The sunny ways.

For the member: I’m just wondering, you listed many things, but if you had a magic wand and there were some simple things the government can do in the short term that would start to turn the curve toward making housing more affordable for people, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

I have a question about appeals. As the law presently stands—I’m going to frame this in terms of the municipality of Sudbury, which at 3,100 square kilometres is the largest municipality in the province of Ontario. And if somebody wants to build a subdivision in Sudbury, somebody living literally 30, 40 or 50 kilometres away could appeal that decision, even though they are utterly unaffected by the building of that subdivision, because Sudbury is so large.

That seems to me to be a type of thing which ought to be corrected, and I’m wondering if the member would agree on the possibility that it might make sense to place limitations on rights of appeal when you live so far away from a proposal that you are utterly unaffected by it.

Even.

Even, at the last minute, with their poll numbers tanking, they’re saying, “Whoa, we need some good ideas.” People have seen through the—

My point is this: There are a lot of good ideas around there, and building non-market housing is one of them. I urge this government to get serious about that.

I also think it is essential that we move forward with increasing density in towns and cities. We have presented very practical solutions that are supported by—honestly, I cannot think of a single stakeholder that didn’t support allowing fourplexes as of right in towns or cities, not a single stakeholder. It’s such a winner. It’s such a winner. You can pat yourself on the back for that. I’d really like to see this government move forward on that and work with municipalities to ensure that they can meet their housing targets, not just in terms of numbers, but also in terms of affordability, size and needs, so we’re not just building a whole lot of 600-square-foot condos and 3,000-square-foot homes on farmland, but we’re building homes for the seniors and students, young families and people who have accessibility challenges.

Then, finally, what I would really like to see this government do in their multipronged approach—certainly something we would do—is to clamp down on the rise of investor-led speculation in Ontario. The reason why that is so important is because when we make it easier for Bay Street and Wall Street or Core Development to come in and snap up homes, we’re making it a whole lot harder for people who just want one home. They just want one home. We’re making it a lot more expensive and a lot harder for them to buy that home.

The whole purpose of the housing market is to provide homes for people first, not investors. That’s what housing is all about: It’s about providing homes to people. When I’m looking at these government bills, I look at it with that lens in mind, and I urge this government to do that as well.

But there are some things in this bill that make this bill really, really problematic. Making it easier for municipalities to say yes to low-density housing when we know we have alternatives is very concerning. Eliminating the planning responsibility from entire regional levels of government without any serious consultation is very concerning. Limiting third-party appeals to the lands tribunal, including valid third-party appeals, we have got a lot of concerns about as well.

The single most effective thing the government could do right now to make housing affordable is to bring in stronger rent control, immediately stabilize housing prices for over 1.7 million renter households and provide relief. With that, we can then move forward with building more housing, including non-market housing and affordable housing. I urge this government to look at this issue very seriously.

We’re going to go to questions for the member. I recognize the member for Bruce–Grey–Owen Sound.

I thank the speaker for her remarks—very comprehensive, and she covered many issues in her remarks today, which is a lot like the housing market itself: It’s complex. There are many elements to it and it’s not straightforward. That’s why we’re bringing forth this bill—in fact, our 13th red tape bill, which is quite extraordinary in and of itself. There’s got to be some record there. Red tape bills are not glamorous—as I said earlier, much like myself.

But I heard her say many times that there are a number of areas in this bill that she would support, and I appreciated that. Reflecting on the complexity of the subject and the measures required, would these positive elements of the bill allow you to support the legislation?

Thank you to the member from Essex. A concern with the government’s changes to the lands tribunal, again, about third-party appeals is that citizens and environmental groups just don’t have the right to appeal at all, yet the government has carved out the right for major industry, developers and airports to appeal. So you’ve got this small group of people that must have lobbied you real hard in the last few weeks, and they can appeal, but everybody else can’t appeal.

