The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Which Party's Housing Promises Will Get Your Vote?

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

It's almost time to vote and Ontarians consistently rank housing as a top issue. Which party has the best housing platform? We're joined by three candidates who acted as housing critics in the last legislature: Jessica Bell (NDP), Dr. Adil Shamji (Liberal), and Aislinn Clancy Green). See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Renew your 2.0 TVO with more thought-provoking documentaries, insightful current affairs coverage, and fun programs and learning experiences for kids. Regular contributions from people like you help us make a difference in the lives of Ontarians of all ages. Visit tvo.me slash 2025 donate to renew your support or make a first-time donation and continue to discover your 2.0 TVO. One of the top concerns for voters is housing. From the skyrocketing costs of buying a home to the homelessness crisis, just how do the parties plan to tackle Ontario's housing shortage? Let's ask. Jessica Bell, NDP candidate for University Rosedale, Dr. Adil Shamji, Liberal candidate for Don Valley East, and Ashlyn Clancy, Green Party candidate

for Kitchener Centre. Welcome to all three of you in our studios. To our viewers and listeners, you probably noticed that we don't have representation from the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. We invited Paul Calandra, who was housing minister at the time of dissolution. He did not make himself available.

And the PC campaign did not offer any replacement. They did, however, provide us with an email statement, which reads in part, we need to build homes fast and get shovels in the ground. We need affordable homes, attainable homes, modular homes, and more density around transit. We need to cut through the red tape to speed up approvals and give municipalities the tools to build. affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable

affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable

affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable

affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable affordable housing, affordable municipalities to support housing enabling infrastructure, including 1.2 billion for municipalities that meet or exceed their housing targets. Ontario deserves a government that will work with municipal leaders to build more homes and protect our families. That is exactly what the Ontario PCs will deliver. All right, with that I should ask, should we get some thoughts on that in terms of their statement? I'll start with Adil and go from there. Absolutely. I mean, everybody deserves a place to call home, but under Doug Ford, that has become

a pipe dream and something more difficult than ever before to achieve. I mean, if we think about it, the number of people who are homeless today is 10 times what it was in 2018. Housing prices have escalated at a rate two times the rate of inflation and rent has gone up by nearly 50%. So, you know, they can say all of the things that they'd like to do or that Ontarians need, but they have completely been an abject failure on delivering any of those things. All right, Jessica. The Conservatives have had seven years to fix the housing crisis.

And like Adil said, we are seeing very clearly that it's not working. We have encampments in towns and cities across Ontario. We have rent at record highs. We have seniors in our riding who have been evicted into homelessness. We have people, you know, high-income workers who are moving to other provinces because they've given up on the dream of owning a home in Ontario. And we're not seeing the government

seriously invest in affordable housing. In fact, they're not investing in affordable housing. And everyone who's walked by an encampment knows that full well. Alright, Ashleigh. Yeah, affordability is key right now, and increasingly that's a housing cost that people can't afford. So people paying for a roof and food is becoming more challenging. Eighty-one thousand people are homeless.

And when it comes to building things, I don't think that that's the case. They don't have a great record. Housing starts are down and for single-family dwellings we're at the lowest we've been in 55 years. So we need to be bold and we need all kinds of solutions and we need to get back in the business of building housing and cut the red tape. This government avoided making fourplexes as of right across the province, which would have been one small step to making sure we can have more units where we already have

the infrastructure. They have doubled down on sprawl development, which we know is the most expensive kind of housing and will take the longest to build. So we need to actually take this seriously, follow through on the recommendations that they have ignored from their own report. All right. Otto, your party has made several pledges about the land transfer tax. Why is this tax significant and what would you change about it?

One of the things is if you want to make homes cheaper to live in, you have to make homes cheaper to buy and cheaper to live in, you have to make homes cheaper to buy and cheaper to build. One of the unnecessary punitive and frankly discriminatory taxes that exist right now are the land transfer taxes. And by targeting them in the right way, by eliminating land transfer taxes for first-time home buyers that are struggling to get into a home, for non-profits that know their communities well and are best positioned to develop affordable and deeply affordable housing, and for seniors who live in homes but are looking to downsize. Eliminating land transfer taxes is an excellent way of making it cheaper for people to get

into homes and to move into the right homes for themselves. It's one of many ways in which we are seeking to eliminate these discriminatory and punitive taxes. It's so peculiar that Paul Klandra, Doug Ford, and the Conservatives have so much difficulty in eliminating taxes. That is supposedly what Conservatives are supposed to do. Yet they won't eliminate development charges.

