Speaker, again, there’s a housing crisis in Kiiwetinoong, not only just in urban areas, but also on-reserve. The need for housing is very high across Kiiwetinoong. I have people who are living in canvas tents in the north. The housing supply in the north doesn’t meet the demand. As I said, there are 1,500 families waiting for affordable housing, and we cannot continue to play games with the federal government.

Can this government work with the federal partners to ensure that we get the funding needed to address the housing crisis, and that we make sure there is affordable housing in the Kenora district?

Alavida Lifestyles is charging seniors in my riding of Ottawa West–Nepean thousands of dollars in rent and fee increases to retain their housing. A resident at Park Place retirement home has been served a $27,000 increase for this year. Another resident at the Ravines is being charged $24,000 more. Seniors on fixed incomes can’t pay these kinds of increases, so they are facing the prospect of losing their homes. And yet, the government’s response to these seniors so far has been a shrug.

What is the government’s plan to protect these seniors against price gouging and eviction?

Seniors in these retirement homes are feeling scared and isolated by Alavida’s high-pressure tactics. Some of them are even having trouble eating and sleeping.

And yet, the Minister of Housing told me in a letter that there are no limits on how much a retirement home can charge or how often they can increase the price. In other words, these seniors are being extorted on this government’s watch, and it’s all perfectly legal. So my question to the government is, why is it still legal?

I understand the member opposite’s confusion. After all, it was our government that invested $200 million to help municipalities repair, rehabilitate and expand critical drinking water, waste water, and really prepare for climate change action. But the Liberals, who she sits next to, voted no. Kathleen Wynne even said that her biggest regret as leader was not supporting housing in Ontario—something that our government is doing in a responsible manner.

When it comes to supporting wetlands, we invested $30 million in the wetlands conservation program, but her Liberal seatmates there beside her voted no.

And when it came to protecting critical waterways, this government is investing good, critical dollars. But again, we have a Liberal Party who voted no and are not getting us the support we need from their federal counterparts.

We expanded parks. We’re protecting lands. We’re reducing emissions. In fact, in Ontario alone, we reduced emissions by 86%.

I’m proud to be standing up here today to propose and present some of the practical solutions that we have on this side of the House to address the housing crisis and the homelessness crisis.

What is very clear right now is that in Ontario today housing is utterly unaffordable. It is utterly unaffordable. It is extremely difficult to find a place that is affordable for you to rent and it is next to impossible for to you find a place that you can afford to buy. The Conservatives have had five years—really, six—to fix the housing crisis, and they have failed. I know they love to look at the federal government and they look at the Liberals and they say, “Well, you know, they’re the reason why we’re having a housing crisis.” I’m here to tell you very clearly that it is the Conservatives. You are the reason why we have a housing crisis today.

I think about the wait-list for community housing, for affordable housing, and there are—I just checked; I went to the city of Toronto website this afternoon—85,000 people waiting for an affordable home. Some of them have been waiting for a decade or longer. These are people, these are seniors, these are people who have disabilities, these are single parents. These are people who need help.

We know that up to 50% of people in Ontario are paying unaffordable rent. Now, I have been following very closely what this government has been doing over the last few years on housing, and from my perspective, things have gone from bad to worse. I, quite frankly, think this government doesn’t want the price of rent to go down, because if this government wanted the price of rent to go down, it would have happened, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t.

This government knows full well that more housing will never significantly lower housing prices to affordable levels. This government has put all their eggs in the basket of “Let’s build a whole lot of housing and it’s just going to have a trickle-down effect and maybe it will reduce the price of rent.” It doesn’t. Evidence shows very clearly that it doesn’t.

What we also know, very clearly, is that rent control does not stymie the construction of new purpose rental. I know you like to stay that it does, but evidence very clearly shows that it doesn’t.

A new two-bedroom apartment going for $3,500 a month in Toronto is never going to be affordable for someone on minimum wage. It’s never going to be affordable for a senior on a fixed income. It is never going to be affordable for someone on social assistance. It is never going to be affordable for a student. It is never going to be affordable for an entry level worker who has just moved to Toronto and is looking to start their career. It’s just not. And that’s how much it costs to rent a new vacant two-bedroom apartment in Toronto today.

It shocks me that the federal government is now sending warning letters to the provincial government saying, “Hey, you’ve fallen so far behind in your affordable housing targets that we’re going to hold back funding for affordable housing and we’re going to hold back funding for infrastructure.” That’s how bad it’s gotten because this government, quite frankly, when it comes to affordable housing, is cheap, cheap, cheap. You don’t want to invest. This government doesn’t want to invest.

