Good morning, Speaker. It’s an honour to rise in the House today to speak on the Greenbelt Statute Law Amendment Act, 2023. As the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing has outlined previously, our government is introducing legislation that, if passed, would restore lands and property back to the greenbelt and the Oak Ridges moraine. That’s approximately 7,400 acres of land being put back into the greenbelt in municipalities across the GTA including Grimsby, Hamilton, Vaughan, King, Richmond Hill, Markham, Ajax, Pickering, Clarington and Whitchurch-Stouffville.

The legislation would enhance protections by ensuring future changes to the greenbelt boundaries are done transparently and through the legislative process, meaning any changes to the greenbelt boundaries would require the approval of this House, which means better protection of our greenbelt lands. If this legislation is passed, the greenbelt will be better protected and even larger.

On top of the land being put back into the greenbelt, our government is adding an additional 9,400 acres. These are lands in the Paris-Galt moraine and 13 areas in the urban river valley. The new urban river valley areas include Stoney Creek and Battlefield Creek in Hamilton, and Fourteen Mile Creek in Oakville. These are just to name a few. Our government is doing more to protect the greenbelt for future generations and following through on our commitment to restore lands, as well as protect and maintain the lands we’re adding. We are a government that is following through on our commitments.

While our discussion remains centred on the greenbelt, we remain focused on the housing supply crisis in our province. This is something that we can no longer ignore, especially in my riding of Burlington. In Burlington, there’s a lot of red tape. It’s difficult to build new homes. The inability to get permits to build homes and the “not in my backyard” mentality has left my community starving for housing.

Speaker, I’d like to share a story. I’m a member of the local curling club in town, and after our first game this season, I sat down with my team and our opponents just to catch up. We talked about the weather, about life, our summers, and our children and how much we miss them. Out of four couples that were seated at my table, each couple had children who had left Burlington and left the province of Ontario—some went to other provinces, some went to other countries. As I thought about this, I thought how sad it was. It’s a real shame that our kids are no longer staying to live in Ontario. These kids were all born and raised in Burlington, educated in Ontario at world-class post-secondary institutes, but they can’t afford a home in Ontario, let alone in Burlington. They’ve gone to other provinces, and even to the United States. They’ve gone to Texas, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Alberta and British Columbia. That’s where the children have gone, Speaker—mine included. They simply cannot afford to live here.

According to a poll by the Ontario Real Estate Association, 46% of prospective homebuyers under the age of 45 have considered moving out of the province in order to afford a home. Ontario, our province, is at risk of losing young, educated and skilled workers to other provinces, states or even other countries because they simply can’t afford to live here.

Let’s remove buying a home from the picture for a minute, because housing prices have doubled and even almost tripled in the last 10 years. Purchasing a home right now, with inflation and increased interest rates, has become incredibly challenging and difficult, and out of reach for most first-time homebuyers.

Statistics from the Realtors Association of Hamilton-Burlington in September 2023 show an average purchase price of $1.3 million for a detached home in Burlington. Just to add, the majority of homes in my community are single, detached homes. Speaker, for the first-time homebuyer, $1.3 million is out of reach. Even with a 20% down payment of $260,000—if you were able to save $260,000, that means a mortgage of more than $1 million. Calculating it out, based on some online tools that I used, it’s about $6,700 a month. To afford that kind of mortgage, a household would have to earn over $250,000 with no other outstanding debt or liability.

I was speaking with another family in Burlington recently. Their son and his fiancé did everything right. They went to school. They worked part-time jobs to pay their tuition fees in post-secondary, and they’ve saved $150,000 as a down payment on a home. Speaker, it’s sad to say that saving $150,000 for a down payment still doesn’t cut it. I just wanted to add here that saving in this economy is hard, let alone coming up with the amount of money that you need for a down payment on a home. Yet this couple was still able to save $150,000, and it’s still not enough.

Let’s look at rentals. On average, in Burlington, to rent a one-bedroom apartment is more than $2,217 a month, and a two-bedroom apartment can be upwards of $2,600 a month. That’s not including gas, utilities or food. All of those costs have increased due to inflation and the carbon tax.

Speaker, our young people are leaving Ontario due to a lack of affordable housing options. These are young people—our family—that we have educated and trained in our province, but they can’t live here because they can’t buy a house.

But our government is committed to our goal of building 1.5 million homes here in Ontario by 2031. Decades of NIMBYism across Ontario, coupled with red tape, have contributed to a housing supply crisis.

