Good morning, everyone. I just wanted to introduce a powerful page from beautiful Beaches–East York, Hosanna Ledetu. His mother works here as well in our precinct properties. So welcome to the chamber and thanks for all you do, Kalkidan.

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.