Thank you for the opportunity to be here, Chair Morrissey and members of the standing committee.

I just want to say first that I concur with Mr. Lee's comments.

I'm pleased to have this opportunity. We're in a crisis moment. It's a crisis in not just housing but also in growth management. The data points are truly shocking when you look at them.

I'm the president of the Residential Construction Council of Ontario. We're a council of builders in Canada's largest province. We know that the housing crisis is affecting many developed countries across the world, but we are one of the most afflicted, in my view. It's ironic, because we occupy one of the best pieces of land on the planet. We have unparalleled resources in land and people, and yet we can't build affordable housing for our existing Canadians and those to come, which is critical, especially for the next generation.

I would urge you in your deliberations to take all of housing into consideration, not just one part of it. There's research that supports this, because this especially affects what we're seeing now, where first-time homebuyers are pretty much extinct.

This crisis has been decades in the making, as Kevin noted. There were various points where we cancelled long-term investments in social housing and where there was a budget freeze by Canada Mortgage and Housing. Then we introduced the GST. In the 1990s it was supposed to have been adjusted for inflation. It didn't happen, and I think that's coming back to bite us now.

We've been warning about some of these things for some time, but that's not anything new. Some solutions are in the works now with all levels of government, which is quite positive. That's a good thing. We certainly support the efforts by the federal government with respect to purpose-built rental housing, because that's absolutely needed. It's vital for economic development and labour mobility and so on. But we need to do a lot more.

Some of the problems we have lie in the area of excessive red tape. That's not necessarily a federal problem, but it certainly has been growing over the years. One of the general problems we've had is that we've had different actors at various levels of government and within governments all acting in a way that affects housing, but no one's really coordinating it from the 30,000-foot level. Something really needs to get done there. We need to run simulations. We need to digital twin. We need to examine better what the impact of proposed measures would be. We're not forecasting well enough. We're still mired by outdated regulations, inefficient approvals processes and file management not really utilizing the most advanced techniques.

The OECD ranked us 34th out of 35 countries in our ability to get things done. We've been calling for over a decade to modernize and digitize our approvals processes, both development and building. That's been very, very slow. In fact, we're well behind other jurisdictions. This can't be left to municipalities. They don't have the individual expertise. They don't have the economies of scale to deal with that. Frankly, we need common performance standards across the board, which would help.

We did the first study, with some others, on how much the taxes, fees and levies are on new housing now. It varies across Canada, of course, but in the greater Toronto area, it's 31% of the cost of new housing. In British Columbia they did their own study, and it's 30%. That is by far the highest in North America. It's not sustainable. It particularly hits the first-time buyer the most. We effectively tax housing like we do alcohol and tobacco. It's like a sin tax. It doesn't make sense, and it's too much.

We need to do things on lands—Crown lands, government lands—and we need to deal with innovation and modular housing and mandates there. Things like building information modelling mandates are badly needed.

I would point out to you a recent report by CANCEA that was really interesting. It was on the social value cost of the housing crisis in the GTA. It was prepared for the Toronto real estate board, of all things—quite surprising, but I commend them for that. It equated the housing crisis with chronic illness. It was equated with cancer, diabetes and heart disease. That's how bad it is.

We often look at things in little silos. We need to take a broader view and a holistic view of what the broader impact of this is.

We need to do more. We need to work more effectively together, and that's industry and all levels of government. I think we can do this. I think we're getting there because I think we're hitting a wall because, as you probably know, in most parts of the country housing starts are starting to come down. The supply is actually falling at the worst possible time. I think that reflects exactly where we're at.

We need that broader oversight. I'm not sure how that can work. I reckon we're one of the most decentralized countries in the world, and that's not necessarily a problem, but we have to pull together to borrow an old rowing term on this, and I think we can.

Anyway, I'll stop there.

Thank you.

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