I was saying neither one nor the other. What I was saying is that there is a two-year wait, and that the reason there is such a long wait is because the Conservative government removed many of the people who were there and then took years and years to appoint new adjudicators.

What the Ombudsman’s report says clearly is that it takes time for adjudicators to be trained, and that is part of why there are so many delays in getting hearings at the Landlord and Tenant Board.

What we have is many, many people coming into our region who are hoping to find a place to live, who are hoping to find work, but often they are coming with nothing, with no supports at all, so it is very difficult.

I have some optimism toward the government’s plan—which is not yet a part of this bill—to support housing for our homeless population. I do have some optimism there, but I don’t see anything in this bill itself that contributes to solving that problem.

I would say that if we’re going to talk about examinations, I would send you both back to school, but hey. Because frankly, to simply parrot “supply and demand” without any understanding of the rest of the market is to show a lack of understanding of what people are actually dealing with.

Interjection.

I noticed that the bill did correct some drafting errors—reminding us, frankly, of Bill 23’s draconian elimination of planning appeal rights for conservation authorities and upper-tier municipalities, a reminder also of the broken promises about the greenbelt and certainly the appearance of widespread corruption in regard to the greenbelt—

The questions about who is benefiting certainly haven’t come from me alone. Those questions are widespread in the media and amongst people throughout the province who are very, very concerned at how easy it is to say one thing one day, and the next day say something completely different and do something completely different.

In terms of the greenbelt, in order to put luxury homes on conservation land—it certainly doesn’t make sense. And then, of course, this idea of taking even more farmland and subdividing it—well, we know that the farming community has organized itself and spoken against this, and it sounds like the government may be listening. I hope that’s the case, because we need that farmland. We need that food.

I am coming to the end of what I wanted to talk about. Again, I think that we have such an incredible problem with people being kicked out, with rents made completely unaffordable, and there is so little here to help. The problems keep getting worse and worse and worse, and then even when solutions are offered, there’s no support for those solutions.

Honestly, it boggles my mind that there is nothing there to support Suomi Koti or Giiwa on Court. Suomi Koti could even be coming out of a seniors’ fund for housing. Do we not have any funding available to support more seniors’ housing? Supportive housing? It doesn’t have to be fully staffed with PSWs. It might have one PSW. There’s a whole range of different levels that seniors are looking for when they can no longer—and no longer want to—manage a home and everything that goes with a home. What is the plan for that? Because I can tell you again, in my region—seven-year waiting lists. Well, in my mother’s case, she probably will be dead by then, I imagine.

So there are very, very clear problems that are not addressed in the bill. And there is so much more that the government could be doing to support housing so that everybody can afford to get into the market to get a place, to rent a place, to keep a roof over their heads.

Again, you point out that this is the fourth bill, and yet there’s no help for renters and there’s no help for seniors, for example. So I hope that the government will do more.

Well, so many things have come up, it’s hard to know where to start. I’ve heard from the member from Essex that things are grand in the landlord-tenant tribunals, but that’s of course in direct contrast to the Ombudsman’s report, which says, “The Ombudsman received more than 4,000 complaints from people on both sides of the landlord-tenant relationship. Many described the financial and mental harm they suffered while ‘trapped in the queue,’ waiting for their applications to be heard.”

There’s quite a lot here: “a shortage of qualified adjudicators ... compounded by a lengthy, cumbersome appointment and training process”.

I’d like to say, the problems at the Landlord and Tenant Board fall squarely on the shoulders of this government, because when they came to power in 2018, they decided not to renew any contracts. They had to put their own stamp and their own people in regardless of the fact that they were not trained, and so they left those positions empty for years. We are finally seeing some of those adjudicating positions filled, but it takes a long time to actually acquire the insight to be a good adjudicator. So instead, what we’re seeing is that—everything is online now. Even though, on paper, it might still say, yes, you can get in-person hearing, you can’t.

I know of a case in Thunder Bay where, with the support of, actually, one of the legal clinics—so this person wasn’t necessarily on their own. But the technology failed. Well, the adjudicator decided that was that. That was the end of the hearing. That person is out of luck. They’ve been waiting for years and years to have the opportunity to have their hearing before the Landlord and Tenant Board, and because of the technology and the refusal to have any in-person hearings, it was a bust. That person is out of luck. That is not unusual, and frankly, I’m surprised that the member from Essex was really singing the praises of how things were going for people, both small landowners and also tenants. It’s harming both. I’ve certainly gotten letters from both tenants and landlords saying that they are in crisis because they’re waiting eight months to 12 months to longer to get a hearing.