I do want to emphasize, the lands tribunal, the adjudicators already have the authority to throw out appeals that are frivolous or that have limited chance of success. So they already have the option to say, “Look, we’re only going to be hearing concerns that are valid.” Those are my concerns about this bill.

I hope that in the next bill the government introduces, there is a commitment to improve the situation facing renters in Ontario today. Strong rent control is needed, vacancy control is needed and strong enforcement of rental protection laws, including clamping down on illegal eviction activity.

To the wonderful member from University–Rosedale, thank you for your brilliant one-hour lead. I always enjoy listening to you speak around many issues, but especially housing.

After six years of the government being in power, owning a house and obtaining real estate or obtaining a home has never been more expensive in Ontario. And we know that the challenges that Ontarians are facing are really the cost-of-living crisis, and at the apex of the problem is the cost of housing. Is there anything in this bill that will make getting a house, getting an apartment, buying or renting that much easier, and is there anything in the bill that will protect you from illegal evictions?

I wish to thank all members who are in the chamber this afternoon for their participation in what has been a very interesting afternoon and opportunity to discuss a subject that I know is important to so many of us and to our constituents and those we have the opportunity to serve, and that, of course, is cutting red tape to build more homes.

I don’t think it’s a secret to anyone in the province of Ontario that we are still in the midst of a housing crisis. I know when I first came to this chamber in 2016, it was an issue that was coming onto the horizon. We had seen the federal Liberals actually talk a fair bit about it in the 2015 federal election that I was involved with. I remember Justin Trudeau coming in to Parliament with his commitment to make housing affordable for everybody. I think eight years later, we can see how that has turned out for the people of Canada.

So it was in 2016 that I really, really started to see, in my area of Niagara West, a changing demography. What I mean by that is we had a lot of people who were selling bungalows and mid-1970s detached homes in the Richmond Hills and the Scarboroughs of the world for $1 million, $1.5 million, and moving to Grimsby, to Beamsville, purchasing homes for $600,000, $700,000, $800,000 and retiring a little bit earlier than they had previously planned. What that led to was, of course, a really challenging situation for local people who were my age. Many of my friends, and I would say many of the young people I grew up with across Niagara, started to move farther south, outside of the GTHA corridor. They moved to places like Port Colborne; they moved to the Burfords of the world; they moved down south even farther, perhaps out to Dunnville, perhaps even out toward Oxford county—I see the member from Oxford listening intently—and this was a result of escalating prices that were growing much faster than their income was able to keep up with.

I see we have a number of young people who are today in the gallery. I’m sure that that is something that they’ve seen as well in speaking with those perhaps who have siblings who are looking for their first home and who are looking to ensure that they’re able to get into that housing market, something that was not just a dream for so many years but a reality. It was something that just happened.

I spoke with my in-laws the other day about the housing challenges in Ontario. They said it’s still hard for them to wrap their heads around the fact that the home that they built now is easily over $1 million, and they built it in the early 2000s for just around $200,000. When they got married in the 1990s, all of a sudden, they realized, “Oh, we’re going to need a place to live,” so they figured out a way to scrounge together $5,000. Their first home was $95,000; they needed 5% down. This is in Wainfleet, just off of Highway 3. So they found $5,000 through a stag and doe, and they were able to put their down payment on their first home. Those days are long gone for the people who are sitting in the galleries today, and they’re long gone for most of the people of Ontario.

Why is that? There are a lot of different reasons that we can get into. Obviously, the interest rate hikes that we’ve seen from the federal government and the Bank of Canada over the last few years have had a massive impact. We’ve seen, of course, a rapid population growth that creates housing pressures. But at its core, it’s a question of supply and demand. When you have hundreds of thousands of people coming to our province because they see the opportunities that exist in Canada, in Ontario—they see the amazing opportunities whether it’s in the new EV plants, whether it’s in the quality of life, whether it’s in the safety of our streets, and they know that they want to live here. They want to be residents of Ontario. When they come here and the province of Ontario and specifically local-tier municipalities don’t build enough homes, that creates a supply-and-demand imbalance. It’s economics 101. I don’t claim to be an economist by any stretch of the imagination, but when you have 600,000 or 700,000 people entering into a region, and you’re building not enough homes, the math doesn’t add up. You have a lot of people bidding on not enough units.

