Ford’s Housing Cuts Have Pushed Ontario into a Crisis of Its Own Making
Election season is already underway in Ontario. Doug Ford spent the summer hinting he would call an early election. He thinks he deserves and will win another majority. But when you look at his actual record on the things Ontario families need — like housing they can actually afford — Ford deserves to be shown the door.
Our province was once on a different path than it is now. Back in 2017, I worked for Ontario’s then-Minister of Housing as he introduced Ontario’s Fair Housing Plan. It created a tax on housing speculators, let municipalities tax empty homes, freed up government land to build affordable housing, formed a housing delivery team to cut red tape, and got new rental housing built.
One of the core pieces of the plan was the introduction of province-wide rent control. It capped rent increases at 2.5%, protecting Ontario’s 1.2 million renters against sudden rent hikes and inflation. Putting a cap on every private rental unit in the province meant all landlords and tenants had to follow the same rules, increasing fairness for everyone.
We also tackled the crisis in social housing. After federal investments dried up in the 1990s, many of these homes fell into disrepair. Some were at risk of becoming permanently uninhabitable. Instead, we invested over half a billion dollars in profits achieved through Ontario’s carbon market to retrofit them.
Recognizing that we’re all just one missed paycheque, addiction, or mental health crisis away from disaster, we also tackled the homelessness crisis. We required municipalities to track the scale of the homelessness problem and addressed root causes by funding mental health and addiction support. We gave municipalities $100 million in annual funding to help key priority groups like young people and the chronically homeless finally find long-term housing.
Things weren’t perfect, but Ontario was on the right track. Then Ford became Premier. He promised voters he would maintain the status quo, saying, “I won’t take rent control away from anyone. Period.” But in office, he quickly brought back a two-tiered system of partial rent control. Now, some tenants are protected from unfair rent hikes while others are at the mercy of landlords who can hike prices every year on any new unit that gets built. In one case, two sisters saw their rent hiked by $7,000 a month.
Ford claims he did all this to get more rental housing built. But construction was already at a generational high when he scrapped province-wide rent control. After, new construction fell by almost half. And the lower rents Ford promised? According to data from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), average rents have risen 34% since Doug Ford took office.
Ford also scrapped the climate-fighting carbon market that funded social housing repairs. Since then, the social housing waitlist in Toronto has risen by 19%. For Toronto seniors, it has grown by 29%. Today, some residents wait up to 14 years to access affordable housing.
As the homelessness crisis takes over our cities, it’s worth remembering that Ford ended homelessness counts, cut over $100 million in housing support for low-income people, and eliminated $10 million previously earmarked for preventing homelessness.
Ford also cut $335 million in annual mental health funding that helped address the root causes of homelessness. Against the advice of his own experts, Ford recently announced the closure of over 60% of Ontario’s safe consumption sites that connect drug users to the counselling and rehab that help keep them off the streets.
In 2018, Ontario’s Auditor General found that around 21,000 people in Ontario were experiencing homelessness. Earlier this year, the Ford Government’s own internal documents revealed that number has ballooned to 234,000 people. Ford has cut, cancelled, and reversed his way into deepening this crisis.
Instead of addressing any of this, the Ford Government is distracted by the fact that it is still under RCMP investigation. Ford can’t explain how wealthy PC donors knew to buy protected Greenbelt land before Ford opened that land up for development. He’s already lost one Housing Minister and two staffers to the Greenbelt scandal. Is he in a rush to call an early election because he’s afraid of what the RCMP investigation will uncover about his government?
Ford’s record on housing affordability is one of inaction, reversing progress, and rewarding PC donors instead of helping struggling families. The question for voters now is whether you believe he deserves another term in office. After six years of failure, it’s time to cut him loose.
Theresa served as Director of Communications to Ontario Deputy Premier Deb Matthews and as an election speechwriter for former Premier Kathleen Wynne. During her time in the office of the Minister of Housing, she led the communications rollout of Ontario’s Fair Housing Plan, The Rental Fairness Act, 2017, Ontario’s Basic Income Pilot, Ontario’s Poverty Reduction Strategy, and Ontario’s first Food Security Strategy.
