Housing questions and answers were integral to Jeff Lehman’s live Instagram broadcast on the weekend.
The Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte provincial Liberal candidate fielded questions and reacted to comments Saturday during just more than 45 minutes, as Ontario heads toward an election Thursday.
And it was no surprise that affordable housing was one of the first subjects for Lehman, Barrie’s mayor 2010 to 2022.
“As mayor, I’ve been a big champion for supportive housing,” he said. “The solution for chronic homelessness is supportive housing and supportive housing is communities where people can not only get a roof over their head, but get the support services they need to address the root causes, the reasons they became homeless in the first place.”
Lehman mentioned the example of Lucy’s Place on Essa Road, a former motel, with 23 units including services for addictions and mental health, and other services the Busby Centre provides there, in partnership with Redwood Park Communities.
“We need a lot more of that,” he said. “That is ultimately what is going to help people get the assistance they need with the reasons they have become homeless. Not just get a roof over their heads.
“Beware any politician that tells you that housing is an easy solution or has quick answers, because the housing crisis we’re in, took decades to develop,” he added. “It will take a little time to fix, but there are things we can do right away.”
One is to build the Ontario Housing Corporation, a government body that would develop provincially owned land for first-time home buyers, sell them at an attainable first-time purchase price, then take that money and build more homes.
“And using surplus lands, that are owned by the province, that allows us to bring new lands into the supply of housing and help dramatically increase the number of new attainable homes inside… urban areas,” Lehman said.
“The solution to the housing crisis is to build more attainable homes and build more purpose-built rentals,” he added. “Places that people can afford. One-million-dollar, $2-million homes in the countryside are not what’s going to help the people who need help in Ontario.”
And his party is also proposing something very basic.
“The rent control the Liberals are proposing would be province-wide for all homes. This is something that would cover everybody,” Lehman said. “No more loopholes that allow a landlord to evict people, do some renovations and then double the rent, which is one of the workarounds that you can do right now under rent control.”
Next were environment questions on the continued protection of natural resources in this region and stopping the planned and perceived destruction of Ontario’s Greenbelt.
He said the Liberals are proposing to expand the amount of protected land in Ontario, from 10 per cent of the province today to 30 per cent.
“We have vast areas of our region which are natural lands — think the Copeland Forest, think of central Ontario to the east, the areas of Muskoka, that are undeveloped,” Lehman said. “We believe there should be greater protection… of lands that we can protect through provincial planning policy.”
And protecting Ontario’s Greenbelt is elementary, he said.
“Don’t build the highways, don’t build the housing in the green belt. It’s pretty straight forward,” Lehman said. “The Liberals are proposing to expand the Greenbelt, especially in the south end of our county, we’re going to use a science-based approach.
“We really believe that running Highway 413 (parallel to the Highway 407 ETR) through the Greenbelt is appalling,” he said. “Theres no reason to spent $10 billion on a highway that’s going to save 30 seconds of travel time, which is what Highway 413 will do.”
Lehman also fielded questions about health care, an ongoing concern since the pandemic hit in early 2020.
“We are absolutely going to need to grow our local hospital,” he said, referring to Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH). “Before COVID and especially today, we do not have the capacity to support just the population we’ve got, so we’re going to need an expanded hospital.
“We’ve got to stop thinking short term. We’ve got to just stop responding to problems, when we design our health care system, when we build the public services,” Lehman added. “It’s like running on a treadmill. You’re never going to catch up. We actually have to do things quite differently and the way to do that is to focus on the reason why people end up in the hospital in the first place.”
He pointed to other, non-hospital environments for people to get the support and treatment they need, separate from the hospital system.
“We believe it’s not just hospitals, it’s about long-term care, in-patient mental health and addiction, it’s about supportive housing. It is about hospice as well. What you are doing is taking the pressure off the hospital ER (emergency room).
“Like why is it we wait until people are in trouble before we help them?”
But the obvious question is how to pay for all of this.
“Every one of these proposals, everything I’m talking about today, everything that’s in the Liberal platform, (is) fully costed, that costing is on-line,” Lehman said, “and it returns… us to balanced budgets in Ontario, in four years.”