I do want to acknowledge that there’s going to be a number of contributions to the topic that we have today and I want to acknowledge that the member for Essex and I are going to be sharing time this afternoon. The member for Essex is also going to be speaking to this question. And really the question is, what is the solution? What is the fix?

We’ve heard the ideology from the NDP and the Liberals. They say we should ban private construction of homes. We should just have everyone in a subsidized home. We should have everyone in nationalized housing. We should have the government run housing across this province and across this nation. There is a really important place for social housing in the province of Ontario and I recognize the investments that have been made by the Ministry of Housing in so many corners of this province. I had the opportunity to tour many of those sites in Niagara, as well, and see the incredible importance of affordable housing and ensuring that we’re building these homes for future generations.

But at its core, the people who build homes are home builders. They are people like the ones I grew up with who swing hammers, who pour concrete, who ensure that the work actually gets done to build homes. But when you show up for your first day on the job—as, perhaps, someone like myself, who as a teen operated a skid-steer and helped to clear out land and ensure that the ramshackle shack in the back was able to be taken down and you were able to create the opportunity for clean, new concrete footings and you were able to build a dream of home ownership on that site. Before that happens, there are a lot of steps that go into site plan approvals, that go into servicing those lands, that go into ensuring that the home that is approved that’s going to be built on that land is safe, is stable, is not going to fall down and that it meets the requirements of local municipalities.

But what we saw in the province of Ontario until our government came to office in 2018 was a cloying, growing, absolutely exhausting mass of red tape that was killing the opportunity for home builders and for those who had dreams of home ownership to ever get into that market. And again, it wasn’t that we weren’t building any homes. That’s something that I often hear the Liberals stand in this chamber saying: “Oh, well, we did build some homes in the province of Ontario when we were there. It’s not like all home building stopped.” And they’re not completely wrong. Despite their best efforts to extinguish the spark of entrepreneurialism and in spite of their attempts to ensure that home builders would not be able to build the homes that people needed here in the province, there were still homes that were being constructed in the province of Ontario.

But, at its core, that supply-and-demand vector—the difference between the amount of homes that we needed with the population growth we experienced as people saw the potential in Ontario and the amount of homes that were actually coming online was absolutely disproportionate. And I remember when it really hit home: It was the spring of 2017.

The spring of 2017 saw a massive price increase that was directly linked to the undersupply of homes that were being built in the province of Ontario. I went to a home builders’ of Niagara association meeting; it was an AGM in, I’m going to say, late April of 2017. I hadn’t been elected that long; just since 2016. And I said to them, “So your frustration here seems to be not with the financing of these sites or not even finding the workers to build these sites”—which has now become more of a challenge, of course, with the labour concerns; as we have a population that’s aging and as we have baby boomers retiring from the trades. I just want to give a shout-out to the Minister of Education and the Minister of Labour, Training and Skills Development for the work that they’re doing to address that challenge.

But really, their big concern came down to red tape, and I remember sitting down with a fellow who has built hundreds of homes across Niagara—not personally, but with the organization that he’s involved with, including a beautiful subdivision in a small town not too far from where I live called Smithville. And if you’ve had a chance to go down Highway 20 on your way to Niagara Falls—perhaps you took the scenic route and you said, “Well, I’m going to go see a little bit of the interior in Niagara. I love the QEW; I love being stuck in traffic, but I also want to, of course, see a little bit of what’s on top of the mountain”—as we affectionately the escarpment—“and what that looks like.”

And so, there were some abandoned lands; it was called the Dunnville Spur. The Dunnville Spur was a part of a rail line that connected, obviously, Dunnville to some other parts of the CNR rail network. But they took that Dunnville Spur—it had been vacant for a long time—and they put it on the open market. It had run straight through town and it was no longer in use for decades and decades. They put it on the market and it was purchased in order to turn it into homes. Again, this was scrubland; it had been essentially an access point for a rail line going through town.

