Today is the National Day of Housing and I want to acknowledge the advocacy of the many people and organizations who are taking action today.

This question is for the Premier. Ontario’s housing crisis has many causes, but I want to focus on three. The first: exclusionary zoning and the outdated planning rules that actually make it illegal to build homes people can afford in the neighbourhoods they want to live in. Ending exclusionary zoning was a top recommendation of the government’s own Housing Affordability Task Force.

So, Speaker, to the Premier: Instead of taking those recommendations, why did he waste a year giving preferential treatment to his greenbelt speculator friends?

The NDP is proposing a massive expansion of affordable and non-market housing. We want to double the current supply so people have homes that they can actually afford to live in. Back to the Premier: When will his government make the necessary investments to build the affordable and non-market homes that this province needs?

This brings me to the third cause: financialization. By ignoring non-market housing and leaving everything to the private sector, we are seeing housing being treated as a commodity, not as a human right. Under this government, we’re seeing more and more rent gouging and unethical evictions. Tenants are being unfairly displaced. We’ve even heard of a tenant in Toronto–St. Paul’s whose landlord raised their rent by $7,000 a month.

Speaker, will the Premier support the NDP’s call to bring back real rent control, or does he think that a landlord should have the right to raise a person’s rent by $7,000 per month?

To the Premier, when will your government implement the solutions that Ontarians are asking for?

Bad-faith evictions have skyrocketed under this government, yet the Landlord and Tenant Board has issued just 13 fines for bad-faith evictions in four years—13 in four years.

To the Premier: Is this because the Premier has stacked the board with his party’s unqualified friends instead of protecting the rights of tenants?