And their track record is abysmal; 1,187 affordable homes have been built by this government since 2018, at a time that in Toronto alone we have 85,000 people waiting for affordable housing. You’re doing this much—this much—when we have a crisis that is huge. It’s hard to watch.

I also think about all the projects in my riding, the affordable housing projects in my riding that aren’t proceeding even though these projects are so desperate to go ahead. I think of Scott Mission. Scott Mission is in a riding—the residents’ associations fully support this affordable housing project to be built. The affordable housing project will house men, primarily men, who are chronically homeless. It is a very hard population to house, but Scott Mission has had over 100 years of experience serving that community, this community, and they have been working extremely hard to raise millions of dollars.

They already have the land to build an affordable housing project to deal with the homelessness crisis that we have in our riding. Literally 100 metres away, there’s an encampment—100 metres away there’s an encampment. Scott Mission cannot get their project off the ground because they need assistance from the provincial government and the federal government to make it happen. They need assistance. You are not going to make money off people who have been chronically homeless for 15 years. The private sector is not going to be building homes for these people. We need government investment. It’s not coming, and as a result, communities suffer.

I think about all the people in my riding who are struggling to keep their homes. I’ll give you an example. In the last two weeks, we’ve had a 90-year-old senior; his landlord keeps trying to take him to the LTB again and again and again in order to evict him. I have no idea where this individual is going to go if the landlord is finally successful in evicting this tenant, even though the landlord clearly has no intention of moving into this tiny one-bedroom apartment.

I think about Pat, who’s being threatened with eviction from her home at 145 St. George. She tells me she’s not going, but she has the provincial government and the provincial government’s laws stacked up against her. I’m worried about Pat. I’m worried about her because it’s very easy to evict in Ontario today. I’m concerned.

I am proud that we are here today calling for practical, bold solutions to address the housing crisis. The centrepiece of it is to establish an agency called Homes Ontario which will build thousands of non-market and affordable homes, where much of the initial investment is recouped over time through rent. By providing access to public land, of which the provincial government has so much; financing; and low-interest loans, Ontario can and should lead the way in building affordable housing and non-market housing.

Because if we do this, if we move forward on this, we can address the homelessness crisis and the encampments that are in nearly every town and city across Ontario. It’s not just a Toronto problem; it’s in nearly every town and city. If we do this, we can address the affordable housing supply shortages in small towns and rural towns and mid-sized towns across Ontario by partnering with municipalities. We can address the very real backlog of 85,000 people or more who are just looking for an affordable home, a rent-geared-to-income home that they can live in. And it will also allow us to build homes for newcomers and seniors and young career professionals who really want to find a rental they can afford to build their lives and their careers and their families here.

The Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing likes to say that we’re going to be bringing Communist Russia to Canada. That’s one response. But when you take off your ideological blindfold and you look around, you see that other levels of government are moving forward on this very practical and sensible idea with great success. We need to take those very wise ideas and implement them here in Ontario.

I look to the BC government. The BC government has established BC Builds. They are investing $1 billion and $2 billion in financing to build thousands of rental homes on underused public land with the goal of targeting middle-income renters.

I think of the city of Toronto, with their Housing Now program. They are looking at building 15,000 new homes—5,000 of them are affordable—on 22 properties. It is practical. They have the infrastructure. They’re near transit.

I think about the federal government. Even the federal government finally—the polls are not going well for them, so finally, they’re starting to accept some half-decent housing proposals. They are allocating $1 billion to the Rapid Housing Stream to provide loans to developers who will build affordable housing, and they are providing $1.5 billion to support the construction of co-operative housing.

It makes a lot of sense. Other levels of government are doing it, and I believe it is time for Ontario to take that step and, instead of being cheap, invest in non-market and affordable housing so we can address the housing crisis that we have in Ontario today. I urge you to support it because it makes a lot of sense. What this government is doing right now is clearly not working, so start listening to us.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this bill today. As Associate Minister of Housing, I spent the last number of months laser-focused on housing and I look forward to sharing some of my perspectives.

I want to point out, to begin, a few issues that I have with the NDP motion and I’d like this chance to talk about some of the history of housing supply in Ontario.

Our province needs more housing of all types. Our government is investing in building more affordable housing, more supportive housing, and we’re cutting red tape to make more market housing get built by community home builders and the not-for-profit sector, not by government.

I’ve read the NDP motion. Some of it I agree with, particularly the first two lines: “Whereas everyone has the right to an affordable home,” I agree; and “Whereas any solution to the housing affordability crisis must include public, non-profit and co-op housing options,” as they do today. The rest, frankly, Speaker, I take exception with.

