, is because the intersection of homelessness, mental health, addictions and poverty puts so much pressure on our health care system.

Finally, Speaker, I want to say that when we build these homes, we have to make sure these homes are energy-efficient, not only to help address the climate crisis but to also help address people’s bills each and every month to heat and cool their homes. I want to tell you about a project that I’m working with in my riding with Habitat for Humanity that will build 70 affordable homes for people with an array of solar panels on them that will save them $62,000 a year in utility costs. We can do this if we have the will to do it.

I would like to thank the members from Spadina–Fort York, Parkdale–High Park, Ottawa West–Nepean, Thunder Bay–Superior North, Perth–Wellington as well as Guelph for their comments on this motion here today.

The NDP is the party of housing. We built the most significant amount of affordable housing, supportive housing and co-op housing of any government and have never been beaten at that.

Here on the official opposition side, we believe in listening to the experts. We believe in helping non-profits and co-ops and non-profit housing providers to do what they’re good at. This government would much rather prioritize a for-profit market. As I said, there’s nothing wrong with the for-profit market, despite the misunderstanding across the way, but we have to look at all different aspects of the housing spectrum.

I also want to turn to the greatest generation, the people who fought in World War II. They, because of the housing that was provided for them by the Bill Davis government, gave rise to the baby boom generation, which had incredible economic benefits the likes of which we have never seen before. I am shuddering to think that the member from Perth–Wellington would call Bill Davis, who created a tremendous amount of housing, a raging socialist.

I also want to thank the member from Spadina–Fort York for mentioning the $5 billion this government is content to hand over in development charges, but I want this government to think about this as an opportunity. They have an opportunity to listen to the non-profit and co-op housing providers. They have an opportunity to listen to Ontarians across the spectrum of housing need, and they have an opportunity to act. It’s disappointing that only on this side of the House, we have heard co-op housing. On that side, there has been a curious and conspicuous absence of listening to the people of Ontario. I hope they will vote in support of this incredible motion today.

Further debate?

Thank you very much, Speaker, and just so you know, you’re in for a double bill tonight, so this should be fun.

First of all, I want to thank everybody for being here: the table, the Chair, my colleague on the other side whom I have a great deal of respect for even though we don’t always agree.

I want to back up. We’re going to talk about the question about whether the legal fees and the criminal investigation of those legal fees, those fees for lawyers—whether we should pay for the lawyers of politicians, MPPs, ministers and the staff who are caught up in this criminal investigation that’s going to happen over the greenbelt.

But we have to back up a bit and see where we start. How did we get here? We had, of course, the Premier change direction very precipitously on the greenbelt after promising for years and years that he wasn’t going to touch it, under the guise of “We’ve got to do this. It’s an emergency, and I have no choice.”

We have an Auditor General’s report that says, well, in actual fact, what happened here, there’s all these pieces that we’re missing—we can talk about process—but at the end of the day, the actual uplift in value in that land, that land that was owned by a few well-connected insiders, people who were, by the Premier’s own admission, his friendraisers—fundraisers and friends—and friendraisers, too. We all know who they are because they own land in other parts of the province that we’ll talk about later on. She really identified what the problem was here, and that there was an $8.3-billion backroom deal. We all know that.

The government then reversed course on it after the Integrity Commissioner’s report. The Integrity Commissioner’s report was very detailed, and it’s important in this debate because it will help us understand why we’re talking about legal fees and fees for lawyers in this criminal investigation. The Integrity Commissioner said two things. He said that this whole investigation, what he saw was, it was marred by brown envelopes and deception—those are his words. So what was evident from the Integrity Commissioner’s report was that the Minister of Housing at the time, who I’m going to talk a bit more about later in the second half, was reprimanded and he stepped down, which was the right thing to do.

It was evident from the Integrity Commissioner’s report that a lot of people were lawyering up. Everybody had a lawyer, and probably with good reason. Those lawyers cost money.

I think it’s fair to say that in this instance where we have the kind of things that we saw go on, the questions that the Integrity Commissioner raised, the concerns that he raised and the evidence that he brought forward and the fact that we have the RCMP—the Mounties—conducting a criminal investigation into these dealings and that we had four senior members in the Premier’s office, who are no longer connected, or no longer connected to the government, who were caught up in this. We have the former principal secretary, former executive assistants, the director of housing; we have Ryan Amato who was appointed as Minister Clark’s chief of staff by the Premier’s office. So all roads lead to the Premier’s office when you look at this.

