Years into their respective struggles tackling housing affordability in Ontario, and its biggest city, Premier Doug Ford and Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow made similar appeals on Friday to the federal government for more help with the crisis.
Both leaders expressed at a joint news conference that they feel the housing affordability woes experienced by their constituents in recent years could be aided by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals following through with promised changes to development charges (DCs).
DCs are fees that municipalities in Ontario levy on builders and are meant to help pay for new infrastructure and services required for more residents. DC rates in the province have risen significantly in recent decades and are viewed as part of the reason why housing prices have increased so much.
Ford’s Progressive Conservatives took a second shot at trying to change how they’re collected in Ontario through Bill 17, legislation it passed just before Queen’s Park’s spring sitting wrapped up this week.
Under Chow’s mayoralship, Toronto councillors also voted about a month-and-a-half ago to freeze the city’s DC rate. The city has also trialled exempting certain projects from all DCs, but “can’t afford” to do this for any more, according to its mayor.
But Carney’s federal Liberals have said they’ve got even bigger changes in the works, promising to reduce DCs by 50 per cent for multi-unit housing projects, while also ensuring municipal funding and services aren’t impacted.
“Hopefully, the federal government, I hear that it’s going to jump in there and hopefully take 50 per cent of those DCs off,” Ford said on Friday. “But, I want to emphasize that 50 per cent cannot go to the builders. It has to go to the people — that’s the only way this is going to work, and to bring down the cost.”
Chow added that she’s “very encouraged to see that both the provincial and the federal government … want to lower development charges — whether it’s 50 per cent or whatever percentage.” She cautioned, however, that because cities rely on DCs for revenue to use to provide services, “the question (also) is, how much contribution can each level of government provide (municipalities).”
Ford joined Chow at city hall on Friday to announce that the provincial government would be providing the City of Toronto with $67 million in funding through the Building Faster Fund. The program, through which the province provides funding to regions, cities and towns, was created by the Ford government a couple of years ago to incentivize municipalities to hit their housing targets.
The amount the government of Ontario is providing the City of Toronto with is in recognition of it eclipsing 80 per cent of the 2024 housing starts goal set for it by the province.
In early 2022, a Ford government-appointed panel of housing experts wrote in a report that Ontario needed to construct 1.5 million homes over the next decade to bring relief to the province’s housing affordability issue. Ford’s PCs quickly committed to reaching that target but haven’t come close to facilitating the pace needed to reach it in any year since.