They say to look forward, you must take a look back, and what we can see when we look back is what worked and what didn’t work and what we can do to build a better future for housing in Ontario. Everyone agrees that Ontario is in a housing supply crisis, and I emphasize the word “supply.” It didn’t happen in the last five years. In fact, Speaker, it happened over the last 30 or 35 years, and we must remember that this crisis was created then.

We have had a population explosion in Ontario; I say this often. Since I was in high school, the population of this province has more than doubled. In fact, the small town of Streetsville that I grew up in was about 6,000 people. And when you talk to the member from Mississauga–Streetsville, she will say that all the farms around Streetsville that I grew up working on are now houses. What do we do, Speaker? Tell those folks to go away? I don’t think so.

We continue to see a massive housing explosion in this province, and we are doing everything we can—under our power, under our will, under our conviction—to get more homes built.

Looking back, under the leader of the former Bill Davis Progressive Conservatives in Ontario, we built houses that we needed. In fact, Premier Davis set the provincial record for the most housing starts in a single year. Then, in 1990, the world changed. We ended up with a new government, led by Premier Rae.

If you’re wondering, Speaker, there’s a reason the NDP doesn’t talk about their record. The reason is that the NDP experiment did not work. In fact, it failed miserably. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has detailed housing data that goes back to 1955. By the time the NDP left office in 1995, Ontario set a record for the lowest—I repeat, the lowest—number of housing starts since 1955, at 35,818.

I want to reiterate that over the last year of the Peterson Liberal government, Ontario had approximately 73,000 housing starts. When the NDP took office, they inherited a good housing situation, and by the time they left, housing starts were cut in half and the NDP were responsible for creating a housing supply crisis that’s continued on since. In essence, we’ve been playing catch-up since 1995.

When Mike Harris and the PCs won government, they inherited a tough situation. After 2003 and after eight years of steady increases under Premier Harris and Premier Eves, we grew housing starts exponentially. Sadly, in 2003, the last year of our government, we saw housing starts drop. At that time, we’d had the best years since the 1980s, and after 15 years of Liberal government, housing starts waned dramatically. Under the McGuinty-Wynne Liberals, Ontario’s housing starts didn’t fall off a cliff like they did with the NDP, but they certainly did decline. Over the last decade in office, the Liberals averaged just under 67,700 housing starts per year.

Under this government, Ontario has had the best three years of housing starts since the 1980s. Starting from July 2018 going through the end of 2023, Ontario has averaged 86,500 housing starts per year. That’s almost 20,000 more housing starts per year than the Liberals averaged over their last decade in office, and dramatically more than when the NDP were in office in the 1990s.

In 2023, we set a record for the most housing starts on purpose-built rentals in a single year, up 27%. After just over five and a half years of this government, Ontario has already had more housing starts on purpose-built rentals than the Liberals through the last 15 years of their government.

Speaker, the story of housing over the last 35 years has been clear. In 1990, the NDP walked into a good housing situation and failed to get the job done. The Liberals failed to get the job done—

I’m really pleased to be able to speak on housing today and to speak in support of our motion.

Housing as a commodity or an investment is very problematic. It has cut so many people out. It has created inflated prices. It has allowed the disappearance of affordable housing to short-term rentals. It’s kicking seniors out of their homes. Two hundred seniors are losing their homes as we speak. It’s pricing seniors in Ottawa out of the market. It is dire and not how we should be providing housing for people or thinking about housing. So I’m very much in favour of the idea of housing Ontario and, really, the importance of building mixed housing and the importance of having these low-cost loans.

In the case of Thunder Bay, we have two projects: Suomi Koti for seniors. We don’t even need public land. They have the land. If low-cost loans had been available, if this government actually had something to support not-for-profit housing, Suomi Koti would already be half built by now. Giwaa On Court is another example of a rebuild of the post office. No need for public land, but they need affordable financing in order to build. It’s still on stall. Both of these projects were presented to the government. There’s been zero support, and I’m so looking forward to the implementation of our bill because these projects could actually be built, and that would be 104 units available immediately in Thunder Bay.

Co-ops: we have a long history of co-op housing in Thunder Bay. In fact, co-op everything. We’ve had co-op bakeries, co-op food buying groups. Castlegreen Co-op has been there. It is still there, and it is still a prime place to live; Superior View, newer co-op housing. What is wonderful about this co-op housing is that they are mixed income.

So we have problematic low-income housing that has wound up being a magnet for the gangs coming to the city. But when you are able to move out of there and into a co-op, where you’re no longer ghettoized, with many people who can’t afford a place to live, then you actually can become part of a community and it really doesn’t matter that you don’t have a ton of income. Those programs have been very successful, and they have moved people into those safer environments, and we really need that.

I’m thinking of another co-op which is Centre francophone de Thunder Bay, another co-op. It’s deep-rooted in northwestern Ontario.