And now there are gorgeous homes there, I have to say. There are townhomes, mostly; a few detached homes, as well. Hundreds of families have moved into Smithville, really created a vibrant diversity that hadn’t existed traditionally, to a certain extent, in that community. These are people often who are commuters, first-time homebuyers, people who are excited. When I spoke with them when I was door-knocking, many of them came from the GTHA and were actually moving into their first home. I spoke with a family who had had five families living in one home in the GTHA, and they were moving into this area.

I spoke with the person who helped put together this particular parcel, and I said to him—because they actually only just completed filling those just prior to the 2022 election. I had gone in there a number of times between the 2018 and 2022 elections, and every time there would be a few dozen more homes. I would speak with them and ask them what their concerns were, introduce myself as their local member. But when I met with the people who had actually put together those new home opportunities, I said, “So tell me, when did this start? Because I know it’s been under way since I was first elected in 2016.” And they said, “Sam, we started putting this parcel of land together in 2004.” That’s 2004, and they finalized the last occupants 18 years later.

I wish that that story of delay and red tape—it wasn’t that they couldn’t build the homes. It wasn’t that they couldn’t get the financing. It wasn’t that there wasn’t the demand for those homes. It was the fact that the onerous burden of red tape that was preventing those homes from being built created a barrier that they hardly could overcome. They did, with perseverance and with a lot of hard work. But I’ll tell you, we should not, as a province and as individual legislators, be creating that level of frustration when the people who are seeking to build those homes are seeking to provide an opportunity, an avenue into that dream of home ownership.

I knew at that time, when I spoke with that man, that his frustration wasn’t even for the business development side of things. It wasn’t about whether or not they were able to have their crews out there. They had a number of sites that they had under way. But his frustration was for those poor families who were having to wait 18 years in order to get into a home that they had been saving for for many, many years. That was because of red tape at so many different levels of government.

That’s why the legislation that we’re debating today, as another part in a long saga of our government taking the bull by the horns, turning that ship of state, and saying no, we’re not going to allow a culture of bureaucracy, of continuous growth in regulation, of what, again, we’ve spoken about in this House as the enervating network of small, minute rules, minutiae that buries your average citizen under that blanket of red tape. We’re not going to allow that to continue to grow and creep into every aspect of building here in Ontario.

We have taken bold steps under the leadership of this Premier and of those who spoke this morning—the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, and red tape; the parliamentary assistant to the minister of red tape; the Associate Minister of Housing; the parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Municipal Affairs—demonstrating that this is an all-hands-on-deck effort to cut back that red tape.

Why? Not because we’re bean-counters, not because we like to meet our regulatory reduction requirements in some burden report that we send out once a year—ultimately, those are just numbers. Those are just metrics and measurements that few people beyond this chamber will read. Why do we care so much about cutting red tape? Why has the Premier said that we are going to keep bringing forward bills?

It’s because it’s not just about cutting red tape; it’s about the result of that tape. The why is as important as the how, and our why is to ensure that that dream of home ownership in every corner of this province is made a reality, as it was for my parents’ generation, for my parents-in-law’s generation, so that young families who are thinking about getting married, who are thinking about having kids—as my wife and I are very blessed to have a couple of kids—and they look at where they live—perhaps it’s a corner basement apartment—and they think, “We need to upsize. We have a one-bedroom, perhaps a studio right now. We’re going to need to look for somewhere a little bigger to build.”

If we had the policies in place that the opposition wanted, it would be essentially no more homes anywhere, it would be no opportunities for those people to keep into that market, because they fundamentally don’t understand that supply-and-demand mechanism in place. They don’t understand that, if you artificially restrict the ability for more supply to come onto the market and you artificially restrict the ability of the people who build these homes—the construction workers who during Skilled Trades Week we all acknowledge as heroes—if we restrict their ability to get on that job site because of all the red tape we’ve created to get to that point, it will not work.

