By Pepper Parr
August 11th, 2023
BURLINGTON, ON
At the Press event earlier today a reporter from Canadian Press asked: “Given the questions that my fellow reporters have asked, you guys have acknowledged what’s in the report and accepted most of the recommendations, did what was necessary to address the affordability crisis and also talked about the previous government’s roles in this.
“I’d like to know why the regional planners and municipalities in your own Housing Task Force are on record saying that Greenbelt lands are not needed to achieve your 1.5 million housing, housing target. So what’s your reason for pushing ahead given all this?
Minister of Housing: “Well, you’ve got a housing affordability Taskforce, that reported 19 months ago Since that report you’ve had the federal government add to the number of new Canadians, which we want to welcome but we aren’t going to have housing for them.
Premier and Minister of housing in Streetsville where they stick to their guns- housing, housing, housing.
Don’t take my word for it. TD economics the National Bank of Canada have all acknowledged that our numbers need to change. We need to have another 500 homes g built. And we need to be mindful of those other reports. We need to be mindful of the data we received from CMHC saying that the number might be closer to 1.8 million, – you know things are changing. There are forces that are out of our control, like interest rates.
We need to work with everyone, with municipal planners and municipalities. We need to work with the federal government on getting shovels in the ground and, to the Premier’s point about Burlington, we we need to have not approved projects. We need to have started projects, you’ll always hear me talk about housing starts. That’s the metric that our government needs, because you need to start that house to be able to build up at least 1.5 million.
Premier: “As the Minister said, that was 19 months ago. I didn’t know 19 months ago, we’re gonna have over 500,000 additional people show up. Supply and demand. We have to build more homes to at least level the market.
Premier asks the reporter: “I’m I’m just wondering if you own a home or if you rent? “You want to own a home. Every person in this area wants to own a home, and we’re going to do everything we can to make sure it’s attainable and affordable for people like yourself and other people to own a home on a condo and and rental purpose built rentals to we need. So that’s what we’re doing.
So despite all the experts saying that you don’t need to do this to build a 1.5 million homes.
Reporter: “You keep repeating the message.
Premier: “And I’m going to repeat our message – that was 19 months ago, 19 months ago. Then all of a sudden, more than 500,000 probably 800,000 have arrived in 19 months that we didn’t expect.
Premier Ford: A singe message – we are building homes.
“We didn’t expect 504,000 people to arrive here. Now no matter if you’re in running a government or running a business, you have to read and react. You have to move with the times. We have two choices. We can sit back and say forget about this housing plan and make it everyone for themselves. We never got elected on that. I’ll tell you what we got elected on 12 months ago, we got elected and we said it over and over in our campaign – We’re going to build homes. We’re going to build 1.5 million homes. We couldn’t be more clear on that we wrote every single day.
“And I don’t think 1.5 million is going to is going to be enough. I think we’re going to need probably 1.8 million. Either way. We’re going to continue building homes but thank you so much for that question.”
