SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Ontario Assembly

43rd Parl. 1st Sess.
October 26, 2023 09:00AM
  • Oct/26/23 10:50:00 a.m.

Actually, he wasn’t listening, because what I said was, the program that he put forward was out of the playbook of Communist Russia. We’ve gone down this road before. Bob Rae did the exact same plan that the members are proposing, and that program cost us many, many billions of dollars more than they’re promising to spend right now. They’re promising to spend—I think it’s $60,000 a unit. That is what they think that they will pay to bring this type of housing on board.

Yet we are actually building social housing across the province of Ontario, working with our partners. The member opposite voted against our successful attempts to remove development charges from those types of homes. In York region, that equates to removing $180,000, on average, from the cost of social housing. At the same time, throughout Toronto, for instance, I’ve used MZOs to build social housing, and they are opposed to that.

What are we doing? We’re building affordable homes across the province of Ontario. We’re doing it. We’re building higher and more along our transit corridors. We’ve removed development charges from our social housing. We have updated the definition of affordable housing in the province of Ontario to include income and so that it can be reflected across all of the province of Ontario, because we know it’s unique from Toronto; it’s different in the northern parts of the province. We’ve done all that. I’ve used MZOs to ensure that we build social housing with our partners across the province. We are getting the job done in a way that actually makes sense and delivers that type of housing for the people of the province of Ontario.

298 words
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