Thank you to the member from University–Rosedale for her thorough debate on housing. One thing that is certainly getting a lot of attention in the media these days is that housing starts are down under this government. They’re actually back to the same level as 2018.

The government talks about the number of housing bills and red tape reduction bills that it has introduced, and it seems to me that that’s just adding to the paper and the collection of documents that say they’re doing something when, in fact, nothing is getting done. Really, we’ve got a man with no plan in charge here. So could you talk a little bit about what you would do if you were in government to get housing starts actually back up?

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 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.

Next question?

We’re going to move to further debate.

The member from Niagara West started off by referencing some of the young people that had been in the chamber earlier today. In a recent round table—and some of those voices actually came to the committee—they actually were just begging the government to stabilize the rental sector. This is all that they have at their disposal right now. So my question to you, the member from Niagara West, is what does your government have against renters? And why do you not recognize that stabilizing the housing sector is one of the key pieces to actually ensuring that we address the housing crisis in this province?

It is a pleasure, of course, to bring some of the concerns of the people from Waterloo region to Bill 185. We were in committee for a few days. We did clause-by-clause. It was a painful, painful exercise, I will tell you, because even when the ideas are good, the government is not interested in listening. In fact, the government isn’t even interested in listening to their own Housing Affordability Task Force, which actually had a few good ideas as well.

I do want to thank our critic on Bill 185. She brought forward, with the help of our research team, which always punches above their weight, some really thoughtful amendments to this bill. Because we came into the process quite earnestly in thinking that the government might embrace the idea that what they’ve been doing, which has not been working because our housing starts are down—and so there was room for improvement, right?

So here we are. I think this is the 12th or 13th red tape bill that the government has brought forward, ironically, in some cases, creating more red tape in the entire process. And it’s becoming really frustrating because the government is clearly spinning their wheels on housing. They’ve created some chaos, particularly with Bill 23, which preceded these bills, which really destabilized the relationship that this government has with municipalities and, of course, broke trust with the people of this province with the $8.3-billion greenbelt scandal which the RCMP is currently still investigating—the criminal investigation into this government.

So it was with that mindset that we went into this process and quite honestly said, “Well, maybe they’re at a point right now that they’re ready to work collaboratively.”

The housing crisis is a serious issue. Everybody understands that housing is an economic stabilizer for people. It’s hard to go to school, it’s hard to raise a family, it’s hard to get a job without housing. Housing is pretty much it, right?

We also learned at pre-budget committee that housing is also health care. This is why the university hospital just down the way is actually entering a new capital campaign to attach housing to their hospital because, otherwise, people just continue to cycle through the emergency room at great cost—way greater cost than providing a roof and warmth, or cooling in the summer. So, really, innovation down University Avenue—I commend that hospital and those doctors for leading the way. I would like to see the same leadership from the government, quite honestly.

And people are starting to take notice. I’ll just tell you before I get into the substance of the bill that I had my Leading Women, Building Communities awards on the constituency week. I did give this award to the Mount Zion church for their Black history advocacy—just really strong women. It was so refreshing to be in a room filled with good people who really care about their community and are looking for solutions to help and to fill the gap.

A lady came up to me, and she said, “Catherine, I want to give you a Band-Aid.” I was like, “Oh, well, that’s nice. Why are you giving me a Band-Aid?” She goes, “I think you should put it on your forehead.” Quite honestly, I didn’t know where this was going to go, because these conversations, as we all know, can go in very different direction. She says, “No, I think you should put this Band-Aid on your forehead because you must be in so much pain from banging your head against the wall.”

This is what it felt like at committee, quite honestly, because the committee members on finance, they don’t really have the ability to move away from the government’s agenda, which is unfortunate because the government’s agenda is not working on housing. Even some of the very, very good ideas that have come from home builders in Ontario, for instance—who are not against building fourplexes, right? Fourplexes are actually embedded in the government’s own Housing Affordability Task Force. They are part of the solution. Are they the everything? Of course not, Madam Speaker, not at all. But for the government to draw the line in the sand—triplexes are okay; fourplexes, not so much—is ridiculous.

It is also ridiculous to hear the Premier of Ontario stand in his place and talk about eight-storey fourplexes. It is absolutely ridiculous. Or that fourplexes compromise the integrity of the neighbourhood—you know what the Premier is actually defining? It is the very definition of NIMBYism.

After all of those days and months and it feels like years of the whole greenbelt thing, where they were calling us NIMBYists for actually advocating for greater transparency and intensification in the very neighbourhoods that are already established—because the infrastructure is there; the schools are there; the hospitals are there; the community is there. We were advocating for that intensification because it makes sense and because, unlike the very strange sentiments from the member from Niagara West that we aren’t really losing 319 acres a day of farmland in Ontario—I have never heard this story before, I have to say. It was a head-shaker, wasn’t it? But the member from Niagara West basically said, essentially, that climate change is making the north warmer, so now we can have more farmland up there. So he’s no longer a climate change denier; he’s a climate change promoter.