They won't eliminate community benefit charges. They won't eliminate development charges, they won't eliminate community benefit charges, they won't eliminate land transfer taxes. These are things that Ontario's Liberals are ready to do because we are ready and serious to make housing affordable and accessible for all Ontarians. All right, we heard development charges, so I'm going to pick up on that. Ashlyn, does the current regime need to change when it comes to development charges? Yeah, I think we've heard loud and clear from AMO that the way we fund municipalities isn't working anymore and it's disproportionately impacting people trying to get into housing.

We need to incentivize people to build kind of starter homes and cut a lot of the red tape that is involved with getting things built within the countryside line. But we need to make sure it's uniform. So we have a focus on creating generational fairness. When I knock on doors, folks who own their own home are often more optimistic and feel like they have enough to pay for a roof and food. But we do need to get rid of those fees. And our first-time homebuyer plan will get rid of the land transfer tax but also development charges on those starter homes which would

save first time homebuyers $150,000. But we have an affordable community fund to make sure that municipalities aren't again shouldering the burden and then we have property taxes in the double digits. Alright Jessica, I'll get you to pick up on that. The NDP is very much in support of bringing in tax fairness into the housing sector, which will include eliminating the land transfer tax for first-time home buyers and also increasing the land transfer tax on investors that are buying their third, fourth, twelfth home. And the whole reason behind that is because we need to increase home ownership rates,

especially for first-time home buyers. By levelling the playing field, we get to do that. All right, I was gonna pick up. We talked about home ownership. I wanna talk about rent. Yes. And I'm gonna come to you, Ashlyn, first. Ontario's current rules say that only units lived in

before 2018 are covered by rent control. Would you change that? Of course, we bring back rent control and vacant CD control. It's been tried many places many times and has not proven helpful. I had a family friend move out of their home because their rent increased by 30 percent in a month and they had to move their whole family out of an apartment to find something new. You know it people need to know how

to budget their money and unaffordability is just a pipe dream for so many. We see in my riding for example that for every affordable unit we build, we lose 39 in the private sector. So we need to do more to keep people housed and protect affordability, not just bringing back rent control and making city control, but making those rent evictions and above guideline increases.

Put a pause on that, because people are getting squeezed out of the rental, and we see, again, 81,000 people facing homelessness. And that's unacceptable when you pay your rent. All right, well let's get our thoughts on the Liberal Party when we talk about rent control. Well, without a doubt we need to reintroduce rent control for buildings that have been constructed after 2018. But what I want to say is that rent control as a consumer protection and affordability

measure just goes part of the way. For example, here in Ontario our vacancy rate for rental apartments is 1.7%. That is a historic low. And what we need to do in addition to bringing in fair rent control, for example, on the models that have been employed in Oregon, Manitoba, California, we need to do that, but we also need to make sure that we spur the development of rental housing so that we can get that vacancy rate between three, five percent.

What I'd like to see is a situation in which landlords and owners of rental apartments are fighting to secure tenants. That is a great way to bring down the cost of rentals, but also make sure that bad actors that use things like rent evictions or above guideline increases or don't maintain the units properly, they will be forced to because otherwise they won't be in a position to get good quality renters into their apartments. So it's about much more than but not only rent control. Alright, Jessica. Yeah, these are really good points.

The Ontario NDP is in support of bringing in real rent control, strong rent control on all homes, doesn't matter when they're built, and to also bring in a system of vacancy control. So there is a cap on how much the rent can be raised between tenancies. And when we do that, we are giving the 1.7 million households who rent in Ontario stability.