Still, the population of Ontario continues to grow. Although our children can’t afford to live here, Ontario’s population growth continues to rise because our province is a hub for research, manufacturing and innovation. Our province attracts people and companies from all over the world. Businesses that want to grow in dynamic North American markets come here. Immigrants who want to make a better life for themselves and their families overwhelmingly will choose Ontario as their home, because Ontario is the best place to live and grow and to raise a family, but we also need to be able to house people.

The greater Golden Horseshoe area is expected to grow to approximately 15 million people by 2051. That’s why we remain committed to tackling the housing supply crisis.

Parliamentary assistant Rae spoke about the Housing Affordability Task Force in his address earlier this week. The report came out in 2022, with a total of 74 recommendations, and 23 of these recommendations have been fully implemented.

One of the recommendations was to set a bold goal of 1.5 million homes in a span of 10 years. Our government is supporting this goal through initiatives like the Building Faster Fund, which provides incentives for municipalities that meet and exceed their housing targets. This fund can be accessed by the 50 municipalities with assigned housing targets, like my community of Burlington.

Tackling the housing supply crisis is a joint effort that takes all levels of government, including our municipal and federal partners. We welcome the long-awaited decision from the federal government to waive the HST on new, purpose-built rental housing. We look forward to working with the federal government to ensure the increase in purpose-built rental housing and that the HST is waived from qualified buildings.

Municipalities are encouraged to meet their goals by adopting official plans and zoning bylaws that exceed three units per lot. This could be a main residence, a basement apartment or a laneway home. These additional options would make it easier for people to live closer to their families and their jobs, and to remain in their own communities.

The More Homes Built Faster housing supply action plan will help rural communities, cities and towns by increasing a mix of rental housing development like townhomes and mid-rise apartments.

Speaker, I live in a neighbourhood that has mixed development, and this type of neighbourhood works better than most NIMBYs could ever imagine. Interestingly, I was told that I was part of the problem because my home used to be a single-family home that was rebuilt into two residences. But I had the foresight to see that converting larger homes into apartments or towns could be a solution to Ontario’s housing supply issue. On the street where I live, there are single-family homes, some large, some very small; there are multi-family homes, like the one that I live in, a semi-detached home; there are condos, and there are rental units, all within a one- to two-block area of where I live. It’s neighbourhoods like these with all kinds of housing and developments that encourage density and diversity in population. Unfortunately, not everyone sees this as a good thing.

Our government often references NIMBYism from the other side—“not in my backyard”—but I think we’re past that; in my community, we’re at the BANANA phase, which is, people don’t want to build anything near anyone at any time. That needs to change—and not just in my backyard, in all of our backyards.

The Housing Affordability Task Force recommends ways to reduce NIMBYism by streamlining the approvals process and urban design rules. This, along with eliminating exclusionary zoning, will allow for gentle density, like in the neighbourhood where I live, to make better use of existing infrastructures like multi-family homes.

Our government has given municipalities a number of tools to cut the red tape and to speed up the approval process to build homes faster and to build communities like mine, with different types of housing that will support the growing population of Ontario. This will help my riding and many other ridings in Ontario reach their housing targets, and it will get more shovels in the ground faster.

This is the kind of bold action our government is taking in keeping its promise to build more homes faster. The government is ending the housing drought caused by previous governments that put this province in a housing supply crisis in the first place.

Our government will continue to develop plans to address the housing supply because we know that continued action is necessary to meet the demand. It will take both short-term strategies and long-term solutions, as well as a commitment from all levels of government, to drive the change that Ontario needs. We owe it to future generations, we owe it to our children, to build homes so that they’re not moving to other provinces, states and countries because that’s where they can afford to live.

This also includes amendments to Ontario’s building code to allow encapsulated mass timber buildings to be constructed up to 12 storeys high.

Speaker, the housing supply in Ontario remains a challenge. Our policies are working and delivering results by implementing the recommendations of the Housing Affordability Task Force. We’re re-examining the process and looking for new and innovative ways of working to get shovels in the ground and get housing built.

As my colleagues have mentioned before me, in 2022 Ontario saw the second-largest number of housing starts since 1988. That’s amazing news, but it has taken 34 years. That’s far too long. Years of not building homes, years of saying “not in my backyard” have put us in this current housing supply crisis.

Ontario grew by more than 500,000 people last year, and we need to house these new Ontarians. Our province continues to grow and our economy continues to boom. With that boom we need more homes for workers so they can live near where they work.

