Oxford MPP pens letter to finance minister about housing affordability
Article content
Oxford MPP Ernie Hardeman announced Monday that he would like to see the upcoming provincial budget address the housing affordability crisis in Ontario.
Hardeman, along with Ontario PC Leader Patrick Brown, penned a joint letter to finance minister Charles Sousa asking for a number of things to be included in the upcoming budget.
“I introduced a motion in the house that suggests the government should appoint an expert panel of people to give (Sousa) advice on what needs to be done,” Hardeman said. “In the motion we’ve included all of the names that should be represented in this panel. This is a panel to make recommendations on all of the things that should or shouldn’t be done to deal with the housing crisis.”
In Hardeman’s letter, he asks that the upcoming budget make a commitment to addressing supply, including reducing red tape and regulatory burden.
Hardeman told the Sentinel-Review that in the last number of years the government has created more red tape prior to allowing a building to go forward.
“They’ve increased the timelines of almost every application in the planning process,” he said. “Obviously if you increase the timeline it takes longer… to get housing on the market. They’ve put other charges in place that cause housing prices to go up and they ask for reports that don’t seem to have any impact on positive development.
“Getting everyone to work together to move it along is – to me – much more important than trying to put more legislation in place that makes it more difficult to get something built,” he added.
Hardeman also asked Sousa in his letter to address the demand for more housing, including speculative vacancies.
“There seems to be a lot of discussion about how many units are actually available for people to buy and rent,” Hardeman said. “There are properties that the government owns that are not presently occupied, but nobody seems to know how many there are and how much assistance the government could be in promoting more development.”
According to Hardeman, there are a number of units in the Toronto Housing Authority in need of repair and not occupied because they are not in a livable condition.
“It would seem to me that they should be working very diligently at investing the resources there to get those back into the marketplace,” he said.
Hardeman said that the panel suggested in his letter would be able to help with gathering all of this information, adding that there would be representatives from the Building Industry and Land Development Association, Ontario Building Officials and mortgage representatives would all “have their voices heard.”
“We could get that information in very short order,” he said. “The timeline is that they should take no longer than three months to put their report together and deliver it to the minister (Sousa) and the minister would have 15 days to table the report so the rest of us could all see what their recommendations are.”