It means they are less likely to be illegally evicted because a landlord wants to kick them out and increase the rent by having a new tenant come in and it means the cost of their rent is stabilised. They can budget, they can plan, they're more likely to be able to pay the bills and pay food. In addition to rent control it is essential that we build more housing. There's no question we have a housing supply shortage in Ontario, especially when it comes to building affordable housing and rental. We in our housing platform have a commitment to bring government back into the business of building affordable housing for low

income and middle-income families and partnering with municipalities and co-ops and nonprofit developers to do that. We are also very much in support of easing zoning rules to fast track the construction of needed housing in towns and cities that people want to live in. We're talking higher density buildings along transit routes and near transit stations. We're talking four plexes in towns and cities across Ontario. So people have more options, not just for renting, but also for purchasing their first home.

All right, we will pick up on affordable and zoning. But I do want to talk about one question to you in regards to the tenant board, landlord-tenant board. We commonly hear about disputes between landlords and tenants. What needs to happen to the board itself? Well, what we need to do if we want to make renting fair and accessible to everyone in the province, we need to do things like bring in rent control. We need to spur the construction of more rental units.

We need to have a situation in place like Ontario Liberals have promised a rental emergency support fund or a rent bank. Those things are important. situation place like a you know, Ontario Liberals have promised a rental emergency support fund or a rent bank those things are important but as I mentioned before a really important thing is we need to make we need to eliminate bad actors from the system and that Means and those can happen on both sides on both the landlord and the tenant side and having a strong and robust landlord and tenant board is Critical to doing that so a number of the things that we need to do, for example, move away from exclusively online hearings. They've got to be online and in person as well with a reformed pathway for mediation to take place

before the landlord and tenant board, before landlord and tenant board hearings take place. And then what Ontario Liberals have committed to is adequately funding the LTB and ensuring that there are enough experienced adjudicators so that we can deliver a two month guarantee. What I heard in my constituency office from landlords and tenants is there are bad actors who are abusing existing laws.

And the fact that they, in many cases, people are waiting one or even two years in order to be able to access justice. That is a unique phenomenon distinct to the Ford government. Under their watch we have seen the backlogging cases at the LTP balloon massively nearly quadruple to 53,000 cases. That is an indictment on Paul Kalandra and Doug Ford, Ontario's liberals, by bringing in hybrid hearings, in-person hearings, pre-trial mediation and adjudication, more mediators.

And then, of course, adequately funding it will eliminate that backlog and deliver that two-month service guarantee. All right, I want to move away from renting. I want to talk about building homes. Ashlyn, I'm coming to you because the Green Party has pledged to build two million homes in a decade. Ambitious, some would say.

How are you planning on meeting that? Well, unlike the Ford government that's going to court right now or is being investigated by the RCMP for paving over the Green Belt, wetlands, prime farmland, we have made a commitment to a food belt and not paving over the places that feed us and the places that we love. But we should be building within countryside line close to infrastructure that's already there

and the places where we work and where we live and where we play. So we've made a very bold pledge supported by OREA. We got top marks from more neighbors as well because we know it meets the moment. So we want to legalize fourplexes and fourstories as of right across the province. I live in a neighbourhood where that was just the way things were done back in the day.

And we know that we can build more density in bigger cities, 6 to 11 stories, in cities over 100,000. And this is why the for-profit sector supports that, because as a city councillor, I know that we need to legalize housing. 70% of the province is why the for-profit sector supports that, because as a city councillor, I know that we need to legalize housing. 70% of the province is zoned for single-family dwelling. That is a thing of the past,

and we need to use up our brownfields, for example, and bring back that remediation. We need to ensure that we can use modular homes and mass timber as a way of getting homes done quickly and cheaply. We know that we don't need to build elevators and use a lot of cement, which makes things more expensive and make things consistent across the province. Builders all over the place are saying each municipality is left to do things

differently, and that creates a havoc in the construction industry. Let's streamline things. Let's cut the red tape for real and add units where we work and play and love. Alright, Jessica, the Ford government is behind on their target of building 1.5 million homes by 2031. What would the NDP do differently? The Conservative government is very behind on their target to build 1.5 million homes and it's primarily because they have relied exclusively on the private sector to deliver and they haven't changed the necessary laws to

help the private sector to do that. This is how we do it differently. We'd have a two-pronged approach. First, we are very much in support of measures to speed up the construction of homes by changing zoning rules. Similar to what the Green Party has mentioned, allowing more density near transit, allowing fourplexes and four storeys as of right in towns or cities so that smaller developers can get into the market and people have choice.