Modular housing: There’s lots of talk of this, but we have to remember that there are different standards of modular housing. Some of them will keep to the current building code, but there’s modular housing available that goes well beyond this and is actually designed for different climates. It’s designed not to off-gas so that people with environmental sensitivities can live with it. It is designed to not have mold, a problem that is in many homes on First Nations’ communities because they were poorly built and poorly thought-out. So again, there are many, many rich opportunities available to us.

Finally, the idea of fourplexes: Why is this such a frightening notion? I’m quite sure I lived in a fourplex in Toronto. There’s lots of them around. There’s lots of them in Thunder Bay. This is not a frightening thing. It’s not suddenly an eight-storey monster in the middle of nowhere.

I will end my remarks there by saying there are solutions. There have always been solutions if you’re not afraid to embrace them. Public land or private land, but affordable financing, and we can get that housing built.

I’m honoured to stand today to discuss one of the more important problems currently facing people in every community across Ontario: access to housing. Our government understands that people across Ontario need a wide range of housing options at various price points to best reflect their needs at every stage in life. Industry experts, economists, home builders, and countless financial and market professionals have offered solutions about what can and must be done to solve this problem. Our government is listening and we’re taking action. We know that government bureaucracy doesn’t build homes, which is why our government is choosing to reduce red tape and create the environment for our community home builders to increase Ontario’s housing supply.

When examining the roots of the situation we’re facing in Ontario with respect to housing, similarities can be drawn across many jurisdictions—across Canadian provinces, American states and even globally, as many countries are struggling with similar challenges. Ontario is certainly not immune from global forces.

I have heard from people in my riding and have listened to media pundits discuss the factors exacerbating the housing crises affecting communities across Ontario, Canada and North America. Rising building costs remain a challenge for builders. Interest rates on mortgages remain a major challenge for potential homebuyers and for people renewing their mortgages. One common denominator I’ve heard directly from home builders, from existing and prospective homebuyers and from renters remains a lack of housing supply.

With a little luck, at any time of day you can tune in to Newstalk 1010 here in Toronto, or AM 800 back in my hometown of Chatham-Kent–Leamington, and probably hear a live radio personality and their guests discuss this very situation at various times throughout any day. I’d agree with some of them that the current housing dilemma involves a constellation of deep and complex factors involving local and global market conditions, population growth, current lending rates and the consequences from policy decisions made many years ago that resulted in diminished supply relative to our population growth, especially the net growth experienced here in Ontario because of years of sustained and positive immigration levels.

The main issue driving this prolonged period of record immigration was that communities weren’t building homes at the same rate equal to the families and individuals who needed all forms of housing. Home builders have long identified challenges with slow, arduous local planning processes, outdated rules and the NIMBYism that unnecessarily delayed important projects that can contribute to the very housing solutions Ontario has been seeking.

To continue to grow our economy and fill the wide range of available jobs now and in the future, we need to attract and retain these hard-working, entrepreneurial, industrious, skilled and motivated people who want to build a life for themselves and their families here in Ontario. To this point, Ontario stands apart from the broader cross-section of other jurisdictions experiencing similar housing pressures. The reason? Since 2018, Ontario has cultivated a climate and nurtured the conditions to attract record investments and create unprecedented opportunities for now and for the future.

In spite of these pressures, setbacks and delays the world experienced during the pandemic, Ontario’s economy recovered quickly. Led by Premier Ford, it’s on a course to lead all jurisdictions across North America in terms of investment in the next generation of meaningful, well-paying jobs.

In response to this housing supply crisis, our government has adopted an all-of-government approach to tackle this very difficult situation, emphasizing collaboration between both municipal and federal levels of government to facilitate the environment needed for community builders to construct homes more efficiently. With a goal of building 1.5 million homes by 2031, it requires partnership with Ontario’s elected mayors and councillors, because municipalities know their communities best. They understand where it makes sense to build and where it just makes sense not to.

Under the leadership of this Premier, we’re working together in supporting municipalities by giving them the tools they need to build more homes faster and tackle the affordability crisis that’s pricing too many people, especially young families and newcomers, out of the dream of home ownership.

We have set ambitious housing targets and we’re holding municipalities accountable while rewarding them for successes with our $1.2-billion Building Faster Fund, designed to help municipalities pay for critical housing and community-related enabling infrastructure needed to accommodate growth, such as site servicing and building new roads. The Building Faster Fund includes $120 million that’s being reserved for small, rural and northern municipalities, to help build housing-enabling infrastructure and prioritize projects that speed up the increase of housing supply.

