With a cabinet shuffle on Labour Day, former housing minister Steve Clark resigning and Premier Doug Ford re-evaluating the Greenbelt lands, the Ontario government isn’t short of news come Tuesday as Guelph MPP Mike Schreiner responds.
“I think we heard a premier this morning who is completely out of touch with how outraged Ontarians are when it comes to Ford's $8.3 billion Greenbelt scandal,” said Schreiner, in an interview.
Ford didn’t explicitly say Ontario will return the protections to the Greenbelt land, even though the decision was made through a corrupted process, said Schreiner.
What Schreiner said he wants is for the premier to focus on housing affordability in a way to build homes people can afford in their communities on land that is already approved for development.
“As the other parties, be it the Green or the NDP and Liberals put us in an absolute disastrous position in 2018 when I took office. We’re fixing everything that was broken. They don’t have a solution. All they do is get up and complain,” said Ford, at the press conference on Tuesday.
Schreiner says that's not true.
“Three years ago I put forward a housing affordability strategy that experts call a master class plan in delivering the solutions we need to address the housing crisis,” said Schreiner. He also has two private members bills regarding zoning changes to try and make it easier for people to build more homes.
Ford ignored the solutions brought forward by the government's own housing affordability task force last year, Schreiner said.
“The premier has spent the last year not focused on building homes people can afford in the communities they want to live in. And instead he’s focused on breaking all the rules,” he said.
This way a handful of wealthy well-connected insiders can cash in billions, Schreiner said.
Implementing a number of options, such as building more non-profit co-op and permanent supportive housing, bringing back rent controls and getting speculators out of the housing market would help move forward solutions to the housing crisis, he said.
“Why should those who broke the rules through this corrupt process that the Ford government put forward open the Greenbelt for development?” Schreiner asked.
He said it’s not fair to Ontarians or fair to developers who play by the rules.
As for Steve Clark, who resigned as housing minister on Monday, Schreiner said he did the right thing by resigning, but he resigned a little too late by waiting five days after the integrity commissioner's report was released.
“The premier has completely failed the accountability test. He wasn't the one who asked his minister or the minister’s chief of staff to resign,” said Schreiner.
“We have a corrupt process that led to a corrupt outcome and the premier has not reversed that outcome,” he said.
As for the cabinet shuffle on Monday, it's a sign “the government is clearly scrambling and is in damage control,” said Schreiner.
“I think people are going to rightfully be even more outraged that the premier is failing to keep his promise. He promised explicitly multiple times that he wouldn't touch the Greenbelt, he wouldn’t open it up for development. Now he's broken that promise,” Schreiner said.