So my question was just simply—this isn’t civil litigation. This isn’t what we’re all protected from when we’re ministers and we’re working and we make a decision that affects people and they want to contest that decision. They can come and they can sue us—civil litigation; understandable. But we shouldn’t be paying for the lawyers of those that are implicated in a criminal investigation, and that’s what we have here. I think it’s unfair to Ontario taxpayers. I think it’s a cost that should be borne most appropriately by the Ontario PC Party. I think it’s evident that there is some connection that’s there. I think it would be the right thing to do. I think it would be the right thing to do for Ontario taxpayers.

I look forward to the response of my colleague, the government House leader.

Really, in fairness, should taxpayers be on the hook to pay for lawyers in a criminal investigation?

Now, we had a reversal on the urban boundaries. It’s not the greenbelt; that’s not the thing we’re talking about, but urban boundaries. A very precipitous reversal, hastily set up, which raises the question, why are we doing that? Is it because of the RCMP’s criminal investigation? Are there concerns with that?

We know in Ottawa, the Watters Road property sticks out like a sore thumb. The city didn’t request it. It’s prime agricultural land. It’s got a geological formation. It’s hard to service. It shouldn’t even be there. It was included, and the people who owned the land, their land tripled in value—tripled in value in one day. And they’ve got a history of donations of $50,000 to the party. That’s what I was talking about earlier.

We have Hamilton, where a farmer gets three offers for his land the day before the boundary expansion is announced. That sounds a bit like somebody’s got some insider information there. The connections between what we saw on the greenbelt and what happened with the urban boundaries, well, we kind of see the same thing happening there.

So why are we paying for the lawyers to cover people’s tracks? Why would we pay their legal fees? Why would the government of Ontario, why would the people of Ontario, why would taxpayers do that? That’s not right. The Ontario PC Party should pay for it. It looks like they were a beneficiary.

The other thing I want to mention is the former Minister of Housing, who I think did the right thing when he was reprimanded here in this assembly or—I’ll correct my record— reprimanded by the Integrity Commissioner. I know the member quite well. I sat with him for a long time. I have a lot of respect for him. I have a lot of respect that he did the right thing, and the objection that I have today is that with this urban boundary expansion and with all things around this RCMP investigation, the Minister of Housing is—they’re doubling down on it. He already threw himself under the bus. Now the Premier is backing up over him.

I mentioned earlier those people connected to the Premier’s office, that all roads lead to the Premier’s office on this one. I think it’s fair. Who are the people who are missing? They’re people who worked in the Premier office and the one who was appointed by the Premier’s office. All roads lead to the Premier’s office. So I don’t know why we should pay for lawyers in this criminal investigation, but even more, I don’t know why the former Minister of Housing is being backed over again. I find it objectionable. I think the Premier should take responsibility. It was his office. It was his direction. The member can’t effectively defend themselves. As a matter of fact, that former Minister of Housing won’t be able to benefit by what the government says it’s going to do to pay for the lawyers in this criminal investigation. He won’t be able to. He’s not attached to the minister; he’s a private member.

So let me figure this out: The person who admitted that he did a wrong thing, that did the right thing in here, who can’t defend himself or it’s going to cost himself money to do that, because they can’t do it here—they’re backing the bus over him again. That’s not right. I don’t care what side of the House that member is on; I don’t. I don’t care whether they sat here, whether they sat here, whether they sat there. I think any of us would objectively say that’s unfair. And when I saw that and I heard that, it upset me a great deal, because I have a lot of respect for that member.

I’ll just leave it at that, Speaker.

The time provided for private members’ public business has expired.

Mr. Kernaghan has moved private member’s notice of motion number 65. Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry? I heard a no.

All those in favour of the motion, please say “aye.”

All those opposed to the motion will please say “nay.”

In my opinion, the ayes have it.

A recorded vote being required, this vote will be deferred until the next instance of deferred votes.

Vote deferred.

Pursuant to standing order 36, the question that this House do now adjourn is deemed to have been made.

The member for Ottawa South.

The member will have, again, up to five minutes to debate the matter. The government can reply for five minutes.

I appreciate the opportunity. I will take the member’s advice under advisement. Thank you.

A response from the government House leader.

It’s an honour to be here tonight. I want to appreciate everyone for being here tonight, because this is an important question that mayors and city councils across the province of Ontario deserve an answer to.