In partnership with municipalities, Ontario will continue to work hard to unlock housing opportunities and support growing communities. The province continues to call on our federal government to pay its fair share and help fund housing-enabling infrastructure investments and support vibrant, growing communities.

Municipal infrastructure is vital to fostering Ontario’s economic prosperity and enhancing quality of life. The crucial funding will power municipalities to sustain the province’s expansion by maintaining essential systems, like water and sewer networks, and facilitating connectivity to roads and bridges.

My riding of Chatham-Kent–Leamington is expansive. It follows the shores of beautiful Lake Erie. Chatham-Kent is home to the Thames campus of St. Clair College. It is still largely rural and made up of several smaller municipalities, like the former city of Chatham, Comber, Tilbury, Wheatley, Blenheim, Merlin, Ridgetown and Highgate, all amalgamated to form the current municipality.

Just consider the network of legacy infrastructure in a community like Chatham-Kent: several different water and waste water treatment plants, hundreds of kilometres of underground pipe and an extensive network of municipal roads. Chatham-Kent possesses one of the highest concentrations of bridges and drains anywhere in the province, with watersheds that include Lake St. Clair, Lake Erie and the Thames River.

Nevertheless, Chatham-Kent identified an opportunity to seize the moment to attract families and grow. Despite targeting to build 81 new homes last year, Chatham-Kent broke ground on 522 new housing units.

Interjection.

I’m so pleased to join in the debate on the official opposition’s motion today. I think that all of us in this House understand that without stable housing, without a strategy to address the precariousness of housing, we will not reach our potential. This is what housing provides to people in Ontario.

I’m going to go through a couple of stats here because it’s important for the government to have their eyes wide open on this situation on housing and homelessness. In fact, this government has refocused their energy on addressing homelessness, and homelessness is a crisis. Homelessness are encampments.

We just met, the leader and I, on Friday with the social development centre, and they described what they’re seeing in encampments as criminal purgatory. It’s where people are not seen; they are not heard; they are the great unwashed. We do not want to acknowledge their humanity.

The normalization of these encampments is a very dark point for us in Canada and in Ontario. We all should agree that people should not be living in tents in the winter on a corner, in a park. It’s almost like this government is content, if you will, that they’re there and they’re not over here. We had a really honest and emotional conversation about the loss of dignity for people in this province. We have to talk about “these people” because they are our people; they are our citizens. They should not be treated like second-class citizens in the province of Ontario.

Now, the government, though, has really been playing a little bit of a shell game with the money on housing, I have to say. We have proposed some solutions here. One of them—it was really interesting. It’s always interesting how many times a member on that side can say, “Bonnie Crombie, queen of the carbon tax.” They’re very consistent in that regard. But I have to say, what’s happening with the commentary around fourplexes—now, the government should remember that it was less than two years ago that they made threeplexes a right of way, not right of way but right of—what is it?

It was less than two years ago that this government made threeplexes as of right. Now it’s the fourplex—this is the line in the sand, right? This is the line in the sand where this government has said, “Oh, forget it.” What do you do with a Premier who says that we can’t have these eight-storey fourplexes? What do you do with that, Madam Speaker? Because this is what the Premier has said, “We can’t have four-storey, six-storey or eight-story fourplexes.” Everybody in this House should fully understand that fourplexes are either two storeys, sometimes they’re three storeys, but for some reason this government has said, “Nope, we’re drawing the line in the sand. The threeplexes are as good as you’re going to get, Ontario.” Maybe they aren’t the whole solution, but they are definitely part of the solution, and we need all of these tools to address the homelessness and housing crisis in Ontario.

It’s important, if you track the money—and I’m the finance critic, so I like to do so. In 2018-19, Ontario spent a total of $1.1 billion on its housing programs. The breakdown is really interesting: $397 million was on homelessness, $693 million was on community housing and $7.8 million on Indigenous housing. My good friend from Kiiwetinoong, this is a familiar story that you’ve heard before. In 2024, the province was planning on spending $1.4 billion, but $707 million on homelessness and only $215 million on community housing. And $422 million was from the National Housing Strategy with the federal government, who are obviously in a point of tension right now with this provincial government, because they want to bypass the provincial government and get money right into those communities.

I will say, they are putting some pressure on this government. Why would you not come together in the face of this housing crisis when money is on the table? We need the resources in the community. This ideological game is such a dangerous place in politics, in my view.

Just to recap, the government has lowered spending on community housing by 70%. For the love of humanity, how do you solve a housing crisis by reducing the funding on community housing? How do you do that? It seems like you’re content to see those encampments. You’re content to spend some more money on the crisis of that moment but not the solution of the moment. This is so short-sighted. To be fair, it’s exactly what the Liberals did.