But I’m proud to say that this Premier, this government, this legislation is continuing the legacy to ensure that that reality is there for each and every young family, new Canadian and even those who might be older but are looking to downsize, those who might have had their home in the GTHA and are now looking to come to rural Niagara and celebrate a smaller, slower way of life. Those people will now have options because of this legislation as part of, again, a continuing saga to cut red tape and get more homes built faster.

I know that my colleague the member for Essex will have much more to add to that.

Next question.

So we’re going to move to further debate.

I recognize the government House leader on a point of order.

Next question?

I thank the members very much for their remarks. Both of them touched on the practical elements of this bill. In fact, I’m also glad that the member from Niagara West touched on the acreage issue because this is one where numbers are thrown out. I think that they’re—yes, let’s get some updated numbers. I thank the member for doing that.

I also appreciate the member’s perspective on the length of time it has taken housing to be developed in our province. I can only imagine how young this young member would have been when some of these projects first started, but I think it’s all the more relevant for, as he noted, the young folks in the gallery. This bill is intended to support young homeowners—again, unlike myself. But I want to understand the member’s perspective and what the key drivers are to enhancing home building that are contained in this bill.

Point of order.

I’d like to thank the members from Niagara West and Essex for their presentation. As I’m sure they both know, representing rural ridings, Ontario is losing 319 acres of prime farmland per day, which represents 5% of the province’s entire farmland that will be lost in just five years. Bill 185 will make that loss even quicker. It will happen even faster.

Now, developers, airports, big manufacturers and cities are being provided the opportunity to appeal the Ontario Land Tribunal rulings that restrict building on farmland, wetland and environmentally sensitive areas, but this bill also takes away the ability for third parties. It takes away the ability of third parties to appeal these decisions. Is this yet another example of this Conservative government disrespecting rural Ontario and farmers?

I want to continue on the theme that my colleague raised, about contrasting this government’s approach to addressing housing with the approach that is being suggested by the official opposition. In preparation of my remarks today I did have an opportunity to take a look at the proposal from the official opposition and I’ll be quoting directly from it.

It starts with an acknowledgement that says, “There is little to no profit in building homes that are affordable for low-income people.” Then it proposes to ensure that 30% of the 1.5 million homes that they propose to build would be non-market homes. That’s 450,000 non-market homes. I am suggesting that each unit would cost $500,000. In order to build 450,000 non-market homes at $500,000 each, that would be $225 billion—$225 billion. How does the official opposition propose to raise this money? This is how they propose to do it: They propose to start with $15 billion “to finance the construction of new, non-market rental homes, to be operated by public, non-profit and co-op housing providers.” Then they say the capital costs of building the new homes would “be recovered from the rental income, which would be reinvested to finance more homes.”

That is the proposition put forward by the official opposition. They want to start with building homes that do not generate a profit and then take that absence of profit and build more homes with no profit. In other words, they want to build homes that don’t generate money and then have no money to build no more homes. That’s what that means.

You see, in order to build more homes, you need more money. In order to have more money, you have to generate the money, and not-for-profit doesn’t generate money by its very definition. That is the approach of the opposition. In other words, they propose to raise $225 billion in dreamland. Because right off the bat they acknowledge that such housing does not generate income. If you don’t have the generation of income, you cannot build any more houses period, end of analysis. That’s how it works.

I therefore contrast that approach with the approach of this government, which is, of course, to lower barriers to construction and by lowering those barriers, I mean lowering costs, such as lowering the red tape compliance, which stands in the way of practically every single development that is started in the province of Ontario.

One of those compliance measures is one which we spoke about earlier, which is the incessant intervention into the planning process of people who have no stake in the planning process. As I mentioned earlier, and gave an example of the municipality of Sudbury—which is 3,100 square kilometres—a person living literally 50 kilometres from a proposed subdivision could file an appeal blocking that subdivision, even though they have literally nothing to do with it, and that is one of the issues that the legislation proposed in front of us today seeks to resolve.