These are measures that the BC NDP government has moved forward on. These are measures that we would do here as the Ontario NDP government. But we also need to be very clear that having the private sector alone to solve our housing crisis, it's not going to work. We need a partnered approach where the government goes back into the very important role of building affordable housing.

An Ontario NDP government would move forward with leveraging public land, financing, grants and fast-tracking approvals so that we can build affordable housing for low, moderate and middle-income families. It's a tried and tested method. It's been used in cities from Vienna to Vancouver. It is time to bring that method back to here in Ontario. All right, Otto. Alright, Aldo. Well, when I think about the housing crisis that we face and the way that we got here, I really think that there have been two major categories of failures. The first failure is that there has been inadequate funding of the homes that we need to build.

Frankly, there are just too many taxes and too much money being asked to be taken from builders, developers, and ultimately from future homeowners. And so doing things like eliminating development charges, replacing that with the Better Communities Fund so that municipalities can still have the infrastructure in place to spur that growth. But also eliminating discriminatory taxes like community benefit charges, again, which can inspire and motivate the private sector in order to build the homes that we need and the places that we need it. There's a separate category of failures altogether, and that is the chaotic and unpredictable

policy environment that has been created by Doug Ford. Over the last seven years there have been at least ten pieces of housing legislation, each one usually reversing something that was in the last one. I mean the classic example which was not through legislation but was through unilateral executive action was the attempt to sell off the green belt which Doug Ford subsequently walked back on because you know he was he was called out and now faces an RCMP criminal investigation about but you know we have municipality after municipality after municipality across our great province

all in a housing crisis because there isn't a streamlined approach to policy to housing policy to housing planning and to our zoning and so you know earlier this year when I introduced legislation to make fourplexes as a freight province wide that legislation was about much more than just fourplexes what it did was it got rid of a lot of the zoning challenges that take place, you know, setbacks and floor area ratios and parking requirements, all of which are things that in the planning world are poison pills

that stop us from being able to build more housing and introduce gentle density. And so our plan looks at not just adequately funding our housing sector and removing taxes, but also creating a streamlined, accessible and predictable policy planning environment that makes it possible for our housing sector to thrive and fire on all cylinders. Ashton, did you want to get in on that?

Well, ultimately, I just want to echo what Jessica was saying as well. This government took away HSTM on purpose-built rentals. Great. What about the HSTM on purpose-built rentals, great. What about the HSTM on affordable housing? Like our co-op and not-profit sectors are ready to build. And we know that we need to have that safety net in order to prevent homelessness. So on two areas, we need to kind of open things up.

And municipalities want that. They're shouldering the burden of downloaded shelter costs. It costs property tax owners quite a bit to create these social services and supports that need to be funded by the province and are funded by the province across Canada. So we need to be sure that we get our not-for-profit and co-op housings funded. So we want to build 250,000 non-profit and co-op homes, but we need supportive housing for folks who have been abandoned by this government are facing addiction and mental health challenges and don't have a roof and food. We know people get so sick when

they are end up homeless and we're seeing seniors and folks with disability end up homeless at an alarming rate and we put the province has abandoned municipalities. AMO has been very clear that property tax is not a good tool for addressing homelessness. It really needs a strategy and a cohesive voice from all partners in the sector to deal with this, because it's so costly to hospitals, so costly to municipalities to pay for shelter beds, and we know shelter is not the answer. Let's follow Winnipeg, let's follow Houston, Texas, and do a housing first approach,

because that's really how we can get ahead of this. All right, Jessica, I'm going to come to you. Mark Stiles has introduced this idea of a government agency called Homes Ontario. What would that look like? How does it look like with the Ontario government sort of involved in building homes there? Sure. So Homes Ontario would be something similar to Infrastructure Ontario. It would be tasked with the job of building 300,000 homes over the next 10 years that are affordable or non-market. The beauty of