Timmins Mayor Michelle Boileau states that in northern Ontario, local towns “have seen an increase to homelessness prevention dollars while either seeing status quo or most recently a decrease to community housing funding.”

It is an exercise in futility to acknowledge that homelessness is a crisis, that those problems are complex and require strategic investment, strategic resources and talent and yet not have the solution around community housing, which is supportive housing.

Tim Richter from the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness said that “when Ontario is spending less on housing, they’re going to end up spending more on homelessness....”

This is exactly what’s happening in Ontario right now. It defies all logic for a government that says that 1.5 million homes need to be built. Right now, the homes that are being built, as my colleague from Niagara has pointed out, are unaffordable homes. It is not the solution. The financialization of our housing sector is killing this province. It absolutely is.

I’ll just summarize by saying that in Waterloo region, the number of people who are experiencing chronic homelessness has grown by 129%, but this is going to triple in 2028. This is a community, quite honestly, that does have wealth. We have a very strong religious and social fabric in our region that has really been trying to lift people up, but that net has holes in it. It is frayed; it is tired. There’s no mending it. We need a new strategy.

That is why the official opposition has brought forward some recommendations here to the government. It sounds like they’re not open to the suggestions; you’re not open to the learning part of this. But I have to tell you, when we met with The Working Centre, Joe and Stephanie Mancini, this past Friday, they have described what’s happening to people who are the most vulnerable in Ontario as beyond cruel.

We need to solve the housing crisis. Please contemplate other options, because your plan, the PC plan, is not working.

I’m very pleased to rise on this NDP motion today calling on the government to support deeply affordable and not-for-profit housing in Ontario because people in Ontario are desperate. We have a very serious housing crisis, and I am really seeing it in my riding of Ottawa West–Nepean. Unfortunately, the budget and the government’s recent housing bill contain nothing to address affordable housing, even though that’s what my constituents most desperately need.

According to rentals.ca, the average rent in Ottawa for a one-bedroom apartment is $2,038 in March. That’s a year-over-year increase of 9.1%. Just to put this in context, if you are a minimum wage worker working 40 hours a week in Ontario, your rent is taking up 75% of your income, and you have only that other 25% to spend on groceries—which are also increasing—and every other expense that you have. If you are on ODSP, that rent is 155% of your income. If you are on Ontario Works, it is 278% of your income.

So when I door-knock in apartment buildings in Ottawa West–Nepean, the number one thing people are telling me is that they cannot afford to pay their rent and buy groceries and pay all of their other bills. In fact, I spoke to someone recently who said rent takes up all of his income, and he is depending on this legacy his parents left him, which he’s spending now every single month just to be able to buy food and stay out of the food bank.

My constituents can’t afford what they have, but they also can’t afford to move because the rents are going up so quickly. Just to give you an example, I had some constituents who came to me because of a situation in a CLV apartment in Britannia where another tenant was harassing people, so there was quick turnover in this unit. In the space of six months with three tenants, the rent went from $1,400 a month to $1,900 a month to $2,600 a month. That is a $1,200 a month increase in the space of six months.

The problem is that when we are allowing landlords to jack up the rents like this, it creates an incentive for landlords to get tenants out. I’ve had a constituent, Judy, who has had two illegal evictions, being told that the landlord was going to move in so she had to move out. This happened in 2019, when she was paying $1,500 a month. The landlord turned around and rented the unit for $500 a month more, rather than moving in. This year, it happened again: She was paying $1,750 a month in rent, and the landlord turned around and rented it out for $450 a month more. So Judy has two Landlord and Tenant Board applications to protest these unfair evictions, which aren’t progressing at all because the Landlord and Tenant Board is broken, and she is now paying $1,915 a month, which is a 27% increase in her rent, all because of the illegal actions of these landlords.

We’re also seeing landlords use above-guideline rent increases to put pressure on tenants to move out. In fact, ACORN just obtained data for the last five years through a freedom-of-information request which was reported on by the CBC, which shows that 20 companies in Ontario were responsible for over half of the AGI requests in Ontario in just the first eight months of 2022. They actually have all the data going back to 2017 on AGI applications to the Landlord and Tenant Board, and they show that in Ottawa West–Nepean, in that time period, there were 128 AGI applications, which accounted for 3% of all the AGI applications during that time period, even though my riding does not have 3% of all the residences in Ontario.

We’re seeing the same names appear on that list over and over again. It is the large corporate landlords like Minto and Homestead and Accora. At eight properties in my riding, the landlord applied for an AGI every single year during that time period that they could, and I’m hearing from constituents that these AGIs are being approved even when they’re being submitted for minor repairs—like, they put some paint in the hallway, and now an AGI is approved. Meanwhile, at other buildings, major repairs aren’t getting done even though the AGI is being approved by the landlord.