Oh, the north. I don’t know if you’ve spent some time up there. Hydroponics? Absolutely. There’s some innovation happening on farming. It’s beautiful; it’s great to see. But this is a common theme that a lot of Conservatives espouse, that there’s this land exchange: “We’ll pave over those wetlands over there, but we’ll create another one over here.” It is a ridiculous concept.

I have to say, the member from Niagara West, that is astounding. I think it’s worth noting because it’s the first time that this new narrative around climate change has actually been introduced in the House. It’s something to be watched because I think that if we’ve learned anything after six painful years of this government—they can spin anything, and then they can use your tax dollars at home to actually promote their agenda.

The Auditor General has already confirmed 75% of those “It’s All Happening Here” would be deemed partisan advertising under the original rules that the Liberals agreed to bring in and then changed for their own political interest.

Who can forget that one commercial? Do you remember the commercial when the Liberals were really on the ropes? I want to say 2015 and 2016, whatever. It’s this lady who’s jumping over this valley to get to her pension. We paid for those commercials, and of course, there was a fictional pension plan, quite honestly—the concept. I remember knocking on a door—and this is why it’s so important. This is why truthful advertising, particularly from a government to the citizens we are elected to serve—that trust can be broken very quickly. When I knocked on the door, this elderly lady who had never worked says, “No, I want my pension.” Yes, she believed the commercial is what I’m saying to you. To add insult to injury, her tax dollars went to pay for that commercial.

We got to some of that through the public accounts committee. Public accounts wasn’t as frustrating, I think, as SCOFEA was because the government could not provide really any rationale for what they were doing, especially when they brought in this new, suddenly urgent amendment on Bill 185 to allow airports, large manufacturers and cities now to have exclusive—they’re going to be able to go to the land tribunal’s planning committee, but citizens and people who care about the environment are not. Now, you’re not even hiding it anymore, that the environment is not your priority, right? When you’re intentionally excluding these voices about their own community—this is a fundamental undemocratic move that the government is making, to exclude the voices of Ontarians in their own communities.

So, to put it mildly, it was a tough sort of week in SCOFEA, because we care deeply about our communities. Environmental change and climate change is real, and it is having an impact on how we should be planning more sustainable communities and housing within those communities, full stop.

There was some good news, though, last week—just to mix it up a little bit here—Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 charges. It was a beautiful, beautiful moment, quite honestly. It kind of restored hope a little bit more in the justice system—not in Ontario’s justice system, of course, because we have some long-standing issues in that regard, but that was a good moment.

Now, our critic talked about some of the amendments that were brought forward. One was to the City of Toronto Act to protect and compensate tenants who are being renovicted or demovicted. Is this government concerned about those people? Not at all. They totally shut that conversation down, not interested in displaced seniors from their precarious housing. The fact that the government introduced this amendment near the end there—which was very concerning, actually, because we have seen how this government establishes legislation: It’s who has access, who’s got the money, who goes to the fundraiser, who goes to the party. This is a direct ask of these communities.

Now, I understand that the government has looked at airports a little bit differently, because they did award an MZO to a skyscraper close to an airport, which we can all agree is not a good idea, right?

I really enjoy this debate on Bill 185. I’d like to ask the member from Essex a question. I know that we’ve had lots of support from across the province from different sectors, different municipalities. AMO is a big supporter. Could you quote some of the other supporters that you know of, please?

It was a flight path.

It was a flight path; I’m sorry. It was a flight path, yes.

Sometimes “MZOs R Us” doesn’t really work for the community or for the sector, but this is definitely—somebody got lobbied real hard, Madam Speaker, real hard, and they got what they wanted. They got their direct ask into Bill 185. And I’m going to tell you, this does not instill trust in how the government is looking at the housing crisis or trying to address some of the proposals.

I’m going to read from Bonnefield Financial, Tom Eisenhauer. This pretty much sums up how I feel about Bill 185—tried to give it a good show at SCOFEA, but that didn’t happen.

He says, “Ontario’s ... government introduced Bill 185—patronizingly named the ‘Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act.’ Buried within the bill are some legislative changes that will accelerate the loss of wetlands, environmentally sensitive areas and especially farmland in Ontario.”

I guess unless you’re in the Far North and you now find yourself in a warmer climate and therefore start pulling those stones out of the stone.

“Of all the threats to our future food security, the loss of our prime farmland is the most severe. And of all the causes of farmland loss (soil degradation, unsustainable farming practices, climate change, erosion, decertification), irresponsible urban sprawl is by far the leading cause. Based on StatsCan data, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture calculates that between 2016 and 2021 Ontario lost 319 acres of farmland a day ... a day! That equates to the loss of almost 5% of the province’s entire farmland area in just five years. The vast majority of this loss was to urban development.”

So, this is on your watch, right? And it does have a cost. It does.

“Bill 185 will effectively neuter settlement area boundaries which limit urban sprawl by restricting the size of municipalities. Developer landowners will now be able to appeal any development rulings that restrict their ability to build on farmland, wetland or environmentally sensitive areas.”

This is an acceleration of sprawl. It is intentional, it is happening in real time and it has been made worse since this government has come into power in Ontario.

The bill will also remove the Ontario Land Tribunal’s ability to review some decisions around municipal decisions, but then, you know what? This got changed, further limiting the guardrails that prevent urban sprawl.