Homes Ontario is that it would work or will work with municipalities, non-profit developers, for-profit developers, co-ops, to provide the financing and the funding and access to public land in order for the private and the non-profit sector to build housing. In our view, this is necessary because we need an all hands on deck approach. We've tried a system where the private sector has been tasked with building affordable housing. That's been the conservative government's approach. It hasn't worked. They've built about a thousand affordable homes over six years when we have literally encampments in every town and city

across Ontario. We need a different approach. The beauty of this is that it's already working elsewhere. The BC NDP government is doing this right now. Vienna is, many other cities have. And it's time to bring this approach here. All right, with that actually, Ashlyn, I'm going to come to you. Should a government agency be in the business of building affordable homes and supportive housing?

I think we need a vision. We know that our co-op and non-profit housing, they're the pros. They're ready to do this. And developers, you know, like we need people to get who can build these kind of homes. Too often it's really a, we've narrowed the field of who is actually building homes right now and so it's important that we get all hands on deck. I know I've been approached by so many missing middle developers and not-for-profit and co-op

housing saying we need to unlock the potential and resource this. We need to resource the housing. We have 270,000 people on a wait list across Ontario. People, as a social worker, I know people put their lives on hold waiting for affordable housing, and it's such a strain on their life. You know, we have lots of kids who are facing homelessness right now, and we have shelters that are under-resourced. We need to fund women's shelters, because if we don't have the affordable housing for people

fleeing violence to go into, people stay in an unsafe environment, or people can't get the benefit of a women's shelter because they have nowhere to go afterwards. So it keeps so many people stuck, but we also need to be sure that we double OW and ODSP. The shelter allowance for OW is $390 and OW is $580. So we need to do the math and we need to be sure that people can continue to pay their rent. Landlords want people to pay their rent and folks living in housing need enough money for a roof and food. So let's pay what shelter actually costs. All right, Otto, I want to get your thoughts on the anti-peace plan of Homes Ontario.

Is the government agency the answer here? So I have a reservation with respect to my colleague. And I appreciate that my two other colleagues are here talking about the housing crisis. And there's one person who's missing here. So I must give credit where credit is due. That being said, we do differ on the need for a monolithic, bureaucratic, and potentially underfunded provincial government agency

that will be in place and hopefully able to start making a dent on the housing crisis two years from now. We have homeless people and encampments on the streets right now. In my career as an emergency doctor, I served as a medical director in 11 homeless shelters, and what I actually saw is that we need to adequately fund

our shelters. We need to ensure that people have access to warm and safe places with wraparound supports. We delivered psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, addiction specialists, and we brought people within the envelope of that supportive care and then watched as people had their addictions issues stabilized and then their mental health challenges stabilized and then they were able to move on to other forms of housing. We believe there is a housing crisis right now that shelters that wrap

around supports need to be funded right now and rather than waiting for a you know a bureaucratic agency to be raised and operational hopefully two years from now. We can do things like eliminating land transfer tax for non-profit builders and allow them to start building the homes, the affordable, deeply affordable homes that we need today, not months or years from now. I've got you to respond. The Ontario NDP is very clear that development fees on affordable housing and supportive housing and non-market housing should be eliminated.

We should be using development fees in a way so that we're spurring the construction of the most needed homes in Ontario. As part of the Homes Ontario program, we have a commitment to build 60,000 supportive housing units so we can get to that issue that you're bringing up, which is how are we going to provide housing for people who have addictions issues, people who have been living homeless for a few years and who need additional support, social workers, food delivery, to get their lives in order again.

That's part of the program. And a final piece that is important to the program is that, like you, I don't want to wait two years for housing to be built, which is why we're looking at what the BC NDP government is doing with their fund to buy up buildings and apartments that already exist and move them over to the non-profit sector so that we can very quickly provide more housing to people that really need it right now and who've been waiting too long. All right, it's very important that when we talked about housing, all three of you have touched on the homelessness issue in this province. As we know, 81,000 Ontarians don't have a permanent home.