I’ve heard from Rosa in Ottawa West–Nepean, whose rent went up 5.5% this year. She told me, “I simply can’t afford this. Things were tight before but now I feel stricken with fear of what will happen. I work very hard every day and I feel stuck in a bad situation.” She concluded, “To be blunt, I’m desperate.”

These corporate landlords are not using AGIs in order to pay for these renovations and repairs. They are using them to maximize profits and to push tenants out. That is an important reason why we need to enable and empower not-for-profit and community home building and not-for-profit landlords within our rental market in Ontario, so that the actual goal is to deliver affordable housing to people and not to maximize dividends for shareholders.

We have great community housing and not-for-profit home builders in Ottawa, like Ottawa Community Housing, Nepean community housing and the Ottawa Community Land Trust. They are ready and willing to do the work—they are doing good work already—but they need support from this government in order to provide that kind of housing for even more people.

There are 10,000 people on the centralized wait-list for affordable housing in Ottawa, and I spoke to one constituent who has been on that wait-list for 12 years. She has given up hope that she is ever going to get an affordable home in Ottawa.

This motion calls on the government of Ontario to get back into the business of building affordable housing by swiftly and substantially increasing the supply of affordable and non-market homes. The NDP has put forward a proposal which calls on the government to provide the funding for these not-for-profit and community landlords to build this housing and make it affordable. If we don’t invest in the not-for-profit part of our market, we are never going to be able to provide affordable housing at this spectrum of the market where people need deeply affordable housing—in fact, we’re never going to see affordable housing at all because, in the last six years, the government has only had 1,184 affordable homes built. That’s just not going to cut it when we’ve got 10,000 people on the wait-list for affordable housing in Ottawa alone.

So I’m deeply disappointed to hear that the government members are speaking about not supporting this motion, that they don’t seem to understand the scale and the depth of the crisis in Ontario, that they don’t understand what is needed to address it and make sure that people actually have an affordable place to live and get to feed their families as well. And so I hope that the government members will reconsider and support this motion this afternoon.

It’s my honour to rise today in support of our opposition day motion. You know, for the government, they often are talking about the current housing crisis in which we are living, which we are experiencing. The first and most obvious answer would be what, Speaker? If there aren’t enough homes, what do we do? We build them. Instead of leaving this up to other people and all these different roundabout ways, the most simple answer is to get shovels in the ground and to build.

I was honoured to table this legislation late last year, and I’m proud that, despite the Conservatives not wanting to get their hands dirty and not wanting to get shovels in the ground and voted it down, we are undaunted. The official opposition will raise the voices of people across this province. The affordability crisis must be addressed in a meaningful way. What is foundational, what is fundamental, what is most often the largest expense in our lives? It’s housing.

While this government blunders ahead and tiptoes clumsily backwards, the Ontario NDP is focused on solutions, and part of that is a commitment to affordable housing. We need a wartime effort to address this housing crisis. We need all hands on deck. We need to capitalize on the strengths and abilities of our community partners such as experts in the field like co-ops, municipal partners and social housing providers.

I recently had the opportunity to congratulate Homes Unlimited London in my riding on 50 years of incorporation. Carmen Sprovieri and Cathy Park were there. It was an amazing event. It was a beautiful and poignant evening. But here is a not-for-profit organization that is phenomenal. They have industry partners. They’re doers. They have industry leaders. They know how to navigate systems. They can easily leverage their own expertise as well as that of others just to get the job done. I sat with Bob and Margo Hahn and Gord and Maria Hardcastle and we had a phenomenal conversation. But it was amazing to see that those are the kinds of organizations that this government could depend upon that could help create that affordable housing.

Recently, in my riding, Richard Sifton of Sifton Properties, with the Anglican Diocese of Huron, are now taking Homes Unlimited into downtown London. There’s going to be at 195 Dufferin Ave., which is going to be 94 residential units—80 one-bedroom and 14 two-bedroom units. It’s going to cost $20 million, and Sifton is donating the building and is going to oversee the reconstruction. It’s a beautiful plan.

But this is exactly what the government could do. Not-for-profits can split a nickel five ways from centre. Co-ops have been in the business of creating and maintaining that housing stock that is vitally necessary to address the affordability crisis that is happening across our province. Yet, this government would talk about recommendations from Scotiabank as being communist. They would talk about how the government creating housing would ruin the free market.

Here on this side, the official opposition speaks to folks who are in the creation of private, for-profit housing. They do not want the responsibility of creating all the affordable housing that Ontario needs. That is not their mandate, Speaker. They are in the business of providing shareholder return. They want to make sure there is a return on investment for all of their people and, quite frankly, there isn’t a great return on investment in the creation of truly affordable housing and long-term affordable housing.

