EDITORIAL: Working to solve a housing crisis

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It’s difficult to find any sympathy with the Ontario government as it blunders in trying to increase the province’s housing stock.

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EDITORIAL: Working to solve a housing crisis Back to video

Bill 23 has angered nearly everyone. It would help fast-track development by allowing municipalities to circumvent the usual protocols with conservation authorities – organizations established to provide consultation on the use of lands prone to flooding.

The legislation would also waive the development fees that most municipalities impose on builders.

The government has also said it will eventually permit residential development in parts of Ontario’s Greenbelt, a protected track of land that mostly encircles the Greater Toronto Area.

The government believes it has good reason for Bill 23. To begin with, Ontario is facing its biggest housing crisis since the end of the Second World War. That lack of new housing is helping to not only increase the purchase price of existing single-family homes and other housing but has also pushed rents to dizzying heights.

Ontario’s housing crisis is the fault of Premier Doug Ford’s government, his critics say. But those same folks are also critical of his response.

Not helping is the federal government’s plan to increase Canada’s immigration. The most recent announcement has a goal of bringing 1.5 million new residents to Canada by the end of 2025.

Not all will come to Ontario, but many will. And most will want to settle in Toronto and the GTA. If we have a housing crisis now, won’t that crisis be worse by then?

What should the Ford government do? We know what it shouldn’t do, according to the critics – it should leave the Greenbelt and Ontario’s farmland alone.

We agree on both counts. But it must be understood that almost all of the residential development that has occurred in Ontario over the last 75 years has occurred on land that once grew food – farmland. To accommodate the incredible economic growth this province has experienced since the late 1940s, hundreds of thousands of acres have been sacrificed to build homes for families, and a great many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants.

If we are to accept more new Canadians over the coming years, room must also be made for them.

Bill 23’s faults can be found in its treatment of conservation authorities and its determination to overcome development fees, which should be a municipal decision.

But other than that, new housing will be built as it has always has in Ontario.

-Peter Epp