Last year, when the government brought forward Bill 23, they removed development charges that municipalities need to service the building of new homes, according to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, costing the province $5.1 billion in municipalities across the province. My own riding in Guelph: $227 million. So why is this money important? Speaker, I don’t have a problem with waiving development charges for truly affordable homes. But then the government is going to have to replace that money for municipalities if they’re going to be able to build those homes, because the municipalities have to pay for things like sewer lines and water lines and stormwater management and parks and libraries and police and fire stations. If the government is going to take their ability to pay for those things away from them, then one of two things is going to happen: Either we’re going to see double-digit property tax increases by a number of municipalities, or you’re not going to see them able to build the servicing needed to build homes. And, quite frankly, we’re in a housing crisis right now. We need to build more homes, and municipalities need to be able to make sure you can turn the water on and flush the toilet when you’re in that home.

So the Premier’s response, and this is what really made me think I’ve got to stand up and defend Guelph, is that—and I quote this from the Hansard today: “Your whole council in Guelph are a bunch of left-wing lunatics.” And then he goes on to say that they say no to housing. And I’ve just got to correct the record, because if you look at the facts, when it comes to new housing starts, Guelph is in the middle of the pack. We need to do better; there’s no doubt about it. I’m pushing that. We need to do better.

Guelph is reaching about 44% of our target that we’ve mandated. We’re not doing as good as Toronto; they’re on pace for 90%. And I told my friend from Brantford over here, even though he’s on the other side of the aisle, that Brantford is the best in the province at 109% of their target.

But I look at places like Mississauga, Ajax and Newmarket that are all around 29%; Barrie is at 23%; Burlington is at 5%. And I’ll remind the members that those are actually ridings represented by Conservatives. This isn’t a partisan issue; it’s just that these are what the facts are.

I also want to say that recently Guelph has led the way in saying yes to fourplexes, getting rid of exclusionary zoning. We just said yes to a major new student housing initiative. We’ve completed the building of three permanent supportive housing spaces, having a Yes in My Backyard campaign to get community buy-in for them. It’s one of the reasons that this so-called left-wing council—Guelph has the lowest unemployment rate in Canada, at just around 2%. We rank second out of 25 cities across Canada as a good place to do business. Over the last decade, we’ve consistently been one of the top 10 cities in Canada to live in, and we rank in the top 10 safest cities in Canada. It’s a great place to live, it’s a great place to do business, and one of the things that worries me is that the government, because of Bill 23, is going to make it more difficult for my community and communities across Ontario to maintain that affordability, because they’ve taken away the ability to service new housing.

I think one of the things that is infuriating so many Ontarians right now is that instead of implementing recommendations from the Housing Affordability Task Force over the two years, the government has been more focused on opening the greenbelt for development, expanding urban boundaries and other initiatives to have expensive sprawl go onto farmland, benefiting a handful of wealthy, well-connected insiders, when what people want are homes that ordinary Ontarians can afford, in the communities they want to live in, on the land that’s already approved for development to build up to two million homes. So let’s get to building those homes, and let’s provide municipalities with the financial support they need to service those homes so we can build them.

Madam Speaker, I have to be honest with you: I have no idea what the member is talking about. In fact, I wish I could actually go submit a document to the table and ask for the opportunity to ask the member what the heck he’s talking about, because in this speech, he’s talking about not paying legal fees and paying legal fees, so he’s asking us to do both things in the same speech.

Having said that, I do like the member opposite. It’s not his fault that he’s in a party that accomplished nothing for 15 years. Madam Speaker, I know that you will agree with me on that. I know that it’s not his fault.

Look, when you come to talking to the former Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, he did a lot of great things for the province of Ontario. He moved the needle on a number of housing supply action plans to help us get homes built across the province of Ontario. I’m sure you will agree with that, Madam Speaker.

The one disappointing thing—and it’s really nice to hear how much the member for Ottawa South appreciates the former Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing. I think the former minister would have appreciated more had they actually voted in favour of the measures that he brought forward to build more homes across the province of Ontario, but he didn’t, and his party didn’t.

But here’s the reality: We’re going to continue to do that. I’ve talked about this in question period. Do you notice how they’re not bringing questions to the table, adjournment debate questions, about the things that we’re accomplishing? They voted against every single housing supply action plan item. They voted against when we cut taxes. They voted against the transit and transportation. They voted against the transit-oriented community things, but they remain silent on that, Madam Speaker, and I’m sure you are as disappointed as I am of the Liberal record with respect to how they have voted in this place.

You can talk as much as you like about the accomplishments, but this is a member who comes from a government that, when they were building infrastructure, they built bridges literally upside down. You can’t really make this stuff up. They built a train system that doesn’t work. So who in the Liberal Party is paying for the bridge that was built upside down? Was it the Liberal Party of Ontario that was paying for the upside-down bridge? Imagine this: You’re building a bridge across the 401, one of the busiest areas in the province, in Pickering, and they build it upside down. This is insanity. This is the hallmark of the Liberal government.