But one thing is for sure—one thing is absolutely for sure—no one is going to build houses in the province of Ontario by theoretically collecting rent from rental housing that makes no profit. You cannot build new homes on the backs of not-for-profit housing. It cannot work by its very inherent definition. It will not work, and that is why the plan proposed by this government is so much better than the unrealistic plan being proposed by the official opposition.

I want to rebut something that the member has raised and I’ve heard—inaccurately, unfortunately—in this chamber a few times now. The overall acreage of arable farmland in Ontario is growing each and every single day. If you look at the great northern clay belt—and this is from the Grain Farmers of Ontario—they look at 16 million acres that are coming online up in the Timiskaming–Cochrane region. If you look, since 2008, we’ve seen that the acreage in northern Ontario has increased from 53,000 acres to over 102,000 acres.

There are obviously downfalls and challenges to the rise of climate change across this land, but one of the impacts of climate change in the north is actually that there is more arable land coming online today than there ever has been. There is more farmland available to farm in the province of Ontario than there ever has been at any point in our history. Because if you look at the amount of acreage in places like eastern Ontario and northern Ontario, there is now land that, before, they were not able to grow on; the heat units have increased to such an extent that they’re actually able to grow beans and corns. I was even just reading this morning, they’re looking at growing potatoes in some of these places—

Again, I think one of the pieces that I spoke about in my debate as well was that is an iterative process, right? It builds on the 13 previous red tape—sorry, 11; 11 or 13—reduction packages that have come forward, and each of those have sought to make, perhaps, individually, not enormously consequential changes, but when taken as a whole, a really positive step forward to streamlining that process for home builders and also for providing certainty to municipalities. One of the pieces that was a challenge for some municipalities was uncertainty, and this is about providing that certainty and good governance.

I’m happy to oblige. The member would be probably unsurprised to know that this is supported by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, who says the following: “We support the introduction of use-it-or-lose-it provisions, which would allow a municipality to establish a deadline for lapsing of planning approvals and provide an incentive for developers to build their approved projects.”

This is from the city of Mississauga. On giving planning authority to local municipalities, they say this: “We welcome this change, which will give lower-tier municipalities full planning responsibility on July 1, 2024, if the legislation passes.”

Here’s some thing from McMaster University: “We support exempting universities from Planning Act approvals. It will allow universities to build student housing more quickly and at lower cost, while reducing pressure on area market housing for students.”

And the list goes on, Madam Speaker. It’s quite a list of supportive quotes, and I thank the member for the question.

I am sure that the members on that side of the House are hearing the same stories from their constituents as we are hearing on this side of the House. I just want to—just last week, a single mom came to my office, working full-time but struggling to pay her bills. She got an eviction notice after 18 years in her apartment and doesn’t know where she’s going to live. A 75-year-old man told us he works a minimum-wage job at Walmart, because he has to, to pay the bills. He’s lived at the same address for 30 years—the unit is now up for sale; he’s desperate about where he is going to live.

So my question to the government members is, why is there nothing in this bill or any of the previous housing bills that this government has introduced that is going to deal with stabilizing rents and keeping tenants housed in this province?

Well, I have some good news for the young people who are looking to rent. I was a renter myself. There were historic number of starts last year in new rental starts here in the province of Ontario, in 2023. That’s great news, because again it comes down to that fundamental supply-and-demand imbalance.

If you don’t have the opportunity to have a large amount of supply, in this case, of rental housing coming onto the market, guess what? You’re going to have a lot of people bidding on a limited number of spots. What does that lead to? Price inflation and ultimately high rents. Bringing more supply onto the market is the way of ensuring that we bring those rents down. You can see this in jurisdictions across the world. When you have an oversupply or an increased supply of rental housing, as we’re doing with the policies that this government has brought in place, those solutions will come forward.

Unfortunately, there’s still the consequences of years of Liberal inaction on building rental housing that we’re all paying for.