By Pepper Parr
June 6th, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
The playing of the national anthem and an Oilers’ jersey on the Chair reflected the mood of the event.
They met as the Bay Area Economic Summit for half a day and started out the meeting by listening to O Canada being played and the Chair of the meeting wearing an Edmonton Oilers hockey Jersey.
There were workshops with a collection of qualified experts. One was labelled Sustainable Leadership, which one of the experts suggested meant that leadership was still breathing – always a good sign.
Mike Moffatt, the speaker who really came across with soundly thought-through arguments on what needed to be done to solve not only the need for housing, but for the solution to attracting the talent needed, was to assure there were properties they could afford to live in.
Terry Cado, president of the Chamber told the Gazette in an interview before the Summit took place that Chamber members were calling his office to complain about the problems they were having attracting talent to the city – the people they wanted to hire were finding that housing they could afford just wasn’t available.
There were no obviously simple answers. And there was plenty of blame to spread around.
Moffatt took to the podium and set out the issues.
There were no obviously simple answers. And there was plenty of blame to spread around.
Where in this coat allocation do you try and lower the expenses?
Moffatt started with what it costs to build a 1900 square foot home in the Waterloo Region and the got into housing starts and that it was impossible to build the number of homes that are needed. The province of Ontario has yet to meet a housing start target.
Restrictive land use policies, skyrocketing taxes on development, more red tape and a constantly changing policy environment weren’t helping.
When Moffatt added that Southwestern Ontario has the worst development process and planning at the municipal level in North America, you knew there was a real problem when you put that fact up against the Meed Ward claim that Ontario is the engine of the country’s economy.
There were solutions. Development charges could be moved from the developer to the home buyer. The current practice of lookin to the developer for these funds resulted in taxation on taxation. The developer has to pay the deveopment charges, marks them up and passes them along to the home buyer.
In the alternative development charges could be deferred.
Revise the GST and the PST – that would take 13% out of the cost of a home – that claimed Moffatt would put shovels in the ground.
He argues as well that the idea that growth should pay for growth, a hill that Burlington Mayor Meed Ward seemed prepared to die onzzz
Land costs have skyrocketed for the developer who banked land; things could not be better. For a developer trying to acquire land and put up new housing – it is a challenge. Impossible if the housing is going to be affordable.
Construction of new homes had not kept pace with the demand.
Then M0ffatt made a stunning comment.
He said that in order to attract and retain 35-year-old workers, you need a healthy community that you can raise a 5 year old in.
He added: If the middle class cannot raise children in a community, that community cannot survive.
The loss of families, means the loss of a tax base and the loss of a workforce.
That’s what Chamber members were telling Terry Caddo
Moffatt: “Who will swing the hammer?”
Moffatt suggested that “we need to get away from the mindset that a unit is a unit when we are counting. The 400 to 600 square foot condos that attracted investors are not housing for a family. We need three and four-bedroom units if families are to be accommodated.
There were very few questions at the end of the presentation. Mayor Meed Ward left the room before Mike Moffatt started his presentatrion.
Moffatt made a comment during the presentation that could have been used to sum up just where the province and its hundreds of communities are in solving the problems when he asked: “Who will swing the hammer?”
