It’s an honour to rise today and welcome all members of the Police Association of Ontario to Queen’s Park. I’d like to give a special shout-out to PAO president, Mark Baxter, and former Guelph PA president, Matt Jotham, who are over in the gallery. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

It’s always an honour to rise here in the House, today to debate Bill 146, the budget measures act to implement the fall economic statement.

Speaker, we are debating this bill at a time when the people of Ontario are facing a huge affordability crisis, driven by an unprecedented housing affordability crisis. You would not know that reading the fall economic statement.

The government had an opportunity with the fall economic statement to change the channel on their $8.3-billion greenbelt scandal, to change the channel on the fact that they’ve wasted the last two years not building homes that ordinary people can afford to live in in the communities they know and love, close to where they work, and instead prioritizing benefits for a handful of land speculators.

Speaker, I want to tell you what I would like to see in the fall economic statement to address the housing affordability crisis coming out of what many have described as a master class plan to deliver the solutions Ontarians need to address the housing crisis that I released over two and a half years ago. There are three key points that we need to see in this fall economic statement: (1) is support to help co-ops, non-profit and supportive housing providers address the needs for deep affordability in our housing supply; (2) is we need to increase market supply by supporting municipalities to be able to build the infrastructure, to provide infrastructure for that supply and to actually legalize housing, which are in the Bills 44 and 45 I have proposed; and (3), the government could have used the fall economic statement as an opportunity to drive speculation out of the housing market so first-time homebuyers can be on a level playing field.

Why is it so important that this government actually make investments in non-profit and co-op housing—which for whatever reason they refused to do in the fall economic statement even though we’re facing an unprecedented housing affordability crisis? Well, first of all, 0% of rental housing is affordable for a minimum wage worker in almost every city in the province of Ontario; 180,000 households in this province are on a wait-list to access housing.

We know the previous governments, prior to 1995, invested in non-profit, co-op and social housing. As a matter of fact, 93% of the deeply affordable homes built in the province of Ontario were built before 1995. That was the year that the upper levels of government stopped supporting that kind of housing. Why is it not in the fall economic statement?

Think of somebody on ODSP trying to survive on $1,200 a month when rents in places like Guelph and Kitchener are now $2,000, even higher in a place like Toronto. Even the government’s own Housing Affordability Task Force—I don’t know if the government has ever read their own task force report—says, “While many of the changes that will help deliver market housing will also help make it easier to deliver affordable housing, affordable housing is a societal responsibility. We cannot rely exclusively on for-profit developers nor on increases in the supply of market housing to fully solve the problem.” That’s the government’s own task force. That’s why we need a fall economic statement that’s going to support co-op, non-profit and supportive housing.

Second, we have to drive speculation out of the marketplace. You know that multiple property owners now own one third of the homes in Ontario. Investors bought 77% of the over 3,000 condo apartments built in Kitchener-Waterloo between 2016 and 2020. There are now 16,000 homes being used for short-term rentals in the city of Toronto alone. So what can we do about that? The government could have introduced regulations for short-term rentals. They could have brought in a multiple-home-speculator tax to help drive speculation out of the marketplace. They could have had a province-wide vacant homes tax, so that first-time homebuyers, young families trying to own their first home, could be on a level playing field instead of bidding against deep-pocketed, oftentimes financialized investment vehicles.

Third, we have to increase housing supply in this province by legalizing housing: legalizing multiplexes, four-storey walk-up apartments, six-to-11-storey buildings along major transportation corridors. That’s exactly why I’ve proposed bills to do that.

Do you know what, Speaker? If you look at what the government has done, according to AMO: $5.1 billion taken away from municipalities to build infrastructure for housing, $227 in my own riding of Guelph, $40 million just down the road to my neighbour in Kitchener. It is clear that Kitchener needs an MPP who’s going to say yes to housing and is not going to say no to housing but also an MPP who’s going to join me here and demand that the government provide the funding that municipalities need to service those houses, otherwise they’re not going to be built. That’s how we can increase non-market supply, increase market supply and drive speculation out of the market to address this housing affordability crisis.

I appreciate the question from the member from Oshawa. Actually, Guelph is doing pretty good—much to contradict maybe some of what we’ve heard from across the aisle—but we have more to do, and partly what we need is a government that is going to replace the fiscal hole that it created for municipalities.

Over a year ago, the government said they would make municipalities whole, address the $5.1 billion they took away from municipalities to service new home building. They have not done that yet. So municipalities like Guelph are looking at a 10% tax increase because of the hole created by the provincial government. So I’m calling on the government to make municipalities whole so they can build the infrastructure needed for homes.

I was the only MPP in this entire Legislature—there was one MPP in this Legislature who voted against the licence plate gimmicks, costing this province $2.5 billion in the first year, $1.5 billion each and every year afterwards, a policy that disproportionately benefits wealthy households. Imagine if we had that money to reduce the deficit now, to invest in health care, to invest in affordable housing, to invest in things that will address the affordability crisis people are facing—

But what this really means for the people of Ontario is somebody struggling to access a doctor or an emergency department, somebody whose school doesn’t have an educational assistant so their child gets the services they need, somebody at Community Living whose housing is being closed, somebody who needs an affordable home but can’t get one because they refuse to invest in co-ops. Those are the real-world implications of underfunding services in this province.