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.

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.