Part of this conversation is encampments. We've seen over the years that has been a big headline for dealing with this issue. I'm curious, I want to get an idea, Ashlyn, how would your party deal with encampments specifically, but also your plan to target the homelessness issue? Yeah, we know that this population has been failed. We're hemorrhaging folks onto the streets. So in my region of Waterloo, we've had a doubling of homelessness in three years. So the government abandoned that census that was collecting data.

We rely on municipalities to do that. And they've downloaded the burden of funding these initiatives. It's essential to our towns and cities, rural and northern communities especially, that are seeing even more growth and rapid increase in homelessness. So we need to support those rural and northern communities especially, but we need to build supportive housing. We know shelters more expensive, hospitals and jails are more expensive. Buy a country mile. I think hospital bed is $30,000 a month, jail is $13,000. Shelter is $5,000

to $6,000, whereas supportive housing operational costs are $4,000. So it's cheaper financially and it's kinder. People get very sick when they're homeless. So it's important that we look at housing as a solution to homelessness. And we need to make sure that that's funded. We need to make sure people have what they need to stay housed by doubling OW and ODSP. And I put forward as MPP, the Keeping People Housed Act, which gets rid of all of these loopholes.

We had four landlords pay on average of $5,000 in the last four years for illegal rent evictions. That's staggering. There's no accountability in the LTB. We need LTBs down to a month. We need to make sure the bad actors are out and create that fairness for landlords and tenants and get rid of those loopholes that displace massive amount of people, massive amounts of seniors and folks with disabilities into homelessness shelters.

All right, Otto, I'll get your take, and as well, I'll ask the same question, dealing with encampments specifically. Yeah, I mean, the way that you deal with homelessness is by building housing with the wraparound supports and services that are necessary for the people who are currently living on the streets or living in encampments.

I want to be really clear about something. If we want to eliminate the phenomenon of encampments. I want to be really clear about something. If we want to eliminate the phenomenon of encampments in Ontario, it's not going to be achieved by violence. It's not going to be achieved by incarceration. It's not dignified and it's expensive and it's not effective. What we need to be doing is funding the wraparound supports and services that we need and then also ensuring things, as Ashen mentioned, doing things like doubling ODSP, absolutely. Making sure that people have access to the primary care

and mental health care. You know, we've committed to bringing mental health care under the purview of OHIP. These are essential steps that can work at addressing the root causes for why we have the homelessness and encampments that we have. But if Doug Ford thinks that his solution is going to be violence and incarceration, it's not going to work. People can't get... there are,

you know, in my clinical practice, there are so many people that are begging for mental health and addictions assistance voluntarily and they can't get it. So how are you going to impose that involuntarily as well? All right, Jessica. I was really deeply disturbed when the conservatives came out with their announcement that they were going to criminalize people who lived in encampments, finding them, potentially sending them to jail. That's no solution. When we've spoken to people who are living in encampments, we would meet people who were desperate to get a

job but found it was very difficult to get a job when they had to spend half their day looking for food and a place to have a shower. Or we'd meet people living in encampments who had chronic health conditions like multiple sclerosis and found it very difficult to work. They found the Conservatives' comments offensive, and many experts felt that targeting people who live in encampments was just downright immoral. It's our view that we need to have a multi-pronged approach to dealing with homelessness.

We need to have a homes-first approach by providing enough funding to municipalities so that they can provide shelter to people in the short term as we build and buy permanent homes so that people can move into a place where they can rebuild their lives. And in addition we need to go upstream and think about how we can stop people from falling into homelessness in the first place. That means bringing in strong renter protections so people aren't illegally evicted or find themselves homeless because their landlord has increased the rent beyond what they can afford. And it's also necessary to look at the income piece. It is good that all three parties are standing here saying that we should double social assistance rates. Many people who are living in encampments or are homeless,

they're on social assistance and they can't get by. And it's also time to raise the minimum wage. It is very difficult in Ontario to afford the rent if you are earning minimum wage. It needs to go up so we can address the income inequality that we're seeing in our province right now. All right. Unfortunately, we are going to have to leave it there. But again, some really great ideas there.

Of course, our election is only a couple of days away and I know you guys are quite busy on the campaign trail, so we're going to give you some time to get out there. Thank you again, Ashlyn, Jessica, and Otto, for joining us on the program. Thanks for having us. Thank you, sir.