But I will go back to my original plan here, because there are a few things in the bill that I like. I do like that there’s some movement towards mandating air conditioning. I think it could be stronger. I think that you need to set an upper limit on temperature, and I think you’ve got to get rid of all the wiggle room for getting out of it.

Now, I see that there are guidelines being set for long-term care, with a maximum of 25 degrees Celsius, but really, that needs to apply to tenants everywhere, whether in free-standing apartment buildings, units within people’s homes or in seniors’ residences. For example, my mother lives in a retirement home owned by Revera. Her unit has been over 30 degrees Celsius for weeks. There’s air conditioning there, but it’s not the right date to turn it on, apparently. It was, “So sad, you’re out of luck. Go buy a fan.”

People pay a great deal of money to live in those seniors’ residences. I would like to see it mandated that the air conditioning be turned on the moment it is above 25 degrees in any single unit in the building.

Fines for violations: Well, it’s interesting to see the fines increased, but I would love to do a freedom-of-information inquiry to see how many times landlords have actually had a fine imposed on them for evicting somebody in order to move themselves or a member of their family into the unit, because the fines have not stopped illegal renovictions—far from it.

Part of this is that Bill 97 leaves the entire burden on renters to protest and to bring charges, and frankly, they don’t have the means to do that. In fact, once they’ve been evicted, they have the overwhelming problem of finding a new place to live in an extremely tight market where there is little to no affordable housing available. So they don’t exactly have time on their hands to launch a legal battle with a landlord outside the tribunal system. Of course, we know within the tribunal system, they’re going to be waiting for over half a year at least, so where do they go in the meantime?

The need for meaningful rent control: In 2018, the government basically gave landlords a get-out-of-jail-free card by not including buildings from that period under rent control, so we’re seeing increases of up to 57%. It’s absurd. It’s really hard to fathom that that makes sense in anybody’s world.

Then I looked at something else in here, this mysterious office, the Provincial Land and Development Facilitator, that addresses undisclosed projects requiring undisclosed payments to provide for other undisclosed things. There will be four deputy facilitators added to this office at a cost of just shy of $1 million. That’s $234,000 a year. That’s a lot of money to work in an office that very few people know anything about. The minister will also have new powers over this office of undisclosed purpose, something I think the people of Ontario would love to learn more about. Unfortunately, there is no information about that.

Bill 97, once again, relies almost entirely on deregulation and tax cuts to incentivize the for-profit private market to deliver 1.5 million homes over a decade. This narrow-minded approach is evidently failing, with the recent budget revealing that projected housing starts in Ontario are actually going down instead of up. In contrast, the NDP has called for a strong public sector role to deliver new affordable and non-market housing that the for-profit private sector can’t or won’t deliver. There is no provision in Bill 97 to facilitate new non-market housing.

We know that the Liberals had 15 years to help. By the way, it was preceding that that we had wonderful development of co-op housing. We have two really solid co-op housing developments in Thunder Bay. They continue to have affordable rent. They also have rent-geared-to-income, but even for the people who are not getting a subsidized rent, it’s affordable. It’s a very nice place to live and it’s been a very successful model.

The Liberals, yes, had 15 years after that to do something; they chose not to. For 14 of 15 years in power—supported by the Conservatives, I might add—the Liberal rent control policy was the same as the Harris PC rent control policy before it, shifting enormous power to private landlords and away from tenants, while failing to deliver new purpose-built rental housing.

I have been trying since August, really, to deliver—I have two fantastic housing projects in Thunder Bay that would provide 104 new affordable units. One of them, called Suomi Koti, is for seniors. I actually had the pleasure of touring Suomi Koti when the leader of the official opposition was in Thunder Bay. It’s a 30-year-old facility. You would never know it was 30 years old. It’s been kept immaculately. People love living there. You can even have your own garden. It’s a beautiful, beautiful space. All of this was put together by a volunteer board. Now, for 30 years, they have intended to build a second building. There is a seven-year wait-list to get into Suomi Koti, as there is to get into any of the reasonably priced seniors’ residences. So they’ve been trying. They have done all kinds of things to raise money. They’ve used their own money to hire accountants, to get the designs done. Everything has been done, but unfortunately there is no support available from this government to support what I’m going to call non-market housing. So 20% of that building would be rent-geared-to-income, but the other 80% would be still below commercial rental rates. It’s a very desirable place to live, but there’s no support for this middle-level housing, and if people were able to move into this space—for example, my mother looked at this—it’s impossible. This would have been affordable. Instead, she, like many other people, are using up their life savings, hoping they don’t live too long and run out of money.