Just this year, Volkswagen announced that they will establish an electric-vehicle battery manufacturing facility in St. Thomas. Again, we are attracting businesses from around the globe, businesses that are creating conditions for growth, economic development and job creation. As we attract these new businesses to Ontario we attract workers to good-paying jobs. That’s why our population is expected to increase to 15 million people just in the greater Golden Horseshoe area alone.

Ontario is a place where it doesn’t matter where you come from, who you love or how you choose to worship—everyone deserves the same opportunity to succeed. We have attracted the world’s leading businesses and amazing people who have helped to build the identity of this province. That’s why we’re ensuring that municipalities across Ontario can build the homes needed to meet their housing targets, homes the people in our province need. I don’t think we can sit back and watch as Ontarians are priced out of the market and I don’t think we can allow NIMBYs to control the types of housing built in our province.

Our goal is 1.5 million new homes and our government will get it done. We’ll achieve this by working together with municipalities and the federal government and staying focused on our commitment, our commitment to the people of Ontario and to future generations, our commitment to the greenbelt.

Our greenbelt is the largest in the world, permanently protecting two million acres of farmland and environmentally sensitive areas like the Oak Ridges moraine, Fourteen Mile Creek and Stoney Creek. Our government is following through on its commitment to restore lands that were originally removed and redesignated. We’re adding in more lands, and we will continue to ensure that any future changes to the greenbelt are transparent. Through the Greenbelt Statute Law Amendment Act, 2023, if passed, our government will be adding lands to expand and protect the greenbelt and to preserve environmental spaces for future generations.

Thank you to the member for the question. Our government has listened to Ontarians and we’re following through on our commitment to restore, to grow and to enhance protections for the greenbelt. That’s why this legislation, if passed, would restore all properties that were redesignated or removed from the greenbelt in late 2022. While it restores all properties that were redesignated or removed, the government is proposing to keep the 9,400 acres in the greenbelt that were added in 2022. These include lands in the Paris-Galt moraine and in the urban river valley areas across the GTA.

At the same time, the truth remains that Ontario is growing at an unprecedented speed, with recent projections showing as many as 4 million additional people who will move to Ontario by 2031.

The other focus, and something that I hear from a lot of business owners in my community, is a struggle to staff and to get employees, and for employees to live somewhat close to where they work. One of the issues that we have is that we have businesses, we have small manufacturers, we have medium-sized manufacturers, but we don’t have workers who can afford to live in the same community or even neighbouring communities.

I’m happy to rise today to speak up about an upcoming event in my riding. Goodwill Amity’s 17th annual Power of Work Awards Lunch is happening this Friday, November 3, in Burlington.

This is an action-packed event filled with inspiring stories and valuable learning opportunities. At this event, we’ll come together to celebrate Power of Work Award winners, including two remarkable job-seekers who have triumphed over adversity to achieve their employment goals, and also celebrate a local employer who has been unwavering in providing exceptional employment support and opportunities to job-seekers in Halton. Work gives people a sense of hope, purpose and confidence.

This event is not just about recognition of leadership in our community, but it’s also a chance to connect with friends, community members and business leaders. Together, we make a significant impact and provide a hand up to those facing barriers to employment right in our own community.

Goodwill provides job seekers with access to free workshops, skills training, resumé assistance, job search guidance, mental health resources and basic needs support through Goodwill Amity’s employment services in Burlington. Mark your calendars for November 3 and be part of a lunch that not only fills your stomach but also your heart.

My question is for the Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade. The carbon tax imposed by the federal government is negatively impacting the people and businesses of Ontario. The carbon tax raises the price on everything, especially for businesses and manufacturers that have no choice but to either take a financial hit or pass the costs on to consumers.

Our government understands that lowering taxes actually increases revenue, creates jobs and boosts the economy. Unfortunately, the independent Liberals and opposition NDP are working against affordability. They continue to support the carbon tax and vote against measures our government has implemented to help businesses start and grow.

Speaker, can the minister please share his views on how the carbon tax impacts Ontario’s businesses?

Only one member from the Liberal caucus understood the negative impacts of the carbon tax and joined us in fighting to lower prices for all Ontarians. It’s time for the rest of the Liberal members who are still saying no to our motion to remove the carbon tax, to do the right thing, do it now and vote to scrap it.

Speaker, can the minister please elaborate how our economy can thrive without the need for a harmful, costly and unfair carbon tax?