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.