Another housing project, also a beautiful one, sponsored by a Biigtigong Nishnaabeg First Nation, is called Giwaa on Court. It involves actually using a historical building, so it would be recovering, repurposing a historical building in the middle of downtown Port Arthur. It’s the old post office. Their plan, again, is affordable housing, 20% rent-geared-to-income, the remaining below commercial, at 80% of commercial rates.

Both of these projects have been ready to go. To me, they’re a gift on a platter to the Conservative government to show that they’re prepared to support mid-level housing, non-profit housing, but there is nothing there. They may in a pinch qualify. I do want to acknowledge that the government has given my region a considerable amount of money to alleviate the homelessness crisis. Okay, but that is a very specific kind of housing, and whether either of these projects will qualify under the terms of that agreement, I don’t know. They don’t know either at this point. When we talk about all of this housing that you’re going to build, and we have two projects that have been ready to go, shovel-ready for months, and there’s no support—and they don’t need a lot of support, but they need enough support in order to qualify for CMHC grants—so, nothing, nada.

Now, I like to think about what is actually going to bring rents down, and I really want to question this whole thing about supply and demand. Supply and demand is really a simplistic, narrow doctrine that we can hear continually about from the government side of the House, and frankly—and I’ve heard this from the Minister of Housing. I know the minister is a smart person, so I’m pretty confident that he knows full well that the vast majority of supply is actually in very few hands and they will control the prices no matter how much unmet demand there is. This doctrine also masks the role of housing speculation and housing financialization that continues to drive up the cost of housing beyond the reach of ordinary Canadians.

Imagine this: If we actually had enough housing that was affordable, so there’s more housing available, guess what? We’re going to see the costs come down, but they’re not going to come down when the supply is at this upper, upper level that so many people can’t afford. And frankly, it’s controlled by far too few people, and then there is also all the speculation that goes into it.

I’m even seeing this in small communities. Where mines are going in, I’m seeing people going in and buying up all the potential rental housing. It’s going to be owned by one person and that person is going to set the rates in that community. That is not that much different from what is happening in other places.

I think it’s time that this myth of supply and demand without context, without depth—

Interjections.

It’s interesting; I’ve already received emails about this bill, and I’d like to read a piece:

“As my MPP, I urge you to demand that these proposals to gut the sustainable policies of the growth plan and provincial policy statement be dropped. Instead, the provincial government should ensure that the elected municipal councils in Ontario’s regions and cities be respected and allowed to plan for livable, walkable and affordable communities instead of being forced to destroy farms and forests to create low-density, car-dependent, expensive and polluting sprawl.”

Now, you’ve already spoken to a number of those issues, but I wonder if you could speak to concerns about the loss of authority of municipal councils.

I appreciate your comments very much, and I’m wondering whether you see an advantage to perhaps having a public education campaign. For example, there could be a hotline; there could be a mail-out that goes to all tenants that spells out the rules and their rights because, for the most part, they don’t know what their rights are. I wonder if you could perhaps make a recommendation to the government about how to further support tenants.

Bill 97 once again relies almost entirely on deregulation and tax cuts to incentivize the for-profit private market to deliver 1.5 million homes over a decade. Yet the recent Conservative budget reveals that project housing starts in Ontario are going down, not up.

The minister spoke about ensuring that there are enough homes for everyone in Thunder Bay, and yet, in Thunder Bay, we have two shovel-ready projects that would immediately add 105 new units of housing in our region while also making another 60 properties available for purchase.

Can the minister tell me why there is nothing in this bill to help the not-for-profit housing? This is housing that is ready to be built right now, and it’s blocked because this government is doing nothing to support middle-level housing anywhere in Ontario. So I’d like to know why that is nowhere in this bill.