Yes, and the tool benefits us and benefits the developers. But the poor person who’s buying the house or renting the house, well, they’re out of luck—and I will lose the front word on the beginning of that sentence.

That’s what this looks like to me. It sounds good. It sounds great—and I’m sure cities are excited about it, because they will get an uplift, because they will get more property taxes when, instead of being 10 storeys, it goes 30 storeys. They will be able to up their tax base over 10 or 15 years, we’ll give it—that’s not going to help the people who can’t pay their bills right now. I thought the most important thing before us was the people who can’t pay the bills and afford life right now. That’s why it makes this bill hard to support.

Schedule 1? Excellent, A+. Schedule 2? Not so good, D-.

My suggestion: Take out schedule 2. Pay for the infrastructure like we always have for GO, and it will make life affordable for everyday Ontarians who are connected by GO Transit.

GO Transit is provincial infrastructure. It should be paid for by the province, not by the guy renting the house or the woman buying a condo. That’s my point. I think that’s fair. I think you’re concerned about affordability too, and this part of the bill is going to make it—well, maybe not for your community, but for the communities around Toronto, it’s going to make it more expensive.

Second reading debate deemed adjourned.

It’s a pleasure today to rise to speak to Bill 131. I do want to congratulate the member from Oshawa, because it was such a good metaphor: “shouting into the abyss.” I don’t think I will ever forget that. I haven’t heard that before; I probably should have. Let’s hope I’m not doing that right now.

Here’s the thing: Schedule 1? Yes, it makes sense. Good idea; I can support it. Schedule 2? It’s kind of hard to understand why we’re collecting development charges for provincial infrastructure. GO trains, GO Transit is provincial. I don’t know when we started collecting DCs for stuff that we fund here as a government. That’s another issue. So that’s one issue with schedule 2.

The second one is collecting development charges for infrastructure that we pay for. The simplest way is to just build the station, pay the money, like we do with the other stations. So something has changed.

Number two: development charges. I have this vague recollection—I don’t know if anybody can help me. In Bill 23, we eliminated development charges because we said, “You know what? This is making it hard for people these days. It’s making it harder for them to buy a house. It’s making it harder for them to rent. We can’t get stuff built, so we’ve got to eliminate DCs.” Now we’re putting them back on. At a time when people are just struggling to pay the bills, we’re making housing more expensive by adding DCs. I don’t understand. I think they call it cognitive dissonance. It doesn’t make sense. They don’t add up.

In the first place, to compare the DCs, is that with Bill 23, if we thought the DCs were actually going to be saved on the cost—if anybody here thought that was actually going to happen and it was going to make things more affordable, no, it wasn’t. I know builders. We all know builders. The DCs will go down, but it’s not going to change the price of the house. They’re just going to gobble that up. They’ve got space. That’s what’s going to happen. We all know that. Bill 23 actually removing those DCs was more about doing something for the development community and the people who were building the houses than the people who were owning the houses or renting the houses.

Then you would say, “Okay, now that we’re collecting DCs to build this provincial infrastructure, who is it benefiting?” Developers again, right? If they get a station built below the thing, they can go up 30 storeys. Who’s going to make the money? Developers. I’m not against people making money, but right now, we’ve got a problem with people not having enough money to be able to afford living.

The other piece is you won’t allow cities to collect DCs for things like, oh, fire stations, community centres, pools, kids’ playgrounds, but you will let them collect money for something that we pay for here. It just doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t sound like this is a decision that’s benefiting everyday Ontarians. It makes it hard to support.

I’m not going to support DCs going on the price of rental housing or the price of a house in my community—it’s not going to happen in my community, because I don’t have GO Transit, but in other communities in Ontario—because that’s going to make it harder for people. We’re actually asking cities to collect money for stuff that we already pay for. It’s just that we don’t seem to want to pay for it anymore.