This question is for the Premier. Early last year, the government’s own hand-picked Housing Affordability Task Force made 55 recommendations to encourage new housing supply. The task force said that a shortage of land was not the cause of the housing crisis. They recommended, in fact, that the greenbelt and farmland be protected.

Instead, the Premier and his government went ahead anyway and they tried to make their friends richer. Now they’re being investigated by the RCMP.

To the Premier: Why did his government rig the system to benefit a select few insiders instead of the people of Ontario?

This is really rich, Mr. Speaker. You know something? We’ve implemented 21 of the housing affordability task force recommendations as we’re moving forward. We led the country in getting the federal government to knock off the HST. We’re knocking off the PST for purpose-built rentals. We have eliminated skyrocketing municipal fees on affordable and non-profit housing—and, by the way, they voted against that. They voted against the previous. We introduced a Building Faster Fund: $1.2 billion in new funding for municipalities, large municipalities, and another $500 million—and guess what, Mr. Speaker? They voted against that. All the parties voted against it, by the way. They’re anti-development; they’re anti-housing, anti-infrastructure, anti-everything.

If they were in charge, this province would be a disaster, like they were for 15 years, Mr. Speaker.

And I am proud to say my father was part of that government. They created 700,000 jobs when they were in power. I know Mike Harris Jr. is proud of what his dad did too. They’re the ones who accelerated the economy, accelerated the boom on housing. I’ll go to toe any day about Bob Rae versus Mike Harris. The Bob Rae days—don’t forget the Bob Rae days.

Interjections.

I wrote a letter to the Governor of the Bank of Canada insisting that he does not raise interest rates. Do you know what the difference is? The Governor of the Bank of Canada is sitting in his ivory tower not talking to the common folks.

I took a call this morning about a married couple with kids that are going to have to sell their home. They’re going to have to sell their home because their mortgage has tripled. It has absolutely tripled and went up thousands of dollars. They won’t be able to afford it.

See, the Bank of Canada is way out to lunch, in my opinion, Mr. Speaker, way out to lunch. They’re creating inflation. They’re creating inflation on groceries. Then we have the carbon tax that the federal government implemented; it created inflation on building homes. They’re doing nothing but creating inflation. They’re living back in the 1970s. They need to get their act together. If anything—

What we’re all against is making sure we get rid of the carbon tax. Folks, let me tell you what we have done. We’ve cut the gas tax by 10.7 cents per litre. We scrapped the licence plate stickers for eight million people. We cut the tolls for 412 and 418. We increased ODSP by 5% tied to inflation. We cut income tax to 1.1 million low-income workers. We increased minimum wage. We extended the 10% tuition fees to take the burden off the students going to colleges and universities. We’re doubling the payments for low-income seniors, which will provide a maximum increase of almost $1,000. And what we’re asking the federal government: Knock off the 14.5 cents of carbon tax.

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.