My question is for the member from Humber River–Black Creek. I know we heard often at committee from a variety of stakeholders, and we heard from the Ontario home builders and the greater Ottawa home builders. They said the number one concern they had was increasing costs, was the high interest rates of the federal Liberal government and also the high cost of the carbon tax increasing the cost of building materials and homes.

I know the member has said he has voted against it in this place, and I appreciate he is willing to vote against the carbon tax. But will he call his federal NDP colleagues, who are supporting Justin Trudeau, and ask him to scrap this tax?

I think you make good decisions when you base it on data. What I would like to say is that I don’t think it’s all developers, because we had a lot of delegations in one of the earlier bills and they support density. This was an Ottawa home builder; our member over there would get to know these home builders. It’s not all home builders that support this bill.

I think if we really want to get home building done, we need to talk to all developers and all home builders, and leaving out stakeholder groups like environmentalists is nearsighted. I worry about some of the sensitive areas and if we don’t have expertise from biologists, hydrogeologists etc. and we don’t even allow them to speak, I think we will go very far in doing harm by not including many perspectives on what good planning actually means.

We know we have a scarcity of building supplies. If you talk to anyone, cement is the number one most expensive thing that we can use right now. So these gentle density houses in the middle of town, we can use wood and sustainable resources and reduce our cement dependence.