“The provisions of Bill 185 run counter to the advice the ... government commissioned from former federal Conservative ... leader Lisa Raitt”—I like Lisa Raitt—“who recommended that stronger protections for farmland and natural areas be an essential component of any measures that encourage more and better housing.” This is a smart recommendation by a former federal Conservative who knows the file very well, Madam Speaker.

“Ontario needs more housing urgently, but not at the expense of future generations’ food security and the environment.” It’s like we didn’t even experience the pandemic together. I mean, we did have different experiences, make no doubt about it, but one of the recommendations from the Senate of Canada is that we become more food-secure. We should not be so dependent on other jurisdictions. We have some of the best farmland in Ontario. We have some of the best farmers. And the Ontario Federation of Agriculture has been very clear in their opposition to Bill 185. This is a genuine concern that they have around future generations of farms.

“The focus of new housing should be intensification of the ‘missing middle’ in existing urban areas as recommended by a long list of experts and task forces and as requested by municipalities like Toronto, Hamilton and Ottawa.” It’s interesting that Bill 185 is silent on that, actually.

“Bill 185 will be a disaster for farmland in Ontario—a far greater threat than the proposed development of parts of the greenbelt,” and so that is why Bill 185 matters so much. I think a lot of us—our eyes were opened on how vulnerable those arable greenbelt lands were, Madam Speaker. But Bill 185 accelerates that proposed sprawl in an incredibly irresponsible manner.

He goes on to say, “To paraphrase the great Chrissie Hynde’s ‘Ohio’ lyric”—this is good—“Ontario farmland is being paved down the middle by a government that has no pride.”

So you’re willing to risk everything with Bill 185. And also, it’s not going to solve the housing crisis. I mean, sometimes, you work backwards from a problem, right? You have to acknowledge the problem.

You refuse to acknowledge that renters in this province have almost been attacked by this government with the removal of rent control in 2018. The issue of affordability is something that this government refuses to address. I mean, you can say that there are this many purpose-built rentals, but if you can’t afford them, they don’t really exist, Madam Speaker, right? They don’t. And right now, the financialization of some of those condos should be under review of your government. We know how money is laundered in Ontario and this happens through these condo developments as well.

Waterloo region has had an open letter against Bill 185 now for a number of weeks. It has partly been connected to, of course, the expropriation of 770 acres of prime farmland in Wilmot, a planning practice that is surprising. But the provincial government, to be clear, has asked these municipalities to find large, industrial land banking, and I know the region of Waterloo doesn’t have the money to buy out these farmers, so the money is going to come from somewhere. It looks like it’s going to be coming from the Ontario government, Madam Speaker.

So, at the end of the day, we have a piece of legislation which, once again, should never be called “building new homes.” It’s really just “here’s an open door for developers” and you’ve formalized it. You basically hung the little sign outside the Legislature and said, “Yes—open for business for developers and land speculators,” and you’ve committed to building property and housing that doubles down on a very unsustainable housing plan, which will actually end up costing all of us down the road.

I’ll leave it at this, from the open letter from Waterloo region:

“Environmental protections are not just ‘red tape.’ We depend on our farmland, our fresh water, and on the other ecological services provided by our unbuilt landscapes. Furthermore, the regional planning processes that have been carefully designed over decades should not be seen as barriers to building much-needed homes. Instead, our regional government plays a vital role,” and they should not be undermined in this process.

Thank you to the member from Waterloo for her remarks this afternoon. She mentioned six painful years, Speaker. Well, if I had their poll numbers, it would be six painful years, colleagues.

As we heard at committee, the Ontario home builders came to committee and presented, and so did OREA and other builders in the province of Ontario. I asked around, obviously, increasing costs of interest rates, costs of labour, construction materials, but obviously also as well, Speaker, the carbon tax. So I asked the home builders if the federal Liberal carbon tax and its increasing year over year is increasing the cost of housing in Ontario. And, Speaker, they said yes. They confirmed that it is causing costs—costs of building materials and labour—to go up.

Does the member from Waterloo agree that the federal Liberal carbon tax is increasing the cost of housing? And will the member from Waterloo call her federal member and ask her to scrap this tax?

You know, the member from Perth–Wellington—I’m not sure if he understands how insulting it is, when people ask serious questions that are impacting the people of this province, around child care, around autism or around special education, and then the government comes back with “carbon tax.” It levels a new level of disrespect, I think, to the bigger problems.

What I will say to the member from Perth–Wellington is the reason we have a federal carbon tax is because your government dismissed the cap-and-trade program, and this is the backstop. The Supreme Court of Canada, as you all know, has said that the federal government has the right to address climate change in this manner. But we would not have that carbon tax if your Premier—because he’s not my Premier—hadn’t cut the cap-and-trade. That’s right.

This is the frustration, Madam Speaker. We have a carbon tax in Ontario because of this government, because they failed around the cap-and-trade piece. But they have their own made-in-Ontario industrial compliance fee, which is a carbon tax, which you don’t talk about in this House. But we are going to talk about it, because it needs transparency. That’s what we want from that.