They also, Madam Speaker—you’ll appreciate this for sure—then said—for anybody watching this at home, they will remember when the Liberals said the economy has to transition away from high-paying, high-tech jobs and we have to become a service economy in the province of Ontario. Now, you’re saying to yourself, what the heck does that mean, to be a service economy in the province of Ontario? But what they didn’t tell people is that in order to fulfill their dream of making Ontario a service economy, they literally crushed every single industry in the province of Ontario, leading to thousands of jobs leaving the province of Ontario.

Having said all of that, we can debate, and hopefully we’ll get more opportunities to debate in the future. I do like the honourable gentleman; I’m sure you do as well, Madam Speaker. He’s one of my favourite Liberals. In fact, he is the most successful Liberal leader we’ve had in this place in probably 10 years. He’s got the party up to seven members; he’s got the party at seven or eight members, so he is the most successful Liberal leader we have had. I don’t know why the Liberals are even looking for another leader, given the success that—and I mean this genuinely. I think the member will agree. I do mean this genuinely. I think that he is a great representative. Now, you will recall, he came into this place when the person who had the seat before him had to leave in scandal. But that’s all right; that doesn’t matter. It was a billion-dollar boondoggle on gas plants, but that’s all right. This is a gentleman who has done a lot of good things for his community, and that’s the only reason why I’m indulging his fantasies that he is saying here tonight, Madam Speaker.

But look, I will say this in closing: He’s going to have a challenge on his hands, because everything that they’re talking about here, they have—their apparent Liberal leading contender for their leadership actually wants to double down and do all of the things that he’s talked about. The leader of the Green Party is just spinning over there because he’s thinking he’s going to be sitting beside somebody in the near future who actually wants to build on the greenbelt, who wants to do all of the things that the member opposite is complaining against. So it’s going to be a real difficult challenge—

I’ll recognize the member from Whitby to—

This House now stands adjourned until 9 a.m. tomorrow, Wednesday, October 25.

The House adjourned at 1817.

Thank you, Speaker, for the opportunity to address the member from Guelph’s concerns on municipal funding. Let’s talk about development charges. Let’s talk about how, before a single shovel hits the ground, the average homebuyer already faces an average of $116,900 in municipal development charges and fees. That $116,900 is more than the cost of a down payment for many homes. Let’s talk about how, over the course of a 20-year mortgage, this could add more than $800 to a new homebuyer’s monthly payment. I want you to keep this in mind as I talk about who is actually affected by the changes our province made to development charges.

As the member should well know, the changes made to development charges are for non-profit and affordable homes. We’ve been clear—and maybe the member from Guelph disagrees—that the last thing our non-profit and affordable home providers need when they’re looking to build homes for vulnerable Ontarians in our communities is excessive fees and bureaucratic roadblocks preventing them from getting shovels in the ground. Municipalities can still get development charges from most market housing.

So I just want to be clear here: That’s what the member is arguing for. He wants out-of-control fees, which in the case of Guelph add $44,000 to the cost of building the average home, imposed on the non-profit and affordable homes his community critically needs.

Well, Speaker, our government disagrees, and thanks to our changes, we’re already hearing about projects this province finally is moving forward. That means shovels getting in the ground on more affordable homes, more non-profit homes, thanks to us cutting these excessive fees. And that means, across the province, more hard-working Ontarians, more young families, more seniors, newcomers and more vulnerable people will have access to a home that they can actually afford in their own community.

Speaker, I’m also glad that the member opposite gave me the opportunity to talk about what this government is doing to support our municipal partners, because we’re counting on them to do their share in helping us meet our mutual goal of building at least 1.5 million homes by 2031, and we’re committed to providing every tool at our disposal to empower municipalities that are shovel-ready and committed to growth.

Guelph specifically has pledged to build 18,000 homes, and maybe the member would be better directed toward advocating that they catch up on their new home starts. To help achieve these goals, the province has also recently introduced the Building Faster Fund, a $1.2-billion, three-year program to support municipalities in achieving housing targets. Each year, up to $400 million will aid eligible municipalities based on their performance towards helping Ontario build at least 1.5 million new homes by 2031. Additionally, 10% of this funding, $400 million per year, is reserved for municipalities that have not received a housing pledge, including small, rural and northern communities, to address their unique needs.

The fund will help municipalities that have made a pledge to meet their housing targets pay for critical housing, enabling infrastructure needed to accommodate growth, such as site servicing and new roads.

Our government will continue to build homes and make the dream of home ownership attainable for more Ontarians. I hope the member opposite can put partnership over partisanship and support real solutions as we continue to get it done as a government.