So this government in their reliance—their ideological, their fixed mindset, where they can’t seem to get it through their ears that we need to have the government incent and assist co-ops, municipal partners and non-profits to create that housing. Instead, they have this myopic vision that for-profit is the only way to go. They’re really letting Ontarians down.

We see other disastrous initiatives from this government including the removal of rent control on buildings first occupied after November 2018. During an affordability crisis, what does this government do for affordability? They poured gasoline on the fire. They’ve created a system of exploitation which has destroyed many lives.

I talk to seniors all the time who have been in buildings for decades. They have paid for the apartment building in which they live, and they are afraid, to this day, each and every single day, that that building is going to be sold to a new owner who will want to get them out so they can jack the rent up to whatever the market can withstand. It’s a legacy of the Liberal government, who shot holes in the boat of affordability in terms of renters, bringing in vacancy decontrol.

This government could follow and could implement NDP legislation to protect renters. They could pass this opposition day motion today to create more affordable housing, to stabilize the system, making sure people have a safe place to call home. Yet, I wonder if they will choose to, or if they will continue to act as partisan puppets for their for-profit friends. Time will tell, and we will see today.

Housing is foundational, housing is fundamental, housing is a human right and housing is health care. I hope this government will understand the importance of housing. They say a lot of words. Let’s see some action today.

Speaker, through you, today my colleagues in the opposition stand united about the urgent need for Ontario families. That need is to address affordability issues, and that has to start with affordable housing. It is about the dream and the security one receives when they know they have shelter. It’s about the confidence that parents should have to know their children can stay in the communities they grew up in. It’s about recognizing the absence of past provincial governments to adequately address the pain of a housing crisis. It’s about taking action when others did not. That’s leadership, Speaker.

Niagara has the most beautiful landscape. This is why we are a gem for tourism. Yet, for the families that live there, we are facing this reality that more and more families are at risk of being unhoused and underhoused.

Speaker, did you know the average wait time for an affordable one-bedroom apartment can stretch over decades, from nine years in the Lincoln area to a staggering 17 years in Niagara Falls? And in my riding of St. Catharines, for one bedroom, it now exceeds 20 years. That’s 20 years people are waiting for affordable housing.

By the time space becomes available, you are almost literally an entirely different person. Our community need for housing grows while the supply lags dramatically behind. This is unacceptable, Speaker. This is why we are here today debating this.

I strive to do the work to be of service to my community. This is why a guide was written—a guide to provide tenants the knowledge to know their rights, so that they are not bullied out of their affordable housing by out-of-area speculators.

Speaker, this is why I strive to advocate to fix the LTB by addressing the wait-list, benefiting both good tenants and landlords. And yet, without affordable housing, the situation will continue to worsen.

St. Catharines was ranked as the 10th most expensive rental market in all of Canada in 2019. I wish I could say that Ontario has dropped the ball on trying to build affordable housing. However, let’s face it: The reality is that Ontario never even bothered to pick that ball up in the first place.

When the Ontario government struck a task force to address housing affordability six months before the last election, not one single representative from the non-profit or affordable housing sector—there was not one. So, this is why it is no surprise we are where we are right now.

The research by assistant professor Joanne Heritz from Brock University sheds light on the bleak picture. It tells us that the gap between supply and demand in affordable housing is not just a temporary imbalance but a chronic failure of our housing policies.

Recalling the conversation at a round table on housing in Niagara, one that included the Leader of the Opposition, we heard a unanimous call for action. Non-profits alone are spearheading the change for non-market housing with little to no support from current provincial strategies. This is not merely a gap in policy; it is a rift in our moral obligations.

The motion before us today calls for bold steps. These are radical ideas. They are rational. They’re not radical; I said they’re rational. More than any of that, Ontario is at risk of losing billions of federal funding intended for affordable housing, all because the action from this Ontario Conservative government on building houses has always been about politics rather than progress.

Think of a single mother in St. Catharines, the young graduate in our south end, the elderly couple in the north: all of whom deserve real action that hits to the core of every family. We must also look towards solutions that have begun to make a difference.

The recent initiatives in St. Catharines, like the 127 units on Church Street and the 24-unit transitional housing on Oakdale Avenue, are worthy projects that are examples of what our community in Niagara can do. However, it is not enough if we do not have meaningful and active participation by the provincial government.

What does courage look like in the face of crisis? It looks like getting our hands dirty, helping families right now, changing our direction and moving forward together. Today, I invite all members to support this motion and get back into the business of building non-market housing today.

